The known placebo

Interesting bit of an article in Harvard Magazine:

What if he simply told people they were taking placebos? The question ultimately inspired a pilot study, published by the peer-reviewed science and medicine journal PLOS ONE in 2010, that yielded his most famous findings to date. His team again compared two groups of IBS sufferers. One group received no treatment. The other patients were told they’d be taking fake, inert drugs (delivered in bottles labeled “placebo pills”) and told also that placebos often have healing effects.

The study’s results shocked the investigators themselves: even patients who knew they were taking placebos described real improvement, reporting twice as much symptom relief as the no-treatment group. That’s a difference so significant, says Kaptchuk, it’s comparable to the improvement seen in trials for the best real IBS drugs.

The article does note that "the study was small and has yet to be replicated" but I'm intrigued. This makes me thinking of a lot of an recent article I read on some rising skepticism over "priming" in psychology. Of course, this makes it all the more confusing - i.e. people are told that they're being given a placebo but that that placebos often having healing effects.