Friends, colleagues, Placebans, spare me your tears;

I come to praise placebo, not to bury it.

The evil doctors do lives after them;

The good is oft in part placebo.

So let it be!

The medical world’s a stage,

And placebos merely players;

Each one plays a different part:

This one Prozac, that one morphine;

The winter of our discontent

Is made glorious summer

By these sweet pills,

And nothing is real,

But thinking makes it so.

                                                Bill Shakespeare

                                                ©Irving Kirsch