I have great respect for medical professionals. Their training allows them to guess the identity of an affliction based on a set of vaguely expressed symptoms, and I'm amazed they do better than random chance.
Unfortunately, diagnosis is only half the job. Treatment is sometimes an exercise in frustration, especially for psychiatric problems. Issues like depression and schizophrenia, seem (to me) to be so poorly understood that the best doctors can do is to treat the symptoms and hope for the best. Combine that with the placebo effect and you have a recipe that tells us that as long as the doctor does something, things might get better. This idea has now been shown (again) in a study published in PLOS One.
In this clever study, doctors worked with a group of women suffering from depression (they were all either going through menopause or were post-menopausal). At the beginning of the trial, all of the women spent an hour or so in the company of the prescribing doctor, discussing their personal life and their symptoms and getting a thorough assessment of their mental state. The women were then randomly divided into three groups: one received a drug treatment while the other two were given placebos. At the beginning of the trial, four weeks in, and at the end (six weeks), all of the women were given a full battery of tests to quantify their depression.
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