Over the past 20 years, the field of sports psychology has grown to where a subject that once carried a stigma is now openly discussed. And as increasing numbers of teen athletes compete in the widening specialized world of amateur athletics, parents are taking their children to hypnotists in hopes that it will help performance.

It's no different than a pro having a personal trainer, swing coach or therapist. But seeing a hypnotist does not carry universal acceptance, and hypnosis remains a mystery shrouded in hard-to-break stereotypes.

Read more on Star-Telegram.com

Do you trust in your doctor? How you answer that question may improve or worsen your condition. Why? The power of expectation. When Parkinson's patients were told that they had a 75 percent chance of receiving an active drug, but were given a placebo, scans of their brains showed that they secreted dopamine on their own.

How does this work? When you get excited about getting rewarded — think of the anticipation of post-recovery sex — your brain releases dopamine. Dopamine is that feel-good neurotransmitter that makes you happy, reduces stress and boosts your immune system so that you can recover faster.

Read more on AOLHealth.com

Acupuncture has been — how shall we say? — one of the less ridiculed techniques of alternative medicine, at least in recent years. A body of evidence shows that it does indeed relieve pain, for many conditions. But a study released today suggests that acupuncture probably only works because patients believe that it will — and it's the belief, not the procedure, that makes the difference.

Read more on Time.com

Also read: Acupuncture, Real or Fake, Eases Pain

Canadian experts say they fear stories of miraculous results from a controversial new MS treatment could be more about the "placebo effect" than an actual breakthrough – fears given new credence by two discouraging new European studies.

Dr. Jon Stoessl, a researcher with the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the acting head of the division of neurology at the University of British Columbia, says patient expectations about medical treatments can affect their success rates. It's a kind of mind-over-matter, dubbed the placebo effect.

He's concerned the hopes of people with multiple sclerosis have been prematurely raised about the long-term success of Dr. Paola Zamboni's research, which suggests a connection between multiple sclerosis and chronic cerebrospinal venous insufficiency (CCSVI) – impaired blood drainage through the veins from the brain.

Read more on Vancouversun.com

Can a 3-year-old really reach a Zen-like state–or is it just a good way to shut him up? Gwynne Watkins discusses the growing ranks of parents and gurus who say meditation calms crazy kids.

Read more on DailyBeast.com

Want to maximize the placebo effect? A good way to do this, according to a new study, is to tell someone they have a decent chance of getting the real treatment instead of a fake pill, but keep them guessing.

In the study, Parkinson's disease patients given a placebo after being told they had a 75 percent chance of receiving an active drug produced significant amounts of dopamine, a chemical key to the brain's reward system that is scarce in the brains of patients with this disease.

Read more on Reuters.com

Consider the case of Jean, whose life was saved by her ginger cat Topsy. "Topsy always waits until I am settled and then jumps on to the bottom of my bed and goes to sleep himself," says Jean.

"But one night he started acting in a really bizarre way. He jumped on my bed before I had got in it, circled around and around and then jumped back off again. It was as if he was trying to tell me something. He kept jumping on and off and was really frantic. It was impossible to sleep because Topsy was making so much commotion.

"I got up and as I did I started to feel shaky, sweaty and dizzy. Then it hit me. I'm a diabetic and I had forgotten to check my blood sugar levels before I went to bed. When I did my glucose test it had fallen dangerously low. If I'd fallen asleep I could have lost consciousness or died. I wouldn't have made it through the night."

Read more on Express.co.uk

He once performed hypnotherapy on a couple of Oprah Winfrey's staff to get her to talk about his profession in a positive light.

Joe Stotts, a hypnotherapist from Pratt, Kansas, has spent 30 years helping people overcome a variety of personality and health issues including pain, addiction to smoking, weight loss, personal problems, phobias and more using hypnosis as his tool.

Read more on PrattTribune.com

Don't scoff at those lucky rabbit feet. New research shows that having some kind of lucky token can actually improve your performance – by increasing your self-confidence.

"I watch a lot of sports, and I read about sports, and I noticed that very often athletes – also famous athletes – hold superstitions," says Lysann Damisch of the University of Cologne. Michael Jordan wore his college team shorts underneath his NBA uniform for good luck; Tiger Woods wears a red shirt on tournament Sundays, usually the last and most important day of a tournament. "And I was wondering, why are they doing so?" Damisch thought that a belief in superstition might help people do better by improving their confidence. With her colleagues Barbara Stoberock and Thomas Mussweiler, also of the University of Cologne, she designed a set of experiments to see if activating people's superstitious beliefs would improve their performance on a task. Read the rest of this entry »

The phrase "mind-body connection" has many connotations. For some, it's shorthand for New Age quackery. For others, it's a source of hope and a way to reconcile their spiritual life with modern science.

For Tor D. Wager, it's just another day at the office.

Dr. Wager (pronounced WAY-gur) is a professor of psychology at the University of Colorado. His specialty is neuroscience and brain imaging, but his passion is the placebo effect – a phenomenon that has undergone a resurgence in recent years and is now being studied by researchers in many corners of science. Read the rest of this article