The psychobiological phenomena that is the placebo effect can often be responsible for the misattribution of a clinical outcome’s cause to a specific treatment’s effect. Through expectation, conditioning and other means, the placebo effect can create the illusion that ineffective treatments are helpful or that a patient’s improvement was brought about by a treatment’s specific mechanism of action, which is not always the case. Given the complex and emergent nature of pain, it is an incredibly difficult (if not impossible) task for us to determine the cause of a positive outcome in an environment as chaotic as the clinic. My goal with this post is to facilitate a deeper level of thinking regarding the assumptions that can be made from observed clinical outcomes by highlighting how the placebo effect can impact a treatment’s outcome and how easily it can deceive us.