I think I should be getting better therefore I am getting better

I enjoyed very much the video we saw on Monday about logical fallacies. The movie touched on the effect of placebo trials, yet I researched a little more on placebo pills and their effectiveness and I found a couple interesting facts. (These facts are all from medical literature)

“In the 1950’s angina pectoris, recurrent pain in the chest and left arm due to decreased blood flow to the heart, was commonly treated with surgery. Rather than doing the customary surgery, which involved tying off the mammary artery, some resourceful doctors cut patients open and then simply sewed them back up again. The patients who received a sham surgery reported as much relief as the patients who had the full surgery.”

“In a recent study of a new kind of chemotherapy, 30 percent of the individuals in the control group, the group given placebos, lost their hair.”

These are only a few of the examples of the effectiveness my placebo trials. I wonder greatly at how our body could be so greatly effected by our mental component. So is it then that pain is just a figment of our imagination? Or from the latter example, was the hair going to fall out anyway? We know that they chances of this is next to none, so why did the human body act like this. We can justly say that the pain would not have left of the hair would not have fell out if the people involved in this did not decide it was supposed to happen. This directly contradicts the cause and effect theory of the world, for there is not cause for the relieved pain or the hair falling out. So we are left with this question: Can our mind be more powerful than the normal course of the world, that it can defy it?