Elves, Maybe, or Midgets

New Scientist article: 13 things that do not make sense

Scientists know there are some things we don't understand. Like the placebo effect. This is from the article:

"DON'T try this at home. Several times a day, for several days, you induce pain in someone. You control the pain with morphine until the final day of the experiment, when you replace the morphine with saline solution. Guess what? The saline takes the pain away.

This is the placebo effect: somehow, sometimes, a whole lot of nothing can be very powerful. Except it's not quite nothing. When Fabrizio Benedetti of the University of Turin in Italy carried out the above experiment, he added a final twist by adding naloxone, a drug that blocks the effects of morphine, to the saline. The shocking result? The pain-relieving power of saline solution disappeared."

This, very clearly, is MAGIC.

Or possibly elves. Elves might be administering morphine, secretly, to the subjects, in the mistaken assumption that the experimenters just, maybe, RAN OUT of it. Elves would know that the saline wouldn't work! Saline doesn't ease pain!