The Boston Globe this week ran a great feature noting that as the ability to pinpoint causes of the placebo effect, as well as medical concerns that seem to respond well to placebos increases, doctors face an increasingly difficult practical and ethical question: Should they use placebos as part of their regular medical practice? Or, as Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow frames the question, "if the placebo effect can help patients, shouldn’t we start putting it to work?"

At IFTF, the Health Horizons Program is spending time looking at the latter and considering how design thinking may apply to the future of health.  "Design thinking" is an emerging trend that focuses on developing innovative responses to business challenges.  It is a cross-disciplinary approach that combines "creative confidence and analytic ability," according to David Kelly, founder of Stanford's d.school an