You made me think of more from the books.  I think Akka had a male lover when he was in school. 

Yeah, his name was Sancla and he died rather young.

Well, from my insider's point of view (bear in mind, however, that's it European, not American), education today is too concentrated on papers and documentation. Everything has to be writted down and documented, so that when some higher instance comes calling to check on us, papers are correct. And as a result we have less time to do actual teaching and general education, because we need to fill in endless papers.

But I don't think home schooling is a good choice, either. Then we have the whole question of socialisation, meeting other people, seeing that they are different, have different abilities, different points of view, different hobbies and interests. Of course, it can be an unpleasant experience (I hated my primary school with all my heart and my classmates were in general rather nasty), but I believe it's necessary. And a good teacher could definitely improve it for his or her students.

So, at the moment it's Leonard Cohen. Mostly the more depressing of his songs (as if there were a lot of optimistic ones in his career), like "Everybody knows" and "The Future".

Well, one more thing we have to take into consideration is that many illnesses are self-limiting, which means that one would eventually get better without any intervention whatsoever (common cold and a lot of other viral illnesses are a good example here). But because we are humans and our minds are prone to search for patterns, we would probably attribute the recovery to the remedy that we were taking at the moment.
Take the common cold (which I'm suffering from at the moment). When I was younger and had a cold, I used to take vitamin C and eat a lot of garlic (these are two most popular home remedies over here). And naturally I got better, so I thought it worked. Having read more about it, I realised that common cold is self-limiting, so now I just try to take things easy for a couple of days and drink plenty of liquids (hydration is important if you have a fever). And my colds go away as quickly as before. Naturally, I lack the comfort measure that vitamin C used to provide, namely "I'm actively doing something to get better, instead of waiting for the illness to resolve on its own." But since I don't believe in it anymore, there's no sense in taking it, even as a placebo.

I've searched Benedetti on Pubmed and read a bit more about his experiments. He seems to claim that placebo response, if pre-conditioned by first using opioids (that's a very important point here) is mediated via opioid receptors. Which means it is really no wonder that naloxone disrupted the placebo response. Benedetti also claims that if placebo response is pre-conditioned using non-opioid medication, it becomes mediated by non-opioid receptors. And if it is not pre-conditioned (so a patient gets saline solution at the very beginning and only hears it is a pain-killer), it uses other pathways altogether.

I'm afraid I'm a sceptic here. I believe that mind can have a lot of powerful effects on the body, but they are mostly connected with hormones and neurotransmitters (last weekend, while walking down a street I had a serious case of "fight-or-flight", for no reason really, other than seeing three guys who just triggered this effect - and I suppose my pulse and blood pressure were pretty much elevated for some time afterwards). I simply do not believe in a tumour disappearing due to placebo effect - although there are some cases when tumours spontaneously regress. All the rest is logical fallacy, like mistaking correlation with causation.

One thing about placebos. What they influence is always subjective symptoms. So that people who get placebo painkillers report their pain is lesser on a pain scale - but pain perception is subjective all the way. We have a saying over here "If you want to get rid of headache, hit your thumb with a hammer" - newer, more immediate pain makes the older pain "disappear". However, placebo responses do not improve objective measures. There was this trial with asthmatics - the ones on placebo reported feeling better but tests like spirometry showed that in fact nothing improved. Which can be dangerous - you think you are better when in fact you are not.

About this Danish guy - all his symptoms are a typical stress response, too much adrenalin and cortisol in the blood stream. And stress responses can be very well triggered by thinking alone - when I was in primary school, I would get all sick before some tests, complete with high fever, sweating and vomiting. It took my mother some time before she realised what it was.

But yes, placebo responses are very important in some cases. We have no real medicine for common cold, for example. But if you have a cold and feeling miserable, a bowl of chicken broth and a little care can go a long way.