I'm glad lutusp has already jumped in here to decry the shoddy quality of "science" relied on to build the opinion piece kindly submitted here. He is correct that psychology often relies on data unrepresentative of humankind as a whole,

http://hci.ucsd.edu/102b/readings/WeirdestPeople.pdf

often engages in dodgy data manipulation after gathering the data,

http://opim.wharton.upenn.edu/~uws/

and is usually part of a larger scientific universe of rushing to publish.

http://www.ma.utexas.edu/users/mks/statmistakes/filedrawer.h...

That said, while we will always have to be wary of grandiose claims about preliminary study results,

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

and especially about "mind over matter" claims,

http://norvig.com/prayer.html

there are skeptical psychologists

http://www.lscp.net/persons/dupoux/teaching/JOURNEE_AUTOMNE_...

http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/publications/o...

http://www.psichi.org/pubs/articles/article_730.aspx

and other researchers in psychology who apply rigor to their discipline, so over time we may actually find out something about human behavior from psychology more reliable than the weak and debatable assertions found in the article submitted here.

AFTER EDIT:

Because the submitted article mentions the placebo effect, in the usual manner of popular articles, perhaps I should share here some links that are helpful for understanding what placebo effects are all about. Some of these online links cite quite a few useful scholarly publications.

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/behold-the-spin-what-a-n...

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/michael-specter-on-the-p...

"In other words, the best research we have strongly suggests that placebo effects are illusions, not real physiological effects. The possible exception to this are the subjective symptoms of pain and nausea, where the placebo effects are highly variable and may be due to subjective reporting."

Despite the numerous press releases on the Web pointing to publications co-authored by Ted Kaptchuk, who has NO medical training or credentials,

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/dummy-medicine-dummy-doc...

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/dummy-medicine-dummy-doc...

the statements typically found in those articles, such as "Recent research demonstrates that placebo effects are genuine psychobiological phenomenon [sic] attributable to the overall therapeutic context, and that placebo effects can be robust in both laboratory and clinical settings" are untrue.

http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/the-rise-and-fa...

"Despite the spin of the authors – these results put placebo medicine into crystal clear perspective, and I think they are generalizable and consistent with other placebo studies. For objective physiological outcomes, there is no significant placebo effect. Placebos are no better than no treatment at all."

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20091554

"We did not find that placebo interventions have important clinical effects in general. However, in certain settings placebo interventions can influence patient-reported outcomes, especially pain and nausea, though it is difficult to distinguish patient-reported effects of placebo from biased reporting. The effect on pain varied, even among trials with low risk of bias, from negligible to clinically important. Variations in the effect of placebo were partly explained by variations in how trials were conducted and how patients were informed."

Fabrizio Benedetti, a co-author of one of the most cited papers who is also a medical doctor, sums up his view this way: "I am a doctor, it is true, but I am mainly a neurophysiologist, so I use the placebo response as a model to understand how our brain works. I am not sure that in the future it will have a clinical application."

To sum up, despite claims to the contrary by a person without medical training who is often covered by the lay press, the best-considered view among medical practitioners with clinical experience is that the placebo response has no clinical application.

See also:

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/does-thinking-make-it-so...

http://www.skepdic.com/placebo.html

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/revisiting-daniel-moerma...