This plenary took place on Monday, October 5, at 8:30 am during the International Conference on Communication in Healthcare (ICCH) 2009, in Miami Beach, Florida, USA. The Silent Healer; The Role of Communication in the Placebo Effect Jozien Bensing, PhD, was born in 1950 in Tilburg, the Netherlands. After finishing her formal education as clinical psychologist at Utrecht University, she started a research career at the Netherlands Institute for General Practitioners. She is founder and first president of the European Association of Communication in Health Care. In 1985 she became director of the Netherlands Institute for Health Services Research. She was appointed as full professor of Health Psychology at Utrecht University in 1991. She is a member of several councils and committees on the interface between the scientific world and healthcare, such as the Netherlands Society of Sciences, the Dutch Royal Academy of Sciences, the Dutch Health Council and the National Advisory Council on Health Research. She supervised more than 20 PhD-theses and wrote more than 200 publications, mostly on healthcare communication and related issues. In 2003 Jozien Bensing became the first non-American to receive the international George Engel Award for “outstanding research contributing to the theory, practice and teaching of effective healthcare communication and related skills” from the American Academy on Physician and Patient (now AACH). In 2004 she received a royal decoration (‘Officer of the Order of Orange Nassau’) for her work in translating scientific knowledge into public. She received the prestigious SPINOZA-award for her research on doctor-patient communication in 2006; in 2007 she was chosen to become a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences, which consists of the top-200 most prestigious Dutch scientists.