[3] In 1960, when Stoessl was a child, he and his family moved from England to London, Ontario, after his father was offered a job in Canada.
[4][5] In 1984, Stoessl joined the faculty of the University of British Columbia, where he worked on the positron emission tomography program with Donald Calne for two years.
[5] In 2001, Stoessl published a paper in Science which found that the placebo effect in Parkinson's disease might be due to patients' anticipation of benefit, and that substantial dopamine is released in the brains of Parkinson's patients in response to placebo administration.
[4][6] Subsequent research by Stoessl has found that dopamine is released in the brain of Parkinson's patients when they are given a placebo, but only if they are told the probability of it being a real drug is 75 percent.
[7][8] He has said that "In Parkinson's, as in many other conditions, there is an important placebo response and that can be measured with clinical outcomes.