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Placebos are typically inert tablets, such as sugar pills. A placebo (/ p l ə ˈ s iː b oʊ / plə-SEE-boh) is a substance or treatment which is designed to have no therapeutic value. [1] Common placebos include inert tablets (like sugar pills), inert injections (like saline), sham surgery, [2] and other procedures. [3]
Placebos have featured in medical use until well into the twentieth century. [3] In 1955 Henry K. Beecher published an influential paper entitled The Powerful Placebo which proposed idea that placebo effects were clinically important. [4] Subsequent re-analysis of his materials, however, found in them no evidence of any "placebo effect". [5]
Placebos are commonly known as the inert drugs — think sugar pills — that researchers use to measure the effects of real drugs. But research shows they can actually improve certain health ...
The structure of this trial is significant because, in those days, the only time placebos were ever used "was to express the efficacy or non-efficacy of a drug in terms of "how much better" the drug was than the "placebo". [18]: 88 (Note that the trial conducted by Austin Flint is an example of such a drug efficacy vs. placebo efficacy trial.)
Benedetti has been credited as being partly responsible for the increasing respectability of research into the placebo effect. [14] A review of his book Placebo Effects: Understanding the mechanisms in health and disease in the New England Journal of Medicine stated that he runs "the foremost laboratory for the study of placebo effects in the world."
Placebo analgesia occurs when the administration of placebos leads to pain relief.Because placebos by definition lack active ingredients, the effect of placebo analgesia is considered to result from the patient's belief that they are receiving an analgesic drug or other medical intervention.
Research published in 2008 showed that placebos enhanced memory performance. Participants were given a placebo "cognitive enhancing drug" called R273. When they participated in a misinformation effect experiment, people who took R273 were more resistant to the effects of misleading post-event information. [36]
An example of an active placebo is the 1964 work of Shader and colleagues who used a combination of low-dose phenobarbital plus atropine to mimic the sedation and dry mouth produced by phenothiazines.