placebo
Sign in to savethumb|Placebos are typically inert tablets, such as sugar pills. A placebo ( ) is a medicine or treatment intended to appear genuine to its recipient, but which has no pharmaceutical effect. Common placebos include inert tablets (like sugar pills), inert injections (like saline), sham surgery, and other procedures.
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A placebo is a fake medicine or treatment—such as a sugar pill or saline injection—that is made to look genuine but has no actual pharmaceutical effect. Placebos matter because researchers use them in studies to test whether real medicines work better than a fake treatment, and because people sometimes experience real improvements from placebos even though they contain no active ingredients.
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Article
20 sectionsContents
- Etymology and definition
- Effects
- Factors influencing the power of the placebo effect
- Depression
- Negative effects
- Ethics
- In research trials
- In medical practice
- Mechanisms
- Psychology
- Placebo analgesia
- Brain and body
- Confounding factors
- History
- Placebo-controlled studies
- Cultural influences
- See also
- References
- Further reading
- External links
thumb|Placebos are typically inert tablets, such as sugar pills. A placebo ( ) is a medicine or treatment intended to appear genuine to its recipient, but which has no pharmaceutical effect. Common placebos include inert tablets (like sugar pills), inert injections (like saline), sham surgery, and other procedures.
Placebos are used in randomized clinical trials to test the efficacy of medical treatments. In a placebo-controlled trial, any change in the control group is known as the placebo response, and the difference between this and the result of no treatment is the placebo effect. Placebos in clinical trials should ideally be indistinguishable from so-called verum treatments under investigation, except for the latter's particular hypothesized medicinal effect. This is to shield test participants (with their consent) from knowing who is getting the placebo and who is getting the treatment under test, as patients' and clinicians' expectations of efficacy can influence results.