Quotes About Placebo

As an example, companies would require researchers to compare a new drug with a placebo (sugar pill) instead of with an older drug.

This finding suggests that the placebo effect explains the apparent clinical effectiveness of antidepressants. In other words, improvements in mood may be a result of the patient's belief in the power of the drug—not the drug itself.74

Even though I never found that antidepressants solved all my problems, they did help some. And even if it is a placebo, the fact that these drugs can make things easier, well, I have to at least give them credit for that. So I don't feel like it is harmful or wrong or anything to experiment with psychiatric drugs—under a doctor's supervision, of course.

For me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo.

expectations, in fact, are so powerful that placebos (fake treatments like sugar pills, saline injections, and sham surgery) cause bald men to grow hair, high blood pressure to drop, ulcers to heal, dopamine levels to increase, and even tumors to shrink. And although pharmaceutical companies would rather keep this on the down low, placebos relieve symptoms on par with real medication. In other words, it's our beliefs that do the healing.