Placebos Work Even When Patients Are Told They're Taking a Placebo

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The standard explanation for the placebo effect is that it works because patients believe in it: they expect to feel better and, through some combination of psychology and physiology, they do. This assumption seemed so obvious that for decades it was taken as a given. Researchers at Harvard Medical School upended this in a 2010 study of 80 patients with irritable bowel syndrome. One group received no treatment; the other was given pills explicitly labeled "placebo" and told by clinicians that the pills contained no active ingredient but that placebos had been shown to help some patients with IBS through the body's self-healing processes. At the end of the trial, the open-label placebo group reported significantly better symptom improvement than the control group. Even knowing the medicine was inert did not prevent the therapeutic effect. Researchers speculate that the ritual of taking a pill, the therapeutic relationship with a clinician, and conditioned responses to the act of treatment may all play independent roles — separate from belief in the treatment itself. The findings have profound implications for medicine and the ethics of placebo use, since openly administered placebos could potentially be used without the deception traditionally assumed to be required.