Placebo effect

 

 

Placebo

A substance containing no medication and prescribed or given to reinforce a patient's expectation to get well It is also used as a control in an experiment or test to determine the effectiveness of a medicinal drug.

Placebo effect

Any effect that seems to be a consequence of administering a placebo; the change is usually beneficial and is assumed result from the person's faith in the treatment or preconceptions about what the experimental drug was supposed to do. Pharmacologists were the first to talk about placebo effects but now the idea has been generalized to many situations having nothing to do with drugs.