Are placebos magic or real?
A bit of whimsy making the medical rounds has a pharmaceutical company petitioning the Food and Drug Administration for approval of a new pain reliever. The compound, to be packaged in red, white and blue capsules, will be sold with a label that is indisputably true: PROVED EFFECTIVE IN ONE-THIRD OF ALL CASES AND ABSOLUTELY SAFE. The nostrum's name: Placebo.
Long the butt of jokes, placebos (from the Latin for "I shall please") are one of the oldest, most useful and least understood "remedies" in the doctor's satchel. Generally they come as pills of milk sugar or talc...
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