placebo

There is some scientific merit to some alternative modalities, such as the well-documented placebo effect.

After the surgery he discovered that he had simply drunk fruit juice with added sugar and he had been given a placebo.

Nobody conceived of a thing like the placebo effect or researcher bias —none of these notions had been worked out yet.

Those who had received the actual drug reported better levels of self-satisfaction than the unfortunates who just got the placebo.

The second is the placebo effect, which will often cause anything presented as medication to “work.”

It is a milder form of this same method to give what the learned faculty term a placebo.

We are interested in what makes the placebo act as effectively as the true medication.

This is a last phase of the metaphysical polity, and is only a kind of placebo.

Hence the complacent brother in the Marchant's Tale is called Placebo.'

We'll call this the placebo criticism and will come back to it, too, in a moment.