The Placebo Effect

By Virginia Prescott on Thursday, September 24, 2009.
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The placebo effect, when the results from taking a sugar pill has the same effect as a genuine medication itself, was first studied back in the 1950s. Now scientists are finding the placebo effect to be on the rise.

Today, nearly half of all drugs that fail in late-stage trials do so because they haven’t been proven to work any better than a placebo. This has pharmaceutical companies running scared, and scrambling to develop drugs for everything from depression to Parkinson's disease that are more effective than placebos.

Steve Silberman is a contributing editor for Wired Magazine, where he wrote about this apparent rise in the placebo effect.

Wired: Placebos Are Getting More Effective. Drugmakers Are Desperate to Know Why.

(Photo by ThomasThomas via Flickr/Creative Commons

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The whole point of drugs is to do better than placebo. What exactly does it mean that placebos are "on the rise" that statement makes no sense.

Submitted by Travis Roy on Thu, 09/24/2009 - 13:19.
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