Take This Sugar Pill and Call Me in the Morning (Jeannette Cooperman, May 22, 2025, The Common Reader)
In a study of dental pain, patients were given morphine, and it helped their pain. Not surprising. But others were given saline placebos, and they, too, had less pain. Those who suffered were those given naloxone, which blocks the effect of opioids. So were the placebos triggering the brain’s release of natural opioids?
These and other studies “support the emerging concept that drugs and placebos share a common mechanism of action,” says Dr. Fabrio Benedetti, a neuroscientist and placebo expert at the University of Turin Medical School. That sounds clean and tidy. Yet “a placebo pill has almost no effect when administered by researchers who do not care about the placebo effect,” writes an academic who keeps his blog anonymous, “but the exact same pill has an enormous effect larger than all existing treatments when administered by a researcher who really wants the placebo effect to be real.” His conclusion? That it is the attention paid by the researcher, not the placebo itself, that makes the difference.