Is Your Doctor Prescribing Placebos?

In a study published this week in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, a student-and-professor team at the University of Chicago surveyed 466 faculty physicians at Chicago-area medical schools. Almost half of the 231 respondents — 45% — said they had prescribed placebos in regular clinical practice and, of those, just over half had prescribed them in the previous year. Among the reasons the doctors gave: to calm a patient down, to respond to demands for medication that the doctor felt was unnecessary, or simply to do something after all other clinical treatment options had failed. Read more..
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0%2C8599%2C1700079%2C00.html