Placebos

The placebo was used for centuries as therapy for patients whom physicians were unsure of how to treat or for whom no useful treatment was available. In research, the notion of placebo control arose to account for those beneficial or harmful effects not directly attributable to the therapy of interest. Knowledgeable clinicians are interested in determining which parts of the placebo effect they should implement to optimize their patients' health. Strong critics of the placebo argue that it is not ethical to assign subjects to any intervention that has even the potential of being less efficacious than current therapy. Life‐threatening conditions where a proven effective treatment exists, are agreed to be inappropriate for placebo‐only allocation. One of the areas of medicine where the use of placebo has been debated widely is in depression. The use of active treatment controls instead of placebo would make accurate evaluation of interventions difficult.