Jim wries: << I'll be teaching about the placebo effect in my quantitative reasoning class later today, and I just remembered having read a year or two ago about a study that claimed to actually disprove the existence of the effect. Do any of you remember this? What is the current scientific consensus about the study?

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What I seem to recall is only that a study appeared to show the placebo effect is less than it was thought to be. Seem likely to me that its effect will depend highly on the population under study, and perhaps above all on the kind of ailment that is being treated. If the ailment has a high psychosomatic component, there would probably be a higher placebo effect. --Dan