A placebo is a medical treatment that doesn’t contain any kind of medicine. In fact, it contains no active ingredients at all. But in many cases, placebos can have a therapeutic and sometimes dramatic effect.
Doctors would give placebos to patients that had little else to offer or seemed to have nothing wrong with them. They might give a patient a tincture of sugar water, or a pill filled with nothing but sugar, hoping that the patient’s belief in the medicine or trust in the physician would help relieve the symptoms.
