Escaping from placebo prison

doi:10.1136/bmj.b1898

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Jeremy Howick, MRC/ESRC interdisciplinary postdoctoral fellow1

¹Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, University of Oxford, Oxford OX3 7LF

jeremy.howick{at}dphpc.ox.ac.uk

Nunn is correct: there is no such thing as the placebo.1 People slap the label placebo on treatments that have a host of distinct factors with potentially therapeutic effects, including: