Doctors prescribe placebos more often than patients might imagine. A survey of Chicago-area physicians found that 45 per cent report they have given a patient a placebo at least once, according to a study published in this month’s Journal of General Internal Medicine, The Globe and Mail reports.

Past surveys of Israeli and Danish doctors revealed that 60 per cent and 85 per cent, respectively, admit they’ve relied on the “placebo effect” to heal patients. But should patients worry about their doctors shamming them? Though prescribing dummy pills is viewed as ethically shady, the placebo effect can work, the paper writes. Brain-scan research indicates that placebos trigger pain-relieving endorphins in the brain.

Doctors turn to placebos for a variety of reasons, according to the Chicago study, including to calm the patient, as a last resort when nothing else works, or simply to get a patient to stop complaining.

They are not necessarily handing out sugar pills disguised as real drugs, says lead researcher Rachel Sherman, a fourth-year medical student at the University of Chicago. A more common scenario is a physician who tells a patient to take ibuprofen for pain when nothing else has worked because “it might help, and it won’t hurt.” Even if the doctor doesn’t believe the drug will alleviate the physical symptoms, the placebo effect may make the patient feel better nonetheless.

Sherman - whose medical education, to this point, has included no mention of placebo use in clinical practice - says her survey of 231 physicians points to the need for more open discussion. “Perhaps this is something that will become more widely acknowledged,” she says.

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