If you haven't heard of the placebo effect, you should know that it is about a person experiencing the effects of perhaps a medicine solely through mental fabrications. For example, let's say I told you I was giving you the best migraine pill on the market but really it was just a sugar pill. If you somehow feel much better after taking the pill, you likely faced the placebo effect. The placebo effect is a major concern in experiments, so investigators constantly have to employ measures to make sure that there is not bias in the collected data.
But I'm guessing that you probably already knew about the placebo effect because it has pervaded pop culture over the years. Anyway, if you've been reading this blog for a while now, you know that the point of my posts is to tell you about things you probably don't know, so that's enough talk about the definition of the placebo effect.
Recently, the manufacturer of a prominent painkiller in Australia, Nurofen, was charged with misleading customers. The company marketed products specifically for migraines or tension headaches. But here's the catch. All the products had the same active ingredient—342 mg of ibuprofen lysine. There wasn't much that was different between these products other than the packaging. Nurofen enjoyed the ploy while it lasted and was able to charge twice the product's original price for these pills that apparently targeted certain pain.
The funniest part is that many claimed that these pills were in fact extremely effective. That gave customer's incentive to buy the more expensive, "specialized" pills over generic pills which would have served the same purpose. Placebos. Oh, boy.
But I'm guessing that you probably already knew about the placebo effect because it has pervaded pop culture over the years. Anyway, if you've been reading this blog for a while now, you know that the point of my posts is to tell you about things you probably don't know, so that's enough talk about the definition of the placebo effect.
Recently, the manufacturer of a prominent painkiller in Australia, Nurofen, was charged with misleading customers. The company marketed products specifically for migraines or tension headaches. But here's the catch. All the products had the same active ingredient—342 mg of ibuprofen lysine. There wasn't much that was different between these products other than the packaging. Nurofen enjoyed the ploy while it lasted and was able to charge twice the product's original price for these pills that apparently targeted certain pain.
The funniest part is that many claimed that these pills were in fact extremely effective. That gave customer's incentive to buy the more expensive, "specialized" pills over generic pills which would have served the same purpose. Placebos. Oh, boy.