Giving Compass' Take:

• Alexandra Sifferlin discusses the potential of honest placebos - placebos that are known to the patient - to treat medical conditions. 

• What can honest placebos teach us about improving medical care? What further research is needed? 

• Learn how to find and fund scientific research. 

The medical community has been aware of the placebo effect–the phenomenon in which a nontherapeutic treatment (like a sham pill) improves a patient’s physical condition–for centuries. But Ted Kaptchuk, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and one of the leading researchers on the placebo effect, wanted to take his research further. He was tired of letting the people in his studies think they were taking a real therapy and then watching what happened. Instead, he wondered, what if he was honest? His Harvard colleagues told Kaptchuk he was crazy, that letting people in a clinical trial know they were taking a placebo would defeat the purpose. Nevertheless, in 2009 the university’s teaching hospital, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, launched the first open-label placebo, or so-called honest placebo, trial to date, starting with people who had IBS.

The findings were surprising. Nearly twice as many people in the trial who knowingly received placebo pills reported experiencing adequate symptom relief, compared with the people who received no treatment. Not only that but the men and women taking the placebo also doubled their rates of improvement to a point that was about equal to the effects of two IBS medications that were commonly used at the time.

“Placebo is not magic,” says Alia Crum, principal investigator at the Stanford Mind & Body Lab, who is also studying placebo. “We view placebo effect as the product of your body’s ability to heal, which is activated by our mind-sets and expectations to heal, and shaped by medical ritual, branding of drugs and the words doctors say.”

Crum says honest-placebo research is fascinating and important, but she doesn’t see doctors prescribing placebo pills anytime soon. Instead, she’s interested in how doctors can get their patients into the right mind-set for medical care. “We’ve been pumping billions of dollars into developing new drugs and treatments without making much headway on the chronic-disease crisis,” she says. “What if we spent that same time, money and effort on achieving a greater understanding of the patients’ natural abilities to heal?”

Read the full article about honest placebos by Alexandra Sifferlin at TIME.