Pricey Placebos Work Better Than Cheap Placebos

Why pay more? Because, as a recent study of placebos done at MIT found, the more you pay for pain relief, the better you feel. The Los Angeles Times reports on the study, summarized in the Journal of the American Medical Association, and which asked 82 volunteers to rate the intensity of electric shocks
administered to their wrists before and after they received a dummy
pain pill. Half
of the study participants were told that the drug had a regular price
of $2.50 a pill. The remaining subjects were told that the new
medication had been discounted to 10 cents a pill. The bottom line? Researchers found that that you get what you pay for: 85 percent of subjects who
received regular-priced pills reported feeling less pain after taking
the dummy medication, compared with 61 percent of those who received the
supposedly discounted pills.
Read more in the L.A. Times.