Noun: placebo effect
- Any effect that seems to be a consequence of administering a placebo; the change is usually beneficial and is assumed result from the person's faith in the treatment or preconceptions about what the experimental drug was supposed to do; pharmacologists were the first to talk about placebo effects but now the idea has been generalized to many situations having nothing to do with drugs
"The patient's symptoms improved due to the placebo effect, even though she received a sugar pill"
Derived forms: placebo effects
Type of: consequence, effect, event, issue, outcome, result, upshot
Encyclopedia: Placebo effect