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Noun: placebo effect
  1. 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

Derived forms: placebo effects

Type of: consequence, effect, event, issue, outcome, result, upshot

Encyclopedia: Placebo effect