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The twist: The pill was a form of deception. It contained only lactose, sucrose, and glucose; it was a placebo.

Sugar is not chemically inert. It actually takes the edge off pain and general misery.

I wish they would stop publishing results indicating that "We believe sugar does absolutely nothing whatsoever in the body, so if you consume sugar pills, clearly any reaction to it is complete bullshit made up by your mind because you believed in it."



OK, but the amount of sugar in a pill is tiny. It's presumably not a piece of hard candy, but rather mixed with standard pill fillers.

I don't think that's enough to take the edge off of anything.


It's presumably an amount you could look up if you genuinely want to argue this for some reason.


"Sugar pill" is a generic term for an inactive substance. It doesn't contain a meaningful amount of sugar, and similar effects are present using other substances. How would we test diabetes medicine if the only options were either medicine or sugar?

Trying to claim the placebo effect is from taking a tiny amount of sugar is silly. If sugar alone was curing things, the US would basically never get sick.


No, placebo is a generic term for a presumably inactive substance. I quoted the article. They gave people sugar in this case.


And lactose, along with fillers. Why do you think it was the tiny quantity of sugar not the tiny quantity of milk?


Lactose is just another form of sugar.


Yeah, I should have highlighted the fillers instead of the lactose, I realized my mistake shortly after posting. It's really not the point, claiming the tiny amount of sugar is the cause is ridiculous. This one experiment didn't test multiple placebos, but other's have.




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