ccording to recent research the color, shape, taste and even name of a tablet or pill can have an effect on how patients feel about their medication.

Choose an appropriate combination and the placebo effect gives the pill a boost, improves outcomes and might even reduce side effects.

Strangely, they found that 14 percent of people think of pink tablets as tasting sweeter than red tablets whereas a yellow tablet is perceived as salty irrespective of its actual ingredients. 11% thought of white or blue tablets as tasting bitter and 10% said orange-colored tablets were sour.

A placebo (pluh-see-bow) is a substance or other kind of treatment that looks just like a regular treatment or medicine, but is not. It’s actually an inactive “look-alike” treatment or substance. This means it’s not a medicine.

Sometimes the placebo is in the form of a “sugar pill,” but a placebo can also be an injection, a liquid, or even a procedure. It’s designed to look like a real treatment, but doesn’t directly affect the illness.

placebos seem to affect how people feel. This happens in up to 1 out of 3 people. A change in a person’s symptoms as a result of getting a placebo is called the placebo effect

In particular, saline injections can dampen pain if a person has recently received shots of morphine, a powerful analgesic, and has thereby associated such injections with pain relief.

According to the prohibited drugs list of the World Anti-Doping Agency, morphine is illegal during athletic competition but not during training.

But attitudes are shifting, even in conventional medical circles

esearchers have also used brain scans and other technologies to show that there may be a physiological explanation for the placebo effect in many cases

But more important is the growing recognition that what we call the placebo effect may involve changes in brain chemistry

A study was conducted where some subjects were given doses of alcohol, while others were given a placebo mimic. Both groups showed signs of drunkenness. When there was a suggestion that alcohol was in their system, that knowledge created a drunk-behavious from those that were not actually drunk.

The materials uses for this experiment were four water bottles, 31 plastic cups and a questionaire.  The four water bottles used were : Aquafina, Dasani, Poland Springs and tap water. The tap water was in a  plain bottle with no label, and gave off a yellowish colour. The catch was that all of the other bottles has the same tap water filled inside. However, the appearance of the brand names of the water bottles did not change.

were told to rank each water from 1-10, 10 being the highest. When the brand named water was being served, they were told sepcific information about each brand.

scientists have shown that people who believed they were under the influence of alcohol were both more suggestible and more adamant about the accuracy of their eyewitness testimony compared to people who knew they were drinking water.

Seema Assefi and Dr. Maryanne Garry,

memory can be affected by an alcohol placebo-in other words, by fake alcohol