Placebo

That day proved to be exceptionally busy. After meeting two friends of mine, I received a whole pile of written paper from the panel examination of our third-year students.

I was responsible for scoring one of the essays.

It was a question on lipid-lowering medicine, their clinical use, and adverse effects.

The task was tedious. To my surprise, when I went through the answer for the adverse effect of a particular drug, nearly half of the class wrote the following:

Placebo-like effect.

I must say I have never heard of a distinct syndrome with such a name, nor did I encountered problems remotely related to this seemingly characteristic phenomenon.

And then I had a hunch.

I went back to the Powerpoint file of that lecture, which was made by another professor. On the slide that described the adverse effect of that drug, there was just one line: placebo-like.

It means the drug has no specific side effect and the profile of adverse reaction was similar to the placebo group in randomized trials.

For sure many of our students have intact visual cortex, temporal lobe (for semantic memory), and motor area - they could recite exactly what's written on the teaching slide without knowing what it means.

A icy cold feeling sudden went through my back.

PS. The most dramatic answer sheet, however, belongs to a remarkable candidate who wrote an entire page in an attempt to answer the question last year (which was pretty much the same as the present one, except that we were asking a different class of drug).