It's a strange finding nestled inside a weird phenomenon: children are 50 percent more likely than adults to respond favorably to placebos.
So concludes a Public Library of Science Medicine review by French pediatricians of anti-epilepsy drug studies. If replicated in other drugs, researchers may need to adjust their analyses of clinical drug studies involving kids.
What could account for the tendency of kids to feel better after taking a drug designed to do nothing? The reasons, write the researchers, "remain largely unknown and mostly speculative." (Full Story at wired)
What do you think folks? I wonder if imagination has something to do with it. The whole placebo thing, in general, facinates me.
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