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I don't know about that. There seems to be a lot of research investigating the difference between placebo and no-treatment. The publication [0] mentioned in article searches out all the studies that tested placebo treatment, and they all included a no-treatment group.

Here's an excerpt:

>We included randomised placebo trials with a no-treatment control group investigating any health problem

[0] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20091554

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I meant the original 1955 publication of “The Powerful Placebo” that put the idea of the “placebo effect” into the public consciousness. (Use of the term really takes off starting then [1].)

That article's more recent (2010) link supports its conclusion, which wouldn't need to be stated unless it contrasted with what it calls “pharmacological folklore” from the original publication, which the author says he “took literally” for many decades after.

The point being that the 1955 version of the idea is currently much more widely known than modern no-treatment comparisons, and most people don't realize that its research basis is so flimsy.

[1] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=placebo+effect...

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