There was a one-sentence blurb in the Wall Street Journal this morning, which I found very intriguing.

“About half of U.S. doctors surveyed by NIH researchers say they regularly give patients placebo treatments.”

Unfortunately, I could not find any elaboration on this statement. Is the practice of prescribing placebos really this widespread? How does this work? Does the physician write out a script such that the patient cannot decode it’s a placebo and the insurance company pays? Or is this something that the doctor hands out in the office? I also wonder which conditions this treatment is most common for.

Any clarification of this practice would be greatly appreciated. Opinion would be nice as well – the word regularly in the sentence from the WSJ makes me a little nervous, for some reason.