Placebo Plus Usual Treatment Achieves Clinically Significant Back Pain Relief

anesthesiologynews.com March 29, 2017

A placebo of a pill added to treatment as usual for chronic low back pain resulted in clinically significant improvements in patients who were informed about the placebo beforehand, according to a new study from Portugal.

All 97 study patients reported persistent low back pain for at least three months before the trial.

The first phase of the study consisted of 48 adult patients randomly assigned to open-label placebo (OLP) plus treatment as usual (TAU) and 49 adult patients assigned to TAU without OLP, both for three weeks.