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The story of the placebo effect used to be simple: When people don’t know they are taking sugar pills or think they might be a real treatment, the pills can work. It’s a foundational idea in medicine and in clinical drug trials dating back to the 1950s.Then Ted Kaptchuk came along.Kaptchuk is a professor at Harvard Medical School, and over the past decade, he and colleagues have shown, in study after study, that giving people placebos openly — that is, telling them they are taking a placebo — helps them feel better. Specifically, they found a placebo can relieve not just pain but also anxiety and fatigue.