Main Page | See live article | Alphabetical index Placebo is a Latin word meaning "I shall please". Placebo Domino in regione vivorum ("I shall please the Lord in the land of the living") is the first response in the Roman Catholic service of vespers for the dead - the service came to be known as "placebo" because of this. A placebo is an operation, a chemical solution or a pill, which doctors administer as if it were a therapy, but which they suppose to have no therapeutic value. Physicians typically use placebos only in the context of a clinical trial, in which a "test" group of patients receive the therapy being tested, and a "control" group receives the placebo. See: Placebo effect Placebo is also a Swedish/American band that formed in London in 1995. This is a disambiguation page; that is, one that just points to other pages that might otherwise have the same name. If you followed a link here, you might want to go back and fix that link to point to the appropriate specific page. This article is from Wikipedia. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.