Placebo
“– a fake treatment [using] an inactive substance like sugar, distilled water, or saline solution –”1
— “1 a pill, etc., containing no active substance, given to satisfy a patient or to serve as a control in an experiment … 2 something said only to flatter or mollify.”2
Considering the recent sugar fraud,3 should we revisit all those science studies that used sugar as the placebo? that refined substance now revealed to be not-so-inactive?
And should we ask ourselves: What else in our cultural consumption4 do we consider as innocuous / inactive, when in consequence it is nothing of the sort? How many, for the sake of gain, are dispensing poisons in disguise?
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1. http://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=31481
2. Collins Gage Canadian Paperback Dictionary © 2006 Nelson Education Ltd.
3. Discussed in a previous Déjà Vu ~ Times post at http://dejavu-times.blogspot.ca/2016/09/one-more-nail.html
4. —political, economic, social, religious, etc,—