The recent status of placebo usage in medical practice is highly controversial. To make a better established judgment about this rather complex issue, we clearly need a detailed picture about the different aspects of circumstances of medical placebo use. This is the first study in Hungary to investigate physicians’ beliefs, knowledge, and experience about placebo treatment in its complexity. This summarizes the questions of the previous studies and introduces a number of new ones. The questionnaire we used had 21 items, and was answered by 169 GPs (51.7 ± 9.5 years; 41.0% male). Our results show that placebo application is a widespread intervention in the practice of GPs who returned the questionnaire (83% had already used it). They regarded it as both ethical (98.2%) and effective (93.4%) under certain circumstances.
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