Placebos are pharmacologically inactive substances, and yet they often seem to help people recover from illnesses and injuries.
Nobody wants to own it.
Even shamans and witch doctors would be offended by the idea that their healing powers depended on the placebo effect. The value of that interdisciplinary approach became apparent even as the scholars argued over the definition of placebo. The scholars came from two distinct cultures, one more interested in mechanism, the other in meaning. Definitions and explanations that satisfied one group often left the other in doubt, and thus each side's conceptions and beliefs were challenged. Placebos are best known for their use as inactive substitute treatments in randomized trials of drugs in clinical development.