• Marc Egeth.
• The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, Department of Radiology, 3400 Civic Center Blvd., Philadelphia, PA 19104, United States. marcege@yahoo.com
• Med. Hypotheses. 2009 May 1; 72 (5): 606-7.

AbstractThree separate but related ideas build on van Deventer's concept of the "meta-placebo" effect in which placebo effects are hypothesized to help patients even when patients know they are receiving a placebo. First, a method is proposed to experimentally validate the meta-placebo effect without lying to experimental subjects. Second, the idea of a meta-placebo is extended to a condition where patients experience many of the elements of placebo treatments that are hypothesized to cause placebo benefits, such as an optimistic prognosis by a doctor, but patients do not actually take a placebo pill: a "curabo effect". The final section proposes that patients might be able to experience enough placebo- and -curabo-related treatment elements to gain a beneficial effect without either a pill or a doctor. Instead, simply having the knowledge that one can derive medical benefit from placebo, meta-placebo, and -curabo treatments, and without medicine, might in itself suffice to cause some to feel better: the hypothesized meta-meta-placebo and -curabo (or "meta-bo," for short) effect.

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