PRINTDr. Mom’s new weapon
First placebo tablet hits the online market
June 12, 2008 | 12:00 a.m. CST
What’s the 10-second cure for a child crying about an owie? Kiss it and make it better.
That’s the logic Jennifer Buettner of Maryland was banking on when baby-sitting her 12-year-old niece. To curb the stomachache that seemed to appear and disappear depending on her niece’s mood, Jennifer decided to skip on the Motrin her mother-in-law, a doctor, recommended and buy a placebo from her local grocery store to ease her niece’s nerves.
With help from a pediatrician and some Columbia moms, Vox created a list of when the handy pill could be used. However, pop this pill at your own risk.
• Your teenager is faking sick to skip a math test.
• Trips to the doctor’s office are frequent, yet yield no real cause or illness.
• You need a sugar rush without the caffeine and don’t mind the taste of chewable tablets.
• Your 3-year-old is screaming bloody murder because of a small scratch.
• You’re out of candy on Halloween night.
• You always enjoyed the flavor of the chewable tablets from your childhood.
• Your great-grandmother complains incessantly about a minor backache.
When she discovered there were no placebos currently in the market, a light bulb went off. Why not create one?
With the help of her husband, Dennis Buettner, Jennifer created Efficacy Brands LLC and trademarked “Obecalp” (placebo spelled backwards), which is the first standardized placebo pill to enter the U.S. market. The pressed sugar tablets popped into production June 1.
Obecalp is based on the placebo effect: When people think they’ve taken medicine, their bodies respond as if they have. Basically, it’s a case of mind over matter.
The Buettners believe Obecalp is the cure for the attention-seeking tummy ache or when a simple kiss on a skinned knee just isn’t enough.
The cherry-flavored compressed sugar tablet has the chalky medicine texture to better imitate the real thing, Dennis says. “If you remember as a child getting like a St. Joseph’s aspirin for children and you kinda go, ‘Hey, I don’t want to eat 10 of those,’” he says.
Columbia residents might need more convincing, though. Alison Minnick, mother of a 3-year-old boy, says she didn’t like the idea of “faking out” her child by giving him the placebo. Another Columbia mother, Latonya Douglas, says she wouldn’t purchase placebo tablets for her 2-year-old daughter just yet. Children at her daughter’s age only complain when they’re actually sick, she says. “Maybe when she’s older ... like over 10,” she says. “When they’re older, they know what to say to get out of things.”
Harsha Patel, a pediatrician at University Hospital, says she wouldn’t normally think to reach for a placebo. Although placebos might be effective in cases involving hypochondriacs, it’s difficult to pinpoint if patients are truly ill or if it’s all in their head –– especially in younger children who can’t talk yet to communicate their symptoms.
“You cannot completely ignore the (patient’s) complaint,” Patel says. “There might be some real problem.” However, she says that if patients kept coming back with the same complaints, and she continually found nothing wrong with them medically, she might consider using a placebo.
The question is: Won’t doling out placebo pills to kids when they’re not really sick turn them into pill-popping adults?
Sultana Jahan, a child psychiatrist at Burrell Behavioral Clinic – Central Region, says the effect on placebo-using kids would depend on what the pill was used for –– an over-eating stomachache or something more serious. Jahan says that placebos are not effective in treating ADHD, like they are at treating depression. If a placebo doesn’t work, the kids will be less likely to trust medications later in life, she says.
Douglas says that although she does believe that Americans are overmedicated, she doesn’t think popping a placebo is the answer to the problem. Regardless, Dennis Buettner says the orders from their Web site, inventedbyamommy.com, are adding up and are on target for the goal of $1 million-plus sales in the first year.
