Placebo?

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,—