Placebo

June 6, 2006 12:53 PM

Is it possible to buy placebos (sugar pills) online? I tried Googling and get nothing but music albums named Placebo. I want something that looks like a pill, not a Pez or Sweet Tart. The idea is to use it in a home experiment with some herbals and OTCs.
posted by zek to shopping (10 comments total)

I don't know how many you need, but if you know any women on the pill, see if you can get their week of sugar pills from their pack. I never take mine and end up tossing them. But that might be a weird question to ask people.
posted by bibbit at 1:00 PM on June 6, 2006

Call your doctor and ask him/her to give you a prescription for Obecalp.

In all seriousness, I have no idea, but you can try calling your local pharmacist and/or clinical trial labs to be pointed in the right direction.
posted by necessitas at 1:01 PM on June 6, 2006

Could you not just use a vitamin or something innocuous like that?
posted by Rhomboid at 1:03 PM on June 6, 2006

Empty Gelatin Capsules, add you own sugar.
posted by 517 at 1:09 PM on June 6, 2006

You could buy some empty gelcaps and fill them with sugar\flour\whatever yourself.

Available here.
posted by sanko at 1:10 PM on June 6, 2006

Many health food stores now stock gelcaps (either gelatin or vegetarian) in sizes O, OO, etc. Some places also stock a cap filler, which makes things easier. It's basically a plastic rack that holds about 50 capsule halves in place while you scrape the filling in. You can also by a "tamper" — make sure it is the correct size — to compact the powder and get more into each capsule. Loose powder in your capsules looks sloppy.

For placebos, I would use size O, since that is smaller and easier to swallow than OO.
posted by Araucaria at 2:40 PM on June 6, 2006

You almost certainly can't do this experiment on yourself, by yourself. If you know which ones are the placebos, they won't work well as a control.

If you're performing a test on someone else in your household, I think the gelcaps are the best idea, they allow you to load all of the test substances into identical looking gelcaps, and also to make your own placebos.

If you're getting a reliable friend to help you perform the test on yourself, the gelcaps are again the best option. Make sure you get an identical bottle or baggie for each kind of pill, and have your friend label each bottle randomly, and only give you the index of which substance went in which bottle in a sealed envelope or something. That way you can compare your records/notes to the index afterwards and see which substance had what effect.
posted by The Monkey at 5:26 PM on June 6, 2006

Loading the test substances all into gelcaps is all well and good--except that the contents of gelcaps are absorbed into the bloodstream and thus deliver a different amount of actual medication at a different rate than pills do. This would somewhat skew your (admittedly somewhat unscientific) experiment.
posted by dirtynumbangelboy at 6:47 PM on June 6, 2006

Don't TicTacs look more like a pill than Pez or Sweet Tarts?
posted by achmorrison at 6:50 PM on June 6, 2006

Glucose tablets are what you're looking for. Diabetics use them in case of low sugar episodes.
posted by deborah at 7:50 PM on June 6, 2006