What is the central claim of the passage?

Placebo effects work on reported symptoms through expectation and care, and may not depend on deception. (The passage links the effect to expectation and meaning, then uses open-label trials to question the need for deception.)

For which kind of outcome is the placebo effect weakest?

Hard outcomes such as the size of a tumor. (The second paragraph names hard outcomes such as tumor size as the weakest case.)

What do the open-label results suggest about deception?

That deception may not be necessary for the benefit to appear. (Patients who knew the pills were empty still improved, so the benefit did not depend on being misled.)

In this passage, deception means:

making someone believe something that is not true (Deception is contrasted with telling patients plainly that the pills contain no medicine.)

The Honest Placebo: Level 3 Reading Comprehension Questions

A placebo is a treatment with no active drug in it: a sugar pill, a salt-water injection, a machine that is switched off. For a long time, doctors treated the placebo as noise, an annoyance to be subtracted from a trial so the real effect of the medicine could be seen.

The annoyance turned out to be interesting. Patients who take a placebo often report less pain, less nausea, and better sleep. The effect is strongest for symptoms the patient must judge and report, and weakest for hard outcomes such as the size of a tumor. That pattern is a clue. A placebo does not shrink tissue; it changes expectation, attention, and the meaning a person gives to a sensation.

The strangest result comes from open-label trials, in which patients are told plainly that the pills contain no medicine at all. In several small studies, some of those patients still improved. If that finding holds, the power was never in the deception. It was in the ritual of care itself: the appointment, the explanation, the sense of being treated.

Comprehension questions