Recently, we had a week where, for various reasons, we were unable to get my son's anxiety medication refilled. He was fine, but MY anxiety level was way up. A friend joking suggested that what we needed was a placebo -- you know, some pretend medication, just to keep him thinking he was taking his meds. "It might make YOU feel better," she said knowingly.

Studies show that in some patients, placebos can indeed reduce symptoms, particularly for things like depression, pain, and high blood pressure. Parents also know that kids are sometimes prone to complaining about illness when really they are just fine, thanks, they just don't feel like mowing the lawn or going to Aunt Edwina's for Sunday dinner. And some kids are just hypochondriacs, convinced that they really ARE ill with no real cause.

According to an article in today's New York Times, Jennifer Buettner's niece was one of those kids, and her complaints got Buettner thinking. What if she could give the niece a placebo and convincer her that she had taken medicine? Trouble was there were no available placebo pills for kids, so Buettner created Obecalp (placebo spelled backwards), which is essentially a sugar pill. Kid complaining about a headache? Obecalp to the rescue! Problem solved.

Maybe. Or maybe not.Experts object to placebos for children for two reasons: one is that studies of placebos use in children have shown that the placebo only works if the adult administering it ALSO thinks that the pill contains actual medicine. In other words, if you know the pill is a fake, you will not be able to convince your ten-year-old that it will really work.

The bigger issue, though, for medical professionals is that placebo use teaches kids that every ailment can be solved with a pill, which can impeded a child's ability to make good decisions down the road about drug use. Jennifer Buettner, the inventor of the pediatric placebo, acknowledges this hazard, but says, "We are not promoting drug use." She goes on to claim that the placebo pill is designed to cut down on the number of prescription drugs given to kids. "The overprescription of drugs is a serious problem, and I think there needs to be an alternative," she says.

Which brings me back to my son and his anxiety medication. In the week that it took us to find a pharmacy that could fill his prescription, he was just fine, while I was a nervous wreck, worrying about what might happen if he had an anxiety attack at school, for example. Any sort of placebo, of course, would have done more to calm my fears than to actually manage my son's symptoms. I can't help but wonder if that's really the point of a pediatric placebo: to make the parents feel better, not the child. And to me, that doesn't seem like a good enough reason to give a kid medication, even if it is just pretend.