yeah, I wouldn't give the placebo. I am trying to teach mac that sometimes things just hurt. Closest I get is offering ice up for almost everything. My guess, that woman will make a mint though.

how is giving a sugar pill actually different than some of the homeopathic remedies (like teething tablets)?

dunno, maybe not different at all.

This week's Secret Lives of Women is about stalking--both stalking and being stalked. Seriously chilling stuff.

Random stats: 1 million women in the US are stalked a year. 1 in 4 female stalkers stalk someone they've been intimate with. 1 in three celebrity stalkers are female.

I think I'd give a kid a placebo. Under specific and limited circumstances. I totally recommend giving me a cplacebo, as long as they are only used when they work.

I am having such a huge craving for lemonade. Sadly I have lemonade, so it comes down to self-control.

yeah, I wouldn't give the placebo. I am tryin got teach mac that sometimes things just hurt.

Yes! That's the thing that bugs me most about it. Pain has a purpose! And learning to rely on drugs to fix everything can't be good. There was a commentary on NPR yesterday by a family physician about the placebo thing. He was very anti.

If I'd had placebo pills available when I was a child, I probably wouldn't have faked being sick so much just to get a spoonful of Dimetapp.

I was ridiculously addicted to the flavor of Dimetapp. I don't know why. Yes, the obsession is now past.

I'm not sure, though, that you need a brand-name pill; all you really need is some of those custom-M&Ms with no Ms on them, and all you have to do is convince the kid that "strengthening medicine" (what we really called them in my family) is not a joke but the real straight-up truth.

mac is much more risk adverse than most of his friends - Terrified of falling down and scrapes. Only recently is he learning that he will survive the bruises and cuts. He had a faceplant on the padded playground surface after his hand slipped on the monkey bars and damn it looked scary and his lip bled, but only for like 1 min.

If you regularly give a child placebos, at some point the child will learn the truth. I wonder if this disappointment would be like losing faith in Santa and the Easter Bunny....

Maybe they should all be tied together, and children should be told their placebos have been blessed by Santa and the Easter Bunny.

Of course, with young kids it's mama's kiss that's a placebo ("Kiss it and make it better").

I've been in many a supposedly haunted theatre.

Aurelia, have you been in the alley behind the Ford Center for the Performing Arts (aka the Oriental)? It's where so many people tried to escape the Iroquois Theater fire 100 years ago, only to find that the fire door was an exit without a ladder, so they ended up jumping to their deaths. It's suuposed to be one of the most haunted locations in the city.

I know that Oprah is convinced that her studio is haunted--it's the old Armory Building where the dead from both the Iroquois and the Eastland disasters were taken.

and see, we don't do Santa or the Easter Bunny either.