A placebo effect is generally linked with medical science when a doctor gives the patient a fake treatment which as per science will not have any positive impact on the patient but the patient ends up thinking that the treatment was effective and helped to cure his illness .
Indirect positive impacts of placebo effect
A placebo effect even though doesnt have a positive impact on your body but it may have a positive effect on your mental approach to your illness which in turn might help in curing the disease.
Also there are circumstances when an illness doesn't have a cure but the doctor is compelled to give the patient a pill (like sugar pills)to give him relief on the mental side.
On the negative side, patients may end up consuming medicine which are unnecessary and end up harming their own body.
A major example of placebo effect is homeopathy . The basic theories behind homeopathy is that dilution increases the dose of a medicine which doesnt make sense at all and also the concept of water memory when water remembers the ingriedients added into it. But evven then homeopathy became popular because of blacebo effect in the 20th century. During the start of the 20th century, the field of medical science was not as developed as it is now. Most of the medical practices affected the body negatively as they were unscientific. Operations resulted in more infections and deaths than cure. This is when homeopathy was introduced to the people of america. Homeopathic medicines did not have any postivie effect on the body nor did they have any negative effect. So, when illnesses cured over time because of the immunity mechanisms of our body, the common people started to bilieve that it was because of homeopathy. This lead to the rise of the pseudoscience of homeopathy.
the term placebo effect cen be defined on general terms as " an action or a thing is credited for a case for which it actually does not have any impact"