Implications for clinical practice and policy
infections
INFECTIONS
Our findings have important implications for clinical practice, because they suggest an acceptable behavioural approach towards reducing overtreatment in UK primary care. It appears that replacing unnecessary medication with open-label impure placebos could be supported by the general UK population—particularly in the context of antibiotic prescribing. Hence, our research has confirmed a key pre-requisite to conducting follow-up trials for testing the actual effectiveness of this behavioural strategy for reducing medicine overuse. Our findings could provide a starting point for informing whether placebos should feature more prominently in treatment guidelines, such as relating to infections. Whilse providing support for placebo use in clinical practice, our research raised several points that need to be considered when trialling placebo use practice.