The first paragraph is grossly misleading. The odds are not 50-50 that you get a placebo each time you get a prescription from your doctor. The survey said that 50% of doctors said they have given placebos at SOME POINT. So your odds of having a doctor who sometimes prescribes placebos is 50%.

My father was a Navy-trained surgeon, and as such, the best osteopath in the north country. When I collided with a car that turned left in front of my motorcycle, my kneecap cracked into 6 peices against the roll bar, and my father wired it back together. He also did a large number of other patients a great deal of good, extending their health and well being for many years. But he did something that was all too common back then: dispense shots of penicillin as placebos. His thinking was that it couldn't cause any harm, and it might do some good. We now have more penicillin and other anti-biotic resistant strains of various diseases circulating various populations than ever before. And it doesn't help that paranoid consumers feel that every time they wash their hands they need to use an "anti-bacterial" soap. This only encourages normally benign bacteria to evolve into something far more dangerous. Over 99% of all naturally occuring bacteria are easily managed by a healthy human immune system, but at the rate we are currently encouraging changes in our bacterial populations, this is bound to go down.

FOR EVERYONE'S SAFETY, STOP USING UNNEEDED ANTI-BIOTICS!

Baking soda, vinegar, salt, et cetera are all safe, effective cleansing agents that effectively keep bacteria at bay without encouraging difficult mutations. If you keep on using operating room anti-biotics in everyday situations, you'll be out of luck if you ever need to be operated on, since you could be covered with anti-biotic resistant bacteria.