“Just a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down in the most delightful way,” they sang in Mary Poppins. What if the medicine were sugar only, without any medicine at all? An enterprising Maryland mother, Jennifer Buettner, asked herself that after a wrangle with a young hypochondriac niece. The result is a new healthcare product, Obecalp – “placebo” spelled backwards. The chewable, cherry-flavored dextrose tablets look and taste comfortingly like medicine, but they aren’t. Bottles of 50 tablets will sell for US$5.95.

Cute? Doctors and bioethicists aren’t amused. They complain that placebos should be used with care and that deception is not part of medicine. Furthermore, children might grow up thinking that the only way to get over a bad patch is to take pills. "The idea that we can use a placebo as a general treatment method," says Howard Brody, a medical ethicist and family physician at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, "strikes me as inappropriate."

Psychiatrist David Spiegel, of Stanford School of Medicine, believes that teaching children to reach for relief in a pill could also make them easy targets for quacks and pharmaceutical pitches later. "They used to sell candied cigarettes to kids to get them used to the idea of playing with cigarettes," he said.