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Almost all of the doctors in a survey at three U.S. medical schools say fake treatments, or placebos, can help heal sick people, and almost half of the physicians have prescribed such a regimen.

In the survey answered by 231 Chicago doctors, 45 percent said they had given a placebo in clinical practice, according to a report released Thursday by the Journal of General Internal Medicine. Ninety-six percent of the total respondents said placebos had therapeutic value.

So-called sugar pills are often given randomly to volunteers in medical research to distinguish the physical effects of treatments from psychological ones. Except in studies, the practice of giving placebos is "widely unacknowledged" as doctors increasingly use them to boost patient morale, said Rachel Sherman, the study's lead author.

"It's not about what's inside the pill, it's about using the pill as a symbol of healing," said Sherman, a fourth-year medical student at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine. "The division between mind and body is no longer being seen as distinct, and doctors believe that how patients think and feel can influence health."

Twelve percent of the survey respondents said placebo use in routine care should be banned. Employing the substances raises ethical questions, according to the authors, as many doctors didn't inform their patients that prescriptions were for drugs not expected to have a physical effect.

Thirty-four percent of doctors who prescribed placebos did so saying it's "a substance that may help and will not hurt," and 19 percent said "it is medication." Only 4 percent told their patients "it is a placebo."

The research, the first major U.S. study of doctors' use of placebos since 1979, found that the most common reasons for prescribing placebos were "to calm the patient" and "as supplemental treatment." Doctors also used placebos to "control pain" and "get the patient to stop complaining."

A third of the doctors prescribed antibiotics for disorders, such as viruses, that don't respond to the drugs. Doctors also prescribed vitamins, ibuprofen, low doses of medicines, herbal supplements, and prepared placebos, such as pills made of sugar or artificial sweeteners.

Some drugs make unhealthful placebos, Sherman said. Antibiotics, for example, cause dangerous side effects for some patients, and diseases can develop resistance to the drugs when they are prescribed too often.

The effectiveness of using placebos to help patients is in dispute. A 2001 review published in the New England Journal of Medicine of hundreds of clinical trials found they had little effect in most cases. Other studies looking at specific treatments have shown that taking placebos can boost production of natural pain-fighting compounds in the brain.