Firstly, placebo studies don't require deception - patients are generally told that they might be getting the placebo, or they might be getting the real thing;

Firstly, placebo studies don't require deception - patients are generally told that they might be getting the placebo, or they might be getting the real thing; they don't know which one, but uncertainty is different to deception. In a double blind study) the people interacting with the patient don't know who gets which either - so they aren't deceiving the patient, they genuinely don't know. Secondly, in this case, what if the placebo is not genuinely inert? The 'placebo' was cellulose (dietary fibre) in a gelatine capsule, and apparently fibre is the standard treatment for irritable bowel syndrome. Thirdly, showing that open label placebos might be better than controls is not enough to justify using an open label placebo in a clinical; instead, they would need to have compared an open to a closed label placebo. If a closed label placebo works better than an open label one, then a drug which is not efficacious could be accepted by a clinical trial because it was an unintentional closed label placebo and did better than the intentional open label placebo. In addition, closed label placebos are not just for the patient - they also play a role in double blind clinical trials of keeping the doctors dealing with the patient / assessing results from knowing.