Sugar pill
A so-called sugar pill is a pill containing no medical ingredient; this pill is given to half of the subjects of a double-blind drug trial. The other half of the patients get a pill with the real medicine being tested. A sugar pill is needed because of the placebo effect in which patient's symptoms are alleviated if the patient believes the pill contains effective medicine. By giving all patients a pill, the placebo effect is canceled out; the sugar pill is the "control" (or controlled variable) in a control experiment.
Sometimes physicians will give hypochondriac patients sugar pills; such placebos can alleviate the patient's distress and help decrease expenses to the health care system.
"Placebo" is the proper term in scientific settings; the term "sugar pill" is used in informal writings to the general public as a way to quickly indicate that the pill has no useful medicine. In actual drug trials, placebos rarely contain sugar because the taste of sugar could reveal which patients are in the control group.
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Drugs