Tacrolimus | Life and style | BMJ Group BMJ Group, Sunday 8 June 2008 00.00 BST Probably. There's a good chance that using tacrolimus will help your symptoms of eczema and prevent flare-ups. But tacrolimus is quite a new treatment. So doctors don't yet know if it can cause serious side effects. For this reason, doctors only tend to prescribe tacrolimus if other treatments haven't helped. A placebo is a 'pretend' or dummy treatment that contains no active substances. A placebo is often given to half the people taking part in medical research trials, for comparison with the 'real' treatment. It is made to look and taste identical to the drug treatment being tested, so that people in the studies do not know if they are getting the placebo or the 'real' treatment. Researchers often talk about the 'placebo effect'. This is where patients feel better after having a placebo treatment because they expect to feel better. Tests may indicate that they actually are better. In the same way, people can also get side effects after having a placebo treatment. Drug treatments can also have a 'placebo effect'. This is why, to get a true picture of how well a drug works, it is important to compare it against a placebo treatment.
