While modern medicine stresses that an ideal treatment should have no side effects, can discomfort from taking medication lead to better outcomes?

That is the question a team of researchers from the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf in Germany tried to answer.

Their resulting paper won this year’s Ig Nobel prize for medicine, a satirical prize awarded since 1991 to celebrate unusual or trivial achievements in scientific research “that first make people laugh and then make them think”.

Published in the journal Brain, the study involved the recruitment of 77 subjects who were told they would receive fentanyl nasal sprays before being exposed to thermal pain (in a controlled experimental setting).