Howard Brody considers how to ethically employ the placebo effect:
As I read the current research literature, (and as I wrote about a decade ago in The Placebo Response: How You Can Release Your Body’s Inner Pharmacy for Better Health), the physician would do several things. She’d listen carefully to the patient and be sure to explain the patient’s medical problem in easily understandable terms. She’d demonstrate care and concern while doing so. She’d help the patient feel more hopeful about and in charge of the bothersome symptoms. And she’d do everything possible to create positive expectations about the effects of the treatment. All these are proven ways to turn on the mind-body pathways that we believe to be implicated in the placebo response.
So my question is—why not do all that anyway and avoid giving out phony pills at all? It does not matter whether the preferred treatment for the condition is a pill or other therapy that really works via chemical or physiological means; or just waiting it out and drinking lots of fluids; or getting more exercise. Whatever treatment—pharmaceutical or otherwise—that the physician is going to recommend, it can be accompanied by the same mind-body "pep talk".
The Dish 