I feel this is closely related to Therapeutic Touch. While these practices may be generated by a placebo affect, I would argue that there is a difference between feeling better and being better. Therapeutic touch was largely debunk by a 10 year with a simple experiment that blinded the practitioners as to whether they were applying their touch to a patient or not using a piece of cardboard [0]. The practitioners could not tell the difference. Interestingly, the author is the youngest person to publish a research article. Science based medicine has a nice response to this article as well [1]. [0] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/187390 [1] https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/no-editors-of-the-atlantic-...