You might be interested in the work of Ted Kaptchuk and Kathryn Hall [1], for example. (Kaptchuk is a trained acupuncturist with a degree in Chinese medicine, but basically re-educated himself in western medicine, and is a highly regarded scientist.)
One of their insights is that placebo effect comes from neural modulation of pain receptors, and that the placebo effect has specific limitations. For example, the placebo effect cannot cure cancer or make a cold go away, but it can lessen pain and reduce inflammation through hormone signaling.
It’s like, at some point we discovered the placebo effect, which has got to have been a pretty shocking result, right? I just can’t fathom that the entire scientific community just went “ah, hm, right, placebo. I see. I guess we need to do our random-controlled-trials with a placebo control group now”. Wait, that’s it? Nobody went “wtf woa we can cure a % of people with empty pills, how does that work and how can we up the %?”
I just don’t get it, it seems to me that the existence of the placebo effect is hard evidence that there’s a mind-body connection and we can cure body stuff with mind stuff (and vice versa, probably), so why does nearly all of that remain firmly in alternative woo-woo land?
> I just can’t fathom that the entire scientific community just went “ah, hm, right, placebo. I see. I guess we need to do our random-controlled-trials with a placebo control group now”. Wait, that’s it?
see that's because they didn't go like that - there's even an section on the ethics of using them in medical practice on the wikipedia article for placebo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placebo#In_medical_practice
Plus it's a pretty important topic of discussion when it comes to pain management/opiod crisis. Unsurprisingly, a large group of professionals did not, in fact, randomly decide to ignore a very large and obvious question in the field
I mean that I don’t understand why there isn’t more research into how the placebo effect works and whether there’s ways to make it work better. Reading other sections of the wikipedia article you linked, it seems to me that researchers have been stuck at “is the placebo effect even real?” for decades and few try to figure out how it works and why, and whether it can somehow be amplified. The answers to such questions might well influence the ethics discussion but “we really don’t get how it works so better not prescribe placebos” is a very unsatisfying stance to me.