This is what people who take homeopathy say. It's what doctors and patients said about knee arthroscopy for rheumatoid arthritus until they did a trial involving sham operations.
When Prozac was introduced in the UK we were told that it made people "better than well", and that everyone should have it and that the UK prescription laws were seriously flawed because this drug was restricted to people who had a diagnosed illness and was not available to everyone.
It's that kind of behaviour which is sleazy. The deliberate hyping of medications.
The brutal cynicism of using dying cancer patients to campaign for your ineffective very expensive cancer medication is really disgusting.
I'm not sure whether you're critiquing the book or what you've read in the review.
small correction; The NEJM studies (below), to which your comment was probably referring, were actually for arthroscopic surgery in osteoarthritis patients, not rheumatoid.
It's quite common to think these conditions are similar, but are really rather different, with diverse etiologies. RA is considered an autoimmune disease, whereas OA is not.
update: included subsequent years
(2002) http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa013259
Just defining all effects of pain medication as placebo just isn't scientific at all. Placebos often don't work reliably and repeatable either...
When Goldacre talks about placebo he tends to talk about the pricing differences between differently packaged but identical medication. Thus, a brand name paracetamol is the same as an own-brand paracetamol and they're the same as a budget paracetamol. Yet one can be five or six times more expensive than the other. (Personally I don't see this as particularly bad behaviour.) I agree that he tends to place too much emphasis on placebo, but then I haven't read the studies. There are strong psychological aspects to pain; pain in cancer patients can be helped with cognitive behaviour therapy; some people (40% in one (not very good) report) with long term pain reported relief when they took a placebo.
But also look at coproxamol. This is an old med. we used to think that mixing meds meant you could use smaller quanties of active ingredients. Coproxamol is a sub-therapeutic dose of paracetamol and a dangerous toxic opiod (opiate?) dextropropoxyphene. (Paracetamol in acute overdose is very dangerous so for the dextropropoxyphene to be the more worrying ingredient tells us something). We've known since at least the 1980s that this med is not particularly effective and is very risky, yet it has only just been withdrawn from general use in the UK. We knew that it was less effective than paracetamol alone (because you'd take that at an effective dose) but that it was far more dangerous and that evidence got stronger through the 1990s and 2000s. (An overdose of paracetamol is treatable if caught in time, although paracetamol overdose does kill many people each year. An overdose of coproxamol is usually fatal before help arrives. For a time coproxamol was the leading medication in fatal overdoses.) Removal of this med was fiercely fought for years by pharmaceutical companies and by patient advocacy groups (sometimes funded by those same companies).
That is sleazy behaviour.
He talked about Prozac and about homeopathy.
Those of us who occasionally get migraines know all about this, as do people in palliative care.
This can often be down to the placebo effect. Chris Kresser talks about this [1], saying that even when given a placebo people will report feeling better.
[1] http://chriskresser.com/placebos-as-effective-as-antidepress...
I hear the same thing about the power of prayer and Reiki.
Drugs seem to work much more reliably.
It is exactly this kind of thinking that pharmaceutical companies are exploiting when they hide results from trials.
I'd also criticize the conclusion that there's nothing better than Aspirin on the market. Which hasn't been known since ancient times by the way. The original salicylic acid was much worse on the stomach. Both Ibuprofene and Diclofenac have better analgesic properties, again very noticeable, and metamizole has different properties, again much more useful than asparin. There's really nothing to argue with that, except some hand-waving "placebo" talk, which often isn't so scientific either.
I'm more familiar with the veterinary side of things, and there the situation is that there are both independant trials, and a sort of "grapevine" where veterinarians compare notes on different drugs.
You can't really argue with anesthesia drugs. Either they work or they don't. Either they have a high incidence of accidents in a particular species, or they don't. Antibiotics much the same, especially when performing individual lab tests. Sure there is a lot of hyperbole or bad advertising, but it's not just "bad pharma".