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known since at least the 1980s that this med is not particularly effective and is very risky, yet it has only just been withdrawn from general use in the UK.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.
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.