I don't think that lying to patients to falsely reinforce their untrue beliefs is a solution to the problem -- it'll probably create an additional problem by reinforcing beliefs of the legitimacy of pseudoscience.
“This stuff is not studied to work. It is a placebo.” OP study says this can still be effective.
Turned out he was right.
It's unfortunate that SSRIs have harmful long-term effects—I know some people who have been dependent on SSRIs for around a decade, and probably will be forever because of the neurotoxicity.
And to be clear a placebo doesn't mean the effect of such isn't real. Mental state provably affects the body in all sorts of ways. Interestingly enough the placebo effect is often substantially stronger in Americans than in other groups as well [1]. The two main hypothesis there are that more poorly performing drugs are making it past regulators, the other is that the overwhelming amount of direct-to-consumer medical advertising creates a greater faith in the power of pills than in other countries - US/New Zealand are the only developed countries that allow direct to consumer medical ads. Or perhaps a mixture of both, like in many things.
[1] - https://qz.com/525995/why-the-placebo-effect-is-getting-stro...
You are comparing something that has cured many of humanity's illnesses (in fact, there's a good chance that you are alive thanks to antibiotics) with something that has the curative properties of rubbing quartz crystals or drinking blessed water.
Of course there is something unsettling about that comparison.
Say I have some really great tasting distilled water. Perfectly pure, exactly what I need if I wanted to quench my thirst. Now, I also have an empty gas tank.
Should I put water or flat Coca Cola in the gas tank? They are both bad, despite the separately superior qualities of the water. Or, maybe a better comparison is putting diesel in vs coke. They are equivalently bad for the engine despite one of them being used for a similar but separate situation.
Distilled water has other uses besides drinking. It can be used in chemistry for example. You would not get good results in chemistry if you replaced distilled water with coke. “I can drink water, surely I can use coke instead of water on this chemistry experiment, because I can also drink coke” is clearly faulty logic.
And yet, that’s exactly what people do with homeopathy.
While it should always be presented as a “complement” to medicine(because it can have some mental/placebo effect in some people, in some cases), very often people take it as a substitute (the marketing word is “alternative”) to medicine. This is something that the homeopathic industry can’t help but “allow happening”. In fact they are motivated to promote that way of thinking. First it increases direct sales. Secondly, the more mixed up their product is with medicine, the stronger the placebo effect will be, and that will increase sales further.
Unfortunately the placebo effect is very limited. You can’t mend a broken arm with placebo alone. You can’t cure cancer with placebo alone. And yet people replace chemotherapy with homeopathic “remedies”. And then they die.
In short: doctors should never give homeopathic remedies, because that puts them on the same level as medicine. That will ultimately make some homeopathic makers richer, but it will also get some people killed.
This reminds me of a cartoon (in the New Yorker?) where a patient is demanding a better placebo as the current one is not working.
However medicine strives to maintain a separation between an actual body of scientific knowledge and placebo treatments. So, yes, while a placebo can be effective nobody is going to transcribe that placebo onto actual scientific knowledge as if it wasn't a placebo.
Right, so antibiotics work as a placebo, but am I going to put that knowledge down into textbooks that antibiotics can cure the common cold just because such knowledge effectively works as a placebo? No.
Antibiotics are not pure placebo. They are also given to make sure there isn't a bacteria ready to take advantage of the weakened immune system. The regular treatment for COVID also included antibiotics, for the reason I mentioned.