It’s an interesting gray area because the effects of placebos are empirical and reproducible in rigorous trials.

If your doctor tells you “this pill helps many people with your condition ”, they’ll be telling the truth.

They wont be telling truth. Placebo effect is not effective in 100% of cases.

What this will do over time is that people will learn that doctors advice is optional - it might be necessary and good to take pill, because only antibiotics work on this sickness. And a lot of other advice will be optional to follow.

> Placebo effect is not effective in 100% of cases

There is no medicine that is effective in 100% of cases.

Chemotherapy does not 100% fix your cancer.

Covid vaccine does not 100% mean you won’t die from covid.

Antibiotics is not 100% either. There are resistant bacteria.

But you are correct that doctor’s advice is optional. No doctor can force pills down your throat or force you to do surgery, even if it means you will die tomorrow. You still have a choice to just do nothing and die

And quite literally, no one ever said to me that covid vaccine means 100% chance of being covid proof. Same with chemotherapy. Same even with antibiotics - it was always given to me with "if the issue does not go away after finishing them, come back".

> But you are correct that doctor’s advice is optional. No doctor can force pills down your throat

You know full well this is not what I am talking about.

>If your doctor tells you “this pill helps many people with your condition ”, they’ll be telling the truth.

That's actually a really good wording.

I was talking to a psychiatrist friend of mine about placebo effect and he told me that it definitely can make a big difference. But I asked him if he ever just gave placebo pills to patients and he said no because he felt that would be unethical. I didn't really think to ask whether it would really be unethical if it might help.

If you could know ahead of time that it would work, I think it would be different. But you can't know that, right?