I'm kinda working on writing up a few front page posts on this. There are a ton of specific techniques to guide their thought processes the way you want, a lot of which you'll recognize as exploiting crude heuristics that we're trying to patch over here. I'll get my act together and get them written.

The bits of NLP that I've seen overlap with what I've tried definitely use the same mechanism as placebo, even if not really "expectation based".

All mental states seem to be fair game, as well as things your brain can control, like heart rate, blood pressure, etc. I've seen conflicting evidence on allergies, it works pretty well for warts (I've personally done that one and it really shocked me that it worked)