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Desrtopa comments on Fallacies of reification - the placebo effect - Less Wrong
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I don't have the time to dig right now, for I remembered seeing studies that measured the "placebo effect" in at least two ways :
The placebo effect is proportional to the expected effect. If you give, as painkiller, a placebo saying it is paracetamol it'll have lower effect than if you give the same placebo saying it's an opiate derivative.
The placebo effect depends of the mean of usage : a placebo pill will have less effect than a placebo injection, and a placebo sweet syrup will have less effect than a placebo bitter syrup.
If those two kind of studies are real, how do you account for them ?
Another point : there is also the nocebo effect, where people expecting side-effects of drugs do show some of them when taking a "placebo". What's your stance on that ?
To add a bit more information, this book covers a number of studies on the placebo effect (since the citations are in the book, which I do not have access to now, I don't know where to find the original studies.) These studies indicate that the strength of the placebo effect also varies according to the color of the medicine, with different colored pills acting as more effective placebos for different ailments, and that the placebo effect can outweigh the actual effects of a drug (so that a small dose of vomit-inducing medicine could cause less vomiting than the control group, which received no medicine, if offered as an anti-nausea medicine.)
Relevant excerpts on colour and vomit.
And here's a relevant study on Pharmaceutical Packaging Color and Drug Expectancy which has some references.
Note that that study doesn't itself have anything directly to do with the placebo effect. They made fake pictures of boxes of pills, with different colours, and asked people questions like "What do you think this drug would be used to treat?" and "How effective would you expect it to be?". They didn't give any drugs (real or fake) to anyone.
(That isn't intended as a criticism of the study: it's fine that it wasn't studying the placebo effect -- nor of acephalus's citation of it: it does indeed have some relevant references. Just a cautionary note.)