cast it as "natural recovery plus treatment" vs. "natural recovery alone," both of which are equally effective

That naturally leads to the effect of treatment being zero which is conventionally called "the treatment does not work".

When you have some baseline process and some zero-effect interventions on top of it, I think it's misleading to say that all these interventions work.

I argue that one should talk up doing nothing instead of talking down treatments that are no better than doing nothing

These, of course, are not mutually exclusive. Besides, you need to do something to counteract the proponents of the no-effect treatments -- such people exist (typically they are paid for providing these treatments) and if you just ignore them they will dominate the debate.