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hyporational comments on Open thread, Dec. 14 - Dec. 20, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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The placebo group is called such because it receives the placebo treatment, not because medical researchers think all improvement in it is attributable to the placebo effect. Results are reported as improvement in the treatment arm vs. the placebo arm, and never have I seen these differences explicitly reported as treatment effect vs. placebo effect, and I've read hundreds of medical papers. The real magnitude of the placebo effect is almost never of interest in these papers. Some professionals in the medical community could have such a misconception because of the usual lack of scientific training, but I'd like to think they are a small minority.
If the placebo effect is of real importance, I think a more significant problem would be the lack of use of active placebos that mimick side effects since most drugs have them and this is a potential source of breaking the blinding of RCTs.
Sure. But the question under discussion here is what actually is the placebo effect and how much of it can you attribute to psychosomatic factors and how much to just regression to the mean (aka natural healing).
You are correct in that most intervention studies don't care about the magnitude of the placebo effect, they just take the placebo arm of the trial as a baseline. But that doesn't mean that we couldn't or shouldn't ask questions about the placebo effect itself.
In that case your opener is slightly polemical :)
Agreed. The problem with nonintervention arms for studying the placebo effect is that there aren't clear incentives for adding them and they cost statistical power.