Even accepting the premise that there is something to this placebo effect, by definition it would be the least effective treatment used in medical care, since every treatment first has to prove it does better. You can take the lest effective treatments out there, ones with dubious efficacy claims, and every last one of them still outperforms "placebo". Even in the very best case, it is so trivial an effect that you have to torture data in order to get it to confess to anything. This is after decades of people obsessing over it, trying every possible variation to make it systematic.
But following the logic of this effect appearing in clinical trials, if it existed, supplements would work pretty well. If this white lab coat effect worked, all physicians would have to do is prescribe them, give the ritual substance. They wouldn't be miraculous, but they would work, better than a control with sugar pills anyway. It's pretty well-established that they don't work, although given the quality of assessment, it's more of a shmaybe they don't work, since the normal process is not good enough to validate trivial effects. However, in the very best case, those effects would be trivial, and thus not worth any effort even in the very best case, since it would still underperform against literally every single other medical treatment.
And that's in addition with the uncomfortable truth that this "effect" seems to get lower and lower with time. The same with CBT. Not that it is actually getting lower, it's simply disappearing by way of being exposed to more scrutiny and regression to the mean. All of this only makes sense in the light that it's simply an illusion, just as convincing as the celestial spheres, and just as wrong and self-centered.
This is a completely different thing than actively trying to exploit this effect by manipulating people into thinking positive things and doing more than they think they can, or whatever, which is the basis for the whole CBT for MUS/whatever. This is not what is found in the "evidence" for placebo, since they were not trying to convince people to downplay or ignore their symptoms or anything like that. What they found is simply that by not being able to account for everything that can affect an outcome, they can't account for everything that does affect the outcome. This isn't especially hard, it just has the ego-lowering truth that medicine still has far more work ahead of it than behind it.
The basis for this biopsychosocial approach is the plac/nocebo effect. Without accepting the premise of this effect being "one of the most powerful interventions we have", in the words of Simon Wessely, the entire paradigm simply does not make sense, it is derived from a belief that we are experiencing a nocebo effect and so it's natural that the solution is a placebo.
And frankly at this point I think it's the main reason people are pretending that Santa's still real, at least when talking to the children. Too much has been invested in this illusion that it's simply become impossible to actually voice seeing the emperor's naked butt.
