The online skeptic Robert Todd Carroll accepts that there is a placebo effect, but has concerns that administration of a placebo is superfluous at best.

(To) those who say "what difference does it make why something works, as long as it seems to work" I reply that it is likely that there is something which works even better, something for the other two-thirds or one-half of humanity who, for whatever reason, cannot be cured or helped by placebos or spontaneous healing or natural regression of their pain. (1)

He assumes, though, that a placebo is given or administered in place of another therapy. If the sophisticated plumbing that is modern surgery is the best way to fix a problem, not many people would argue that administration of a sugar pill is a better course of action. But if the sugar pill engages a positive somatic response, say in the alleviation of pain, and if it is pharmacologically inert and (save perhaps in the case of diabetes) harmless, if in fact it is pleasing to the patient, who can say it should be withheld?

Whichever way we cut the arguments and the theories, the placebo effect is real and it is real because it engages those parts of human beings which defy reduction to the mechanical. It is real because it therapeutically engages human capacities and capabilities for which conventional medicine has only approximations and crude theorization, if not actual distrust. It may work in what to many are the scientific borderlands, but the important thing for us is that it works."The placebo effect can occur," as the physician Herbert Spiegel once put it, "when conditions are optimal for hope, faith, trust and love."

It might sound sentimental, but then sentiment, working hand in hand with science, can make medical practice so much more powerful. A world in which placebo -- preferably in the form of deft encouragement, but sometimes in the form of a harmless pill -- was tolerated, even embraced, would be a world in which doctors never forgot that medical practice consists not only of the technologies of diagnosis and treatment but also of the careful tending of a patient's expectations and the unabashed willingness to comfort. (2)

Refs(1) Robert Todd Carroll, Placebo Effect (The Skeptics Dictionary), http://skepdic.com/placebo.html, accessed 12 January 2007(2) Margaret Talbot, The Placebo Prescription, New York Times Magazine, September 2001, http://www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/20000109mag-talbot7.html, accessed 1 July 2007