It may relieve pain, e.g., headache, and even modify the course of an illness. However, medicine regards it as a sham treatment, tainted with deception. All this has now vanished and placebo as such is not used. On the other hand, consider a patient with a chronic disease that requires adrenal steroids or immuno-suppressive agents.
Prolonged treatment is accompanied by undesirable side-effects.
Medicine does not even consider such a possibility, since the placebo effect cannot be explained by pharmacology, and involves patient deception. Yet it works and the patient benefits. Such a regimen involves conditioning. In behavioral terms, the drug is regarded as an unconditional stimulus, and the placebo as conditional. The placebo effect may be improved when placebo medication is given after a period of effective drug treatment.