alternative medicine and placebo effect - luke

I find it very interesting that the textbook brings out the argument about alternative medicine and placebo effect. The effect of placebo is utilized in many randomanized controlled trials as the control group. It does play an important role in evaluating efficacy in newly developed treatment method. While ideally we would like the efficacy of our treatment to be much higher then placebo. However, in an actual clinical evironment it is not so clear cut. The faith you have in your doctor, the treatment you heard that works like miracle, different types of intervention utilized, they all plays an role subcontiously which will influence the overall effcacy. Disdinguishing between actual effecay and placebo can be very complicated. While evidence that support alternative medicine is limited, you cannot say that all case reports are the result of placebo.