FYI, you can order placebos from Amazon.
This one is $25 for 25 pills, including the description
It’s interesting the other things that Amazon returns when searching for placebo.
I will third this. Amoxicillin is used as a placebo treatment for many ailments, which is why it is starting to actually become a bonafide placebo.
I worked in a children’s home where we had “hurt cream” and “homesick pills”. They worked very well. 
The thing is, the hurt cream was in a large box that the hospital donated to us. There were small tubes inside, blue, red and green (tummy ache, headache and other pains!). They looked very medical. Inside was just body lotion, unscented. Basically E45, but in an even more medical-looking container. I can’t remember what it was called at all. But thinking about it: why would a hospital have that? Is there a reason? Wouldn’t they just normally say: put some lotion on that dry skin?
Were they perhaps also using the cream as hurt cream placebo? Probably not, as this thread explains the ethical issues. But still, I wonder. Brazilians over-self-medicate to a terrifying extent IME, so it wouldn’t have been unwarranted perhaps?
You (based on what you posted) are not a licensed medical doctor. Having a Ph.D. in chemistry does not qualify you as a doctor. Giving Tums to your children is nowhere close to a licensed MD prescribing something to a patient. Licensed MDs are bound by an oath to adhere to certain ethical and legal standards. You are not. You are free to give your children anything that is reasonably safe and to tell them whatever you like about it. A licensed doctor is not free to tell a patient something that is untrue.
So, again, I would say that the answer to the OP is “No”. And that any licensed MD who knowingly prescribed a placebo to a patient would be lying to that patient and would be violating their oath.
Whilst this is a very common view of medicine, the reality of medical ethics is, and has always been, much more complex. There is no actual requirement for a doctor to take an oath, although it seems to be popular in the US, it is much less so in the rest of the world. The oaths taken are typically very broad, and emphasise ethical behaviour, but do not define it. Registration/licensing does provide for much more strictly defined ethical behaviour. And here is where it gets tricky. In general, ethical behaviour is doing what is best for the patient in the best judgement of the doctor. The placebo effect is well understood to be very strong, so much so that any new drug or procedure must minimally prove that it is better than a placebo. This isn’t just that the new drug has no effect or not, but that its effect is actually better than the result of the placebo effect. And herein lies the ethical question. The placebo effect is real. Patients really do feel better, and often have measurably better symptoms when a placebo is administered. You can find decades of science on why this might be, but one thing is clear, it is real, and important enough to be well studied and understood.
So, can a doctor reasonably, and ethically, deny a patient in distress the clear and real benefit of the placebo effect? Especially young children, who my be genuinely frightened and stressed by their circumstance? Centuries of medical practice say no, a doctor may not. As described above, doctors have knowingly prescribed drugs that are useless for the condition, and have done so probably since the dawn of medicine. It only becomes unethical if the doctor is making money out of an overpriced placebo, or is prescribing one to the exclusion of a treatment that has real efficacy.
FWIW, 7 of the pills in a 28-day birth control pill pack are placebos. But they’re not there to make you think they are doing something when they’re not. They’re just there to make you remember to take some kind I pill very day.
If I got a scrip for placebo, I wonder how many pharmacies I’d need to try before I found one that had them in stock.
Also, what the copay would be. I checked my insurance company’s formulary, and couldn’t find placebo listed as an approved medication, so I imagine it would be pretty high…
This documentary is kinda interesting. It’s about doctors prescribing placebos in the UK..
In that documentary, an orthopedic surgeon described a “placebo” surgery he performed on an elderly guy’s knee. The patient’s symptoms instantly improved.
I was going to say no, except for the aforementioned antibiotics and B12 injections and such, but I thought of one condition in which we often use outright placebo: the acute treatment of pseudoseizure.
A pseudoseizure is not a true seizure in that the patient’s EEG is completely normal while it’s happening, but it isn’t actively being faked; a person having a pseudoseizure really does think she is having a seizure. It looks more or less like a real seizure on the surface, but it’s psychogenic in nature. (A better term that is slowly catching on is psychogenic non-epileptic seizure, pr PNES.) They are often recurrent, and every ER doc or resident can name a few patients who come in with these on a regular basis.
So since the brain thinks it’s having a seizure, you can treat it by letting the brain think it’s being treated–that is, by giving a placebo. The method where I trained is to loudly say “GET THE EPILEPTISOL!”, at which point the nurse brings you an alcohol swab which you rub behind the patient’s ear. I’d feel bad about it, except that it almost always worked.
(Obviously, this only worked with certain patients with well-established histories of PNES.)
I had some kind of itchy rash in about 1973 and the doctor gave me tiny spherical gray pills the size of BBs. I tried years later to figure out what they were and came to suspect they were placebos. This was in a boarding school infirmary, and long before the WWW and “Patient Bill of Rights” when it would have been within the doctor’s options to lie to me.
Back around 1990, I was living with my dad after my mother passed, and he was in early Alzheimer. I couldn’t leave any medication around the house because he would forget if he had taken any and want to take some more.
He would call me several times a day because he was agitated and wanted to take something for it. When I was home with him, I would give him something innocuous, and it seemed to help.
I didn’t want to leave a bottle of vitamins or anything at home that he could take as he pleased because he might take to many of those. Candy wouldn’t work - it had to taste like medicine.
I asked the pharmacist at Walgreens, who was familiar with my dad’s condition and knew me well, and I asked him if they had any kind of placebo pill that was just harmless filler that I could leave at home and my dad could take as many as he liked.
He told me that they did not have anything like a placebo that he could give me, and that doctors didn’t do that sort of thing.
That’s just what they would say.
Pneumonia hit me pretty hard back in 2012. While the nurse was giving me an injection of Z-max, she made a point of telling me that it’s the most powerful stuff there is for my condition. This was a use of the placebo effect to enhance an already efficacious medicine. So they gave me a verbal placebo to go along with my real treatment.
Have you heard that there is a new extra-strength placebo in development? Doctors say it works even better.