Well, even though Underrail is a post-apocalyptic world where you can also be treated by a man who used to dump people who hadn't yet died down a corpse chute in the Arena, I still felt the need to primarily address the claim that placebo isn't used outside clinical studies in the modern world and that it is therefore absurd to have a character in the game use such treatment on a patient. My post is relevant to Pasquale's situation in the sense that, heck, if placebo is used in real-life medical practice and is apparently used fairly frequently, then its use in Underrail shouldn't be absurd at all. Underrail is not the modern world, sure, but it shares a lot with it, obviously, and relevant examples from real life help believability in my opinion.
Now when it comes to "good" and "bad" medicine that I mentioned, placebo often relies on some kind deception, and that can affect the patient's trust if the patient were to find out he's been deceived; also, there is a difference between prescribing impure placebo such as multivitamins or antibiotics and pure placebo sugar pills or, say, doing sham surgery in more extreme cases, and people might react to that to varying degrees. Furthermore, some consider deception unethical no matter the context, a sentiment that could be shared by Underrail characters as well (more likely by those who work in better conditions than Pasquale, but still).
And lastly - homeopathy.
You are right about what you wrote, Sanger, but the thing I was aiming at when I mentioned it was that, considering the lack of evidence for any therapeutic efficacy of homeopathic medicine and that any positive effects, if and when they occur, are thus merely the result of a placebo; one can from a practical standpoint only treat it as, well, placebo (at best), regardless of intentions. Granted, there are some problems with that, and maybe I should have left homeopathy out of this, for many (heh) reasons. But it's there now, so that's that.
I hope that clears up a few things.
No tl;dr, sorry.
