Five things that modern science cannot explain:

[longship]

17. Straw man.

Read the links in my post.(#7) Science is acutely aware of what placebo does and does not do.

It is not necessary to know precisely how it works, since psychology is very complex. But what it can do and cannot do is extremely well documented.

If you don't believe me, try a placebo for malaria and report how that works out for you. Or diabetes. Or cancer. Or smallpox. Or any other maladies on the hind side of non-specific pain, the discomfort of the common cold, or psychogenic symptoms, etc.

Placebo is a null treatment, meaning that in a placebo arm of a study the only treatment is the act of intervention by itself, in spite of the fact that nothing active is given. As psychology is complex, this has been known for many decades which is why drug tests are always blinded and placebo controlled.

Placebo is doing nothing other than the act of the intervention itself. It is incapable of curing anything beyond those non-specific, psychogenic, and self-limiting symptoms. That is well studied, too.

For details, see PubMed.