Placebo

I read a bit about homeopathy & natural remedies v. pharmacology & medicine. It's an interesting topic, and as someone who is always looking for the magic pill to end all of my problems, I can get a little lost in the information.

The one thing I was thinking about is placebo effects. We all know that there are tons of "remedies" that only work by placebo affect, or have no more affect than a placebo. In nearly all tests done for drugs, they use a placebo, and there's a ton of people that the placebo works for.

Are placebos inherently bad, because they are a lie? Or is it something we should be looking in to more, trying to figure out how to reduce the need for medicine by using placebo affect?