It would rather seem that the Hrobjartsson and Gotzsche paper is at one extreme of a spectrum. Here it is put into some context:
placebo effect
Here is a quote from that article:
"Doctors in one study successfully eliminated warts by painting them with a brightly colored, inert dye and promising patients the warts would be gone when the color wore off. In a study of asthmatics, researchers found that they could produce dilation of the airways by simply telling people they were inhaling a bronchiodilator, even when they weren't. Patients suffering pain after wisdom-tooth extraction got just as much relief from a fake application of ultrasound as from a real one, so long as both patient and therapist thought the machine was on. Fifty-two percent of the colitis patients treated with placebo in 11 different trials reported feeling better -- and 50 percent of the inflamed intestines actually looked better when assessed with a sigmoidoscope"
Of course, there is a problem in that people often recover anyway, and it is hard to compare a placebo treatment with a pretend treatment, but even so, I don't think the range of placebo treatments is as limited as Chris suggested.
Note that the Hrobjartsson and Gotzsche paper is a meta analysis of other papers in which they eliminated some research as being in their view flawed.
David