Absolutely. That's why you have a control group which gets a placebo. Then you can test if the medication is more effective than the placebo. At least that's

Absolutely. That's why you have a control group which gets a placebo. Then you can test if the medication is more effective than the placebo. At least that's how it worked until someone looked at the term "placebo effect" and got confused into thinking that's anything other than regression to the mean.