Real Pain Fake Medicine

Along the lines of what K Stein wrote about, I thought it may be difficult to tell a doctor how something hurts or if the person is faking the pain. However if the patient is in pain, there may be ways of tricking the pain away. That is to say, giving placeboes or sugar pills can make pain go way just as morphine or other pain killers can. I began to think what doctors do when the don't have the right medicine or medicine at all for people in combat or an remote areas of the world. I thought about the boat taken over by pirates off of Somalia. If a boat filled with medicine was captured and raided, what would the doctors do for medicine for injured solders, or hurt civilians? I recalled an episode of MASH where the doctors gave their patients placeboes, because their pain killers did not come in because of a raid of the truck that was carrying them. The doctors gave sugar pills to the hurt solders and over half of them felt better and started to fall asleep. Would this work in a real life army hospital or even a civilian hospital locally? It seems to me very likely.