Experimental groups are often called treatment groups or treatments even when you’re doing a toxicity test in insects or something else decidedly not medical

I'm not from the field but I think anything done to a patient, effective or not, is technically a treatment. From everyday life: you can give someone the silent treatment, or treat them like a baby, or what have you. Anything that isn't the default thing you'd do anyway is a treatment. So in medicine I could believe that anything at all that a doctor tells you to do, or does to you, is treatment.

And it would make sense in a controlled trial that "the treatment" would refer to the treatment being tested. It's a treatment for sure, we just want to find out if it does anything useful!

Not if your blinded I guess. But there is a treatment group. Look up treatment - doesn't mean it's effective, it's just a process or something that affects something else. I'm calling it trick or treatment from here on in.

The actual "one weird trick".

That's why there are no clinically proven hiccup cures. There's no way to be better than placebo when the placebo effect is more than enough to get rid of hiccups instantaneously on its own, even if you know it's a placebo.

Idk if I'm dumb but I don't understand your comment. What are you saying exactly? We do trials exactly because we want to test if a treatment is effective or not.