Placebo?

Patronizing?

I vote patronizing, too.

A token (as in, "token gesture")?

A sop?

How 'bout placate? To soothe or mollify especially by concessions : appease. (sop is nice, too.)

Wow! These are all great and in the right vein. I might be able to use them. I hadn't come across sop before.

I used to work at a car dealership. Customers would come in, act like they were ready to buy a car, take up a lot of the salesman's time with questions, test drives, etc. In the end it turned out they couldn't possible afford a car and the salesman had wasted the day chasing his tail for a commission. We called them "strokes" (like jerk off) because they were a false lead full of hot air, a waste of time and left you high and dry. THAT is the word I am looking for, in a less vulgar sense :D

I know the word exists, it's on the tip of my tongue....

And placate is TOTALLY one of the words I couldn't think of!! Thank you!

All I can come up with is mark. But that's the opposite of what you need, in a way.

The phrase in use seems to be "comforting diagnosis". And the phrase most often seen in studies of the phenomenon is either "dismissive" or "patronizing".

Anyway, I thought that depression-related prescriptions actually represented insurance issues preventing access to mental health, and that CFS was if anything the "new female hysteria". And that hypochrondria is actually a rare diagnosis.

But that New Yorker article gives you at least the common term: Gomer, supposedly meaning "get out of my emergency room" (but probably just a reference to Gomer Pyle).

This is probably too late for your term paper, and it would be of no use to you anyway, but when I was in college I had a sleep specialist diagnose me with "idiopathic insomnia."

Basically, the doctor gave up on me and decided the cause of my insomnia was "unknown," or "idiopathic," without so much as doing a sleep study.

... And here were are, more than ten years later, and I'm still right there on the insomniac train.

A lovely quote from Wikipedia about the term "idiopathic": ... in the American television show House, the title character remarks that the word "comes from the Latin, meaning 'we're idiots, because we don't know what's causing it.'"

Regarding 'gomer', The House of God is well worth reading.