32. Can the placebo lie ever be a ‘benign lie’?

January 18, 2018 Health & Healing, Placebo, Sticky Thoughts No Comments

‘The truth and nothing but the truth, so help me God.’

◊◊◊

The existence, indeed almost omnipresence of placebo has weird consequences. One of them is that serious people are now asking whether the above saying is valid or not for medicine in the broadest sense, as it is in jurisdiction.

◊◊◊

Indeed, the issue of placebo lie* does not only concern the ‘sugar pill’, but practically any pill. There is always a placebo-effect involved. Therefore it’s about the whole domain of medicine, regular and alternative alike. It’s about any practicing physician’s or healer’s role in this and relation to this in general.

◊◊◊

The title’s question involves: is a person’s health worth knowingly bestowing him with untruths and downright lies? Should we try to get rid of the placebo lie or should we try to make the most of it? Are doctors more ‘god-like’ than judges?

◊◊◊

My answer to this question is outspoken: no health can be gained through such a lie. If one values health more than truth, one’s not even talking about ‘health’, but about cosmetics, about numbing down symptoms at the cost of true ‘health’. At least: it’s not about what my personal dictionary says about ‘health’, namely: a condition involving a total person.

◊◊◊

Neither do I see how the placebo lie can go together with the emphasis on ‘informed consent’ which is a highly-valued asset in this time and culture, and very appropriately so. Or does it make a difference that the lie involves so many people? I would claim the opposite!

◊◊◊

So I say: the lie will not really help you. But I say more: you don’t need the lie at all in order to gain its underlying effect. In the end, the placebo lie is but one way to get to autosuggestion, the phenomenon behind the so-called placebo-effect. Moreover it’s a meager, relatively inefficient and very unencompassing way. Your own subconscious is capable of so much more than this if you communicate with it in an optimal way! I dare say: the optimal way is a way in total truthfulness.

◊◊◊

So help me God.

◊◊◊

* Placebo lie: the lie involved in making a placebo work for someone through deceiving him into believing that the placebo itself has a material effect where it has not. In the case of the proverbial ‘sugar pill’, the placebo effect will vanish when the person who takes it, knows that he is not taking ‘the latest and most potent inflammatory agent’. In this setting, the lie is necessary for the effectiveness.

Leave a Reply

Related Posts

Trauma Wisdom

Every trauma carries wisdom. It is like a medal of honor, challenging as it may be to appreciate the trauma in any way. With ‘trauma,’ I denote in this text the actual happening as well as the living memory of it. Trauma is (not) a part of you In one way, trauma is a part Read the full article…

Sticky Thoughts

This is the foreword to my book ‘Sticky Thoughts’ that you can find on Amazon (see menu). The purpose of Sticky Thoughts is to bring in a concise way (so that each of them ‘fits on a sticker’) many ideas that may be ‘sticky’ in that they linger on in the reader’s mind. The stickers Read the full article…

4. So plastic flowers are real after all… are they?

Good to know (yet not a recent finding) for all asthmatic patients: you can seemingly get an asthmatic attack through contact with a plastic flower or even distilled nebulized water (*). It may surprise you at first, but this is extremely good news, since it means that the relation between allergen (the thing you react Read the full article…

Translate »