{"id":5795,"date":"2021-01-01T13:18:00","date_gmt":"2021-01-01T13:18:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/aurelis.org\/blog\/?p=5795"},"modified":"2021-05-03T13:28:10","modified_gmt":"2021-05-03T13:28:10","slug":"49-the-patient-as-cure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aurelis.org\/blog\/mind-body\/49-the-patient-as-cure","title":{"rendered":"49. The Patient as Cure"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

If the placebo is made of sugar, the drug is the patient.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s not the placebo that is \u2018effective.\u2019 It is the patient<\/h5>\n\n\n\n

The history of medicine is sometimes called the history of placebo. That\u2019s not unwarranted. Of all the drugs delivered about 100 years ago with an air of \u2018this will work for you,\u2019 only a dozen have defied the hustle-bustle of the scientific evidence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What about the current arsenal? It\u2019s better, of course, but to what extent…? In the field of psycho-somatics, this is not undividedly obvious. An eyebrow-raising story about antidepressants, for example, can easily be traced by those who check up on it in PubMed with search terms such as \u2018Kirsch\u2019 and \u2018Moncrieff.\u2019 It\u2019s up to you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Placebo: the drug that doesn\u2019t work and still does<\/h5>\n\n\n\n

It will remain a strange phenomenon if one only looks at it on the outside. Let it be clear that placebo does not work. In the sentence: \u201cBut this helped me, didn\u2019t it?\u201d something is dubious. Yes. It\u2019s a trick question. Unfortunately, a lot of people allow themselves to fall into this trap. As with a magic trick in which people\u2019s attention is being detracted from the central detail.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In our case, the central detail is the word \u2018this.\u2019 If one sees the placebo in \u2018this,\u2019 one is off for thousands of years of history. If one sees the patient himself in \u2018this,\u2019 that will get us closer to the right way. It could not be otherwise. In \u2018me and my pill,\u2019 there are only two protagonists. If one is of sugar, every action must necessarily have everything to do with the other. There are no magic tricks here<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Is that effect directly accessible?<\/h5>\n\n\n\n

Direct = without placebo, so without sugar or milk powder. But also without other placebo manipulations, without using anything that \u2018works\u2019 for the sake of the idea that it works. So nothing that falsely claims to work instead of the patient himself. In principle, any form of psychotherapy may primarily be placebo. That is claimed by many, and certainly not the least. So how do we get \u2018beyond the placebo\u2019? In what way can we directly touch on what does work in the patient?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A simple \u2018stand up and go thy way\u2019 is insufficient.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Apparently, we have to cross a barrier in the patient\u2019s mind:<\/h5>\n\n\n\n