Creative consulting: more about placebos?

If placebos are inactive, what is it that produces the remarkable changes? Do not ask what the placebo can do but, “What can the thing that responds to the placebo do?” You will end up thinking about self healing and self destructive processes.

Just as you can work backwards from a successful recovery to study healing reactions,1 you can consider what placebo reactions say about healing responses and better care. If placebo can provoke a change indirectly perhaps we can learn to do so directly, because we are the only possible pathway for placebo action. The implications of this pathway, between our consciousness and our biology, can be missing in academic debate about placebo,234 but the discovery that people responding to placebo show definite brain scan changes can bring it back into focus.5

Universal cultural features in healing rituals24

• The healer must have a coherent frame of reference or explanation for the origin and nature of the problem and how it can be helped--germs, curse, chi, etc

• A symbolic bridge is made, integrating the relationships and situation in terms of the culture and the healer's frame of reference

• The healer aims to activate the bridge (often subliminally) by persuading the client that the problem is explainable in the healer's frame of reference: “I can see you have cancer, curses, suppressed anger, irritable bowel, etc”

• Once cognitive consensus is achieved, emotional involvement is needed through attachment to the symbols and frame of reference. Clients have to be convinced they are possessed by a spirit, have depression, have food allergies, etc, and it will kill or damage them if not treated

• Techniques …