02) CHAPTER TWO

Mar 10, 2024 02:34 PM

CHAPTER TWO: The Mysterious Placebo

page 49: “over long centuries, doctors have been educated by their patients to observe the prescription ritual.”

page 49: “psychological mbilical cord”

page 50: “Belief in recovery”

page 50: “The word placebo comes from the Latin verby meaning”I SHALL, please”

?is that accurate?

Page 50: quack remedies (from India) = pseudomediaments

page 51: “They regard it not just as a physicans’s psychological prop in the TX of certain pts but as an authentic therapeutic agent for altering body chemistry and for helping to mobilize the body’s defenses in combating disorder and disease.”

note: this is about the mind/body not any placebo

page 51: laetril

page 52: “No greater popular fallacy exists about medicine than that a drug is like an arrow that can be shot at a particularized target.  Its actual effect is more like a shower of porcupine quills.  y drug-or food, for that matter-goes through a process in which the human system breaks it down for use by the whole."

"There is almost no drug, therefore, that does not have some side-effects.  And the more vaunted

the prescription-antibiotics, cortisone, tranquilizers, antihypertensive compounds, antiinflammatory agents, muscle relaxers-the greater the problem of adverse side-effect.  Drugs can alter or rearrange the balances in the bloodstream.  They can cause the blood to clot faster or slower.  They can reduce the level or oxygen in the blood.  They can prod the endocrine system, increase the flow of hydrochloric acid to the stomach, slow down or speed up the passage of blood through the heart, impair the blood-making function of the body by depressing the bone marrow, reduce or increase blood pressure, or affect the sodium-potassium exchange, which has a vital part in the body's chemical balance.

The problem posed by many drugs is that they do these things apart from the purpose intended by the physician.  There is always the need, therefore, for the doctor to balance off the particularized therapy against the generalized dangers.  The more powerful the drug, the more precarious his balancing act.

Complicating the doctor's dilemma about drugs is the fact that many people tend to regard drugs as though they were automobiles.  Each year has to have its new models, and the more powerful the better.  Too many patients feel the doctor is lacking unless a prescription calls for a new antibiotic or other miracle drug that the patient has heard about from a friend or read about in the press.

Because of the very real dangers associated with powerful new drugs, the prudent modern physician takes full advantage of his freedom of choice, specifying potent drugs when he feels they are absolutely necessary, but disregarding them, prescribing placebos or nothing at all, when they are not."

page 53: “The fact that stress doens’t come from germs or viruses doesn’t make its effects any less serious.”

lpage 53 AND 54: “sympathetic questioning”

page 54: “malingering”

page 55: “Studies (?what studies?) that up to 90% of pts (?accurate?) who reach out for medical help are suffering from self-limiting disorders well within the range of the body’s own healing powers.”

page 55: “The placebo is proof that HERE IS NO REAL SEPARATION BETWEEN MIND ANDE BODY. ILLNESS IS ALWAYS AN Interaction between both. It can begin in the mind and affect the body or it can begin in the body and affect the mind. Both of which are served by the same bloodstream.” see the rest of the paragraph.

Page 65:”our experiences come at us in such profusion and rom so many direcstions that they are never really sorted out, much less absorbed.” (like flooding and las vegas effect),

pag 66: “what we see ultimately is that the placebo isn’t really necessary and that the mind can carry out its difficult and wondrous missions unprompted by little pills.”

page 67: “if we can liberate ourselves from tangibles, we can connect hope and the will to live directly to the ability of the body to meet great threats and challenges.”

0, 2024 02:33 PM