Healing Potions as Communications

In all pharmaceutical tests, placebos cure almost as effectively as the tested drugs. Why should this be interesting?

1. By implication, the drugs also utilize the placebo effect; they simply add something to it. They would not well shrink the wart, silence the tintinitis, steady the dizziness without the "hocus-pocus" of a doctor saying: here is a new drug proven to treat maladies such as yours.

2. Although the pharmaceutical tests show a single figure for the placebo effect, obviously it averages many doctor/patient relations. Some doctors speak hocus-pocus more fluently than others and a trained hypnotist might do better still; indeed, hypnotherapy heals without any literal potion.

3. Probably, this placebo effect is a significant part of any healing.

What, though, is this placebo effect? In Faust, the one calling it "Hokuspokus" is Mephistopheles, the personification of negativity and cynicism. The father of lies, he implies that a remedy comes only by duping people. Similarly, the very word "placebo" means I shall please–medical Latin for humoring. This diction assumes that in the physician's office we resemble an audience watching prestidigitation. If this is the case, we should not look very closely or we would expose the trickery and ruin the drama. This is a faulty assumption! The placebo effect is so important for our well being that we should analyze and understand it because it only seems like trickery.

There is a growing recognition that the placebo effect forms but a small part of a much larger pattern that is central to the curative arts: healing as communication. Although the pain from a thorn in the foot, for instance, can be explained at many levels from the atomic to the anatomical, a useful metaphor is to describe the pain as a "message" to remove the thorn. And if the sufferer has been stepping on a surprisingly large number of thorns, we may even speculate that this behavior is a symptom of (and thus "message" about) some psychological problem. If the symptom is not from a thorn in the foot but asbestos in the lungs, the communicational feedback loop may be between the body and the economic, social, and political systems responsible for the asbestos poisoning.

In other words, if something skews the feedback loop between individual and environment, the remedy involves not only fixing the bad effects of the broken loop (e.g., the thorn or the asbestos) but also repairing the loop itself. Indeed, repairing that loop is normally a precondition for health. Looking in the mirror, anorexics, for instance, see themselves as fleshier than they are; any attempted cure that does not correct this faulty self-information is likely to fail, whereas eliminating all kinks in the loop brings self-healing (if the discontinuities have not already done too much damage).

Healing as communication means helping the mind/body know itself and the environment with which it interfaces. To comprehend the implicatons of this, we must first examine the nature of communication.

Communication as a Threshold System

In thinking about communication, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein imagined a bricklayer shouting to an apprentice “Brick!” and being handed one. This sounds simple. Actually, the speech act depends on lengthy preparation. In addition to learning the English word "brick," the apprentice must have previously settled such questions as: what does such a use of noun as verb mean? where are the bricks? do they differ in size and shape so that a particular kind is needed? why should I bother to bring one? how quickly do I need to do so? should I toss it?

The handing of the brick culminates this preliminary process that reaches back before the apprentice was hired to his very childhood. It belongs to a particular stretch of time (just as I understood that the apprentice was male because he belongs to the stretch of time when Wittgenstein composed his Blue and Brown Books). The invisible context-creating process, however, finishes in a visible act when the largely unconscious thoughts and memories cross a threshold into understanding and action. The key idea here is that the dramatic "Eureka!" of comprehension requires an unpredictably long preparation.

The Basic Pattern of Curative Communication

How do we analyze and apply the notion of currative communication? Consider the following.

1. The sufferers present the symptom.

This phrasing is quite different from their simply "having" the symptoms stored away somewhere. The symptoms (e.g., sneezing, rash, pain) call attention to themselves and once aware of them the sufferers usually seek to eradicate them, but not wholeheartedly. The issue is this: uncomfortable though they be, symptoms (in the healing context) function as pointers to a problem, so, eradicating them prematurely, probably leads to the production of more symptoms: the problem must reveal itself to be solved. Sometimes, however, treating one member of a chain of signifiers effects the others.

Application: Take, for instance, reflexology. Like most of the alternative healing systems, its theoretical foundation is nonsense. The Occidental version began with a mapping of the body onto the foot as if nerves from the lungs went to one zone, from the heart to another, etc. Treating the foot treated the other organs. This is already shaky logic. But like the other alternative therapies, reflexology works well enough to compete with medical science.

After a while, reflexologists changed to completely different mappings, all radically different from the zone system and significantly different from one another. These also worked. Long ago, the Chinese developed a third completely different (meridian) mapping, which flourished for centuries. At this point, you may have the impression that if all these mutually exclusive systems succeeded, all a reflexologist need do is touch the foot any where for any symptom; the communication effect doesn't work that way.

Each of these systems is like a language for the transmission of symptoms, with the therapist giving clues to the unconscious where the problem is to be treated. The foot then evidences some abnormality (usually a throbbing) in the place predicted by the map and during the treatment, the organ supposedly mapped there usually improves. If the therapist's system is inadequate for the communication, the sufferer will modify it unconsciously. For instance, a severe stomach ache may cause throbbing throughout a much larger portion of the foot than the stomach occupies theoretically. The sufferer is speaking loudly in kinaesthetic language; the body communicates in many ways and the healer's presence constitutes the cue for this articulation that furthers the sufferer's self understanding.

2. The "Potion" as Conversational Response

In a chemical language, a pharmaceutical delivers some message to the body. If merely spoken, that message (e.g., suppress histamines) would merely reach the conscious mind, which has turned most of the running of the body over to the unconscious. To be effective, the healing substance or activity must bypass the conscious mind and affect the body more directly. Ericksonian hypnosis, for instance, confuses the conscious mind but only so that it can talk to the unconscious. Energy healing purports to affect the body as directly as does a potion. At any rate, studies of energy healing report synchronized breathing and brain wave patterns between healer and sufferer; some unconscious relationship is being established.

Application: We should rethink the curative process as conversation and mutual healing. Whereas physicians threaten their own health with long hours straining to remain conscious, alternative healers tend to report the opposite. Talking cures (e.g., Ericksonian hypnosis) may proceed with healers in an altered state such that they know and remedy their own unconscious problems while treating their patients. Energy healers talk of receiving energy even as they allegedly dispense it.

3. Cure as Threshold of Understanding

The layperson has an intuition of the first part of this in the common desire to take more and more of a medicine to reach the threshold of health. As we have seen, however, a complex preparation establishes the context of understanding. What arrives then. In such varied approaches as homeopathy, reflexology, reiki, and hypnotherapy, there are reports that the treatment may result in some spontaneous surfacing of repressed memories connected to the problem that causes the symptoms. More often, however, the healing appears to occur entirely in the unconscious, which does not preclude it from being a form of understanding.

Application: The obvious implication is that sensitivity to the body and unconscious is both preventative and curative. To the extent that this sensitivity requires some "language" to connect conscious and unconscious, the study of language-systems that convey unconscious fantasies and metaphors is thus an important adjunct to the other healing arts.

What if the paradigm of healing changes from its present ones (e.g., biochemistry) to communication? My hope is that the communicational paradigm can serve as a general theory within which the present approaches fit together in the same way that languages fit into linguistics.

What difference does this make? It means recognizing the interrelationship between the healing arts and rethinking them in a larger context.

Application: Consider, for instance, the diverse ways that communication between mind, body, and environment may be interrupted. These include (but are certainly not limited to the following:

1. Deliberate. John Grinder (one of the founders of NLP) has said that the only essential technique in that discipline is parts reframe (convincing the portion of the mind that is generating a symptom to stop it). Admittedly, NLP's hypnotherapeutic device of conversing with the unconscious is a very powerful treatment, but it need not be limited to reframing wayward parts. It is also applicable to the following situations.

2. Negligence. The symptom is not always deliberate but may also result from the mind's neglecting to create a necessary system. For example, Milton Erickson (an important influence on NLP) solved a child's bedwetting problem but making the child's unconscious aware of the muscle required for urinary control. Based on Erickson's practice, NLP already includes techniques for generating a part and offshoots of NLP are taking this further, e.g., repairing the body by installing the metaphor of it as analogous to the Star Trek Enterprise with various engineers (i.e., pre-existing or newly installed parts) monitoring the repair. This, however, does not exhaust the potential of conversing with the unconscious, which may also help in the next case.

3. Misleading lack of information. This involves an injured body not giving sufficient data. For instance, a newly discovered chemical is transmitted by healthy fat cells so that the body keeps track of them and does not become overweight. An experimental replacement for this has been shown to aid in weight reduction for those people whose fat cells were not producing enough of it (thereby misleading the mind into thinking the person was much more slender than was the truth). There is room for exploration if the mind can itself repair the corporal systems that should convey essential data.

In thinking about the distortions and deletions in the feedback cycle between mind and world, we can expand our awareness of where problems can arise, how they generate misunderstandings that cause further problems, and how these all can be remedied.

Return to Solving the Puzzle of Health and Creative Energy:

Healing Stories, Arts, and
Therapeutic Metaphors

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