Want to devise a new form of alternative medicine? No problem. Here’s the recipe: Be warm, sympathetic, reassuring and enthusiastic. Your treatment should involve physical contact, and each session with your patients should last at least half an hour. Encourage your patients to take an active part in their treatment and understand how their disorders relate to the rest of their lives. Tell them that their own bodies possess the true power to heal. Make them pay you out of their own pockets. Describe your treatment in familiar words, but embroidered with a hint of mysticism: energy fields, energy flows, energy blocks, forces, auras, rhythms and the like. Refer to the knowledge of an earlier age: wisdom carelessly swept aside by the rise and rise of blind, mechanistic science. Oh, come off it, you’re saying. Something invented off the top of your head couldn’t possibly work, could it?
Well yes, it could and often well enough to earn you a living. A good living if you are sufficiently convincing or, better still, really believe in your therapy. Many illnesses get better on their own, so if you are lucky and administer your treatment at just the right time, you’ll get the credit. But that’s only part of it. Some of the improvement really would be down to you. Not necessarily because you’d recommended ginseng rather than camomile tea or used this crystal as opposed to that pressure point. Nothing so specific. Your healing power would be the outcome of a paradoxical force that conventional medicine recognises but remains oddly ambivalent about the placebo effect.
Questions
1. Appointments with alternative practitioner
2. An alternative practitioner’s description of treatment
3. An alternative practitioner who has faith in what he does
4. The illness of patients convinced of alternative practice
5. Improvements of patients receiving alternative practice