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Patients in the placebo arms of randomized controlled trials (RCT) often experience positive changes from baseline. While multiple theories concerning such ''placebo effects'' exist, peculiarly, none has been informed by actual interviews of patients undergoing placebo treatment. Here, we report on a qualitative study (n = 27) embedded within a RCT (n = 262) in patients with irritable bowel syndrome. Besides identical placebo acupuncture treatment in the RCT, the qualitative study patients also received an additional set of interviews at the beginning,

The phrase 'cultural phenomenology of embodiment' denotes an attempt to gain purchase on the understanding of culture and self from the starting point of our bodies as being-in-the-world, and requires recognition that our bodies are at once the wellspring of existence and the site of experience. In effect, embodiment is our fundamental existential condition, our corporeality or bodiliness in relation to the world and other people. For research in the human sciences, embodiment is "an indeterminate methodological field defined by perceptual experience and mode of presence and engagement in the world" (Csordas 1994: 12). I want to elaborate this definition further, first by noting that it emphasizes the contrast between embodiment as an "indeterminate methodological field" and the body as a "discrete organic entity." It explicitly paraphrases the definition proposed by Roland Barthes (1986: 57-8) of the text or textuality as an "indeterminate methodological field caught up in a discourse and experienced as activity and production" in contrast to the work (book) as a material object that occupies space. In this sense, books can be stacked tightly together on shelves and bodies can be packed in a subway car, but texts can interact with one another in endlessly proliferating ways, and embodiment is a matter of shared, mutually implicating, and never completely anonymous flesh.Following this line of thought, in the following three sections I present an outline of body-world relations, sexual difference, and components of corporeality that establish,