The Placebo as Performance: Speaking Across Domains of Healing

Abstract

In this article I explore the placebo and the placebo effect from a performance-studies perspective. I use this examination to argue for the placebo as a possible dialogic starting point between performance studies and qualitative health scholars. Using Lock and Scheper-Hughes' concept of three bodies (the individual body, the social body, and the body politic), I explain how the placebo as performance opens dialogue by speaking across these three bodies. I argue that the placebo as performance offers a yet-unexplored and heuristic way to bridge the unfortunate divide that often exists between qualitative and quantitative ways of understanding healing. By exploring these connections and offering a history of blind testing in the medical community, I explain how the placebo requires multiple lenses to be understood in the healing process, and by extension opens up traffic between different ways of knowing.

Medicine's inconvenient truth: the placebo and nocebo effect

“…This characterisation of the placebo effect in terms of power seems accurate because the medical consultation undoubtedly occurs within a socially constructed asymmetrical power relationship, which – by way of its stylised form and rituals – is likely to create placebo effects . In this regard, it is noteworthy that religious metaphors and dramaturgical considerations abound in clinical medicine and the more elaborate the ritual, the more likely it is that a placebo effect will occur …”

Subjective Concepts of Chronically Ill Patients Using Distant Healing

“…People feel severely ill despite being diagnosed to the contrary, and spiritual healing is perceived as running contrary to biomedicine. In this healing situation the concept of the "three bodies" developed by Benjamin Myers (2010) to explain placebo effects becomes palpable for patients: They have to integrate the "individual body," which bears all the consequences of the chronic disease; the "social body," which feels the cultural meaning of the healing ritual; and the "political body," which relates to (political) power and control, and thus to external opinions. The experiences gathered during the journey through the biomedical system leave the patients in uncertainty, and call for rituals to fill the perceived gaps (Broom & Tovey, 2008).…”

Diabetes and the Motivated Patient: Understanding Perlocutionary Effect in Health Communication

“…Austin’s concept of performative utterance has also been employed to better understand the therapeutic power of the placebo in double-blind, clinical trials (Myers, 2010; Thompson, Rittenbaugh, & Nichter, 2009), recognizing the power of HCPs words and their potential to affect research outcomes.…”