Last week a new study showed over half of medical doctors use placebos on a regular basis.
Having worked with medical doctors and nurses for years, I wasn't exactly surprised. I'd heard the story a hundred times: patient comes to see doc, patient doesn't feel well, doc sees no signs of serious illness but knows patient won't feel satisfied if s/he walks away empty-handed. Caught in an ethical bind doc prescribes something innocuous.
Studies show not only that placebos are effective (and cheap!) but also more expensive placebos work better than cheap ones and dark-colored placebos work better than white ones. Go figure!
Docs usually frame it along these lines: "I'm going to give you something not usually prescribed for this but I think it will help." As dishonest as this is, it seems to me like a healthy way to harvest the power of the mind to help the body heal without using unnecessary chemicals.
But according to a NY Times article: "The American Medical Association discourages the use of placebos by doctors when represented as helpful", stating it might undermine trust.
This notion of trust and people in powerful positions got me thinking about my own life.
Before working as a therapist I worked as a journalist and occasionally as a copywriter. Basically I sold my writing skills to big corporations. The job was simple: find all the positives about a product or service and omit all the negatives. Here in America it's our national sport. We call it marketing when we're happy, spin when we're angry. Students come from all over the world to study business and learn "le marketing." It's what we do.
And yet, it's still dishonest.
In my neighborhood hangs a poster with a 1950's sepia photo of a Latina-looking woman holding a babe in her arms. The tagline reads: "Because if I graduate it's like a part of her is making it too." Naively I thought this was an ad for a foundation offering scholarships for under-served populations. Then one day I bent down and read the fine print at the bottom: it's an ad for the US Navy.
Here's an example of the marketing that Defense creates with our tax dollars in times of war. It's dishonest. But somewhere there's a study and a focus group that showed that this dishonest approach would get people in a uniform.
Maybe it's just me but when I think about it I realize the list of subtle, socially-sanctioned lies is pervasive in my life from headlines to credit card mailers, from church pulpits to the White House.
Here are just a few of the recent examples that come to mind:
I'm exhausted. I'm tired of being lied to. I'm tired of being given political and corporate Vicodin when all I'm really getting is sugar pills.
And of course spokespersons, politicians and CEO's spend tens of thousands of dollars on consultants who train and rehearse them so that they can tell us these lies in believable ways, without their body language betraying them. It's called 'effective communication skills'.
We know why people lie: because they benefit from it somehow. Power and profit tend to be the two big motors behind dishonest representation.
According to the OECD, a non-profit social and economic observatory that we belong to with 29 other relatively rich countries, our wealth gap has widened considerably since the beginning of the Bush administration. Today, of the 30 member countries, only Mexico and Turkey have a wider wealth gap than ours. A stagnant middle income and a rampant upper income has made it so that seventy-one percent of the wealth belongs to the top 10% of the population.
Clearly the lying has helped some people.
And that feeling of being manipulated by leaders who are way too close to those with money and only seem to be working to sustain one another has been pervasive.
It will be interesting to see how those alliances will shift now that the party has been seriously crashed by a recession that will not speak its name.
In a recent article the ex-Nixon speech writer/investor/actor/pro-lifer Ben Stein wrote about a talk he gave to disgruntled investors in comfy La Jolla, California. He finished by asking just whose side the government is on.
Funny I've been asking myself that for years...or more precisely: "When will I live under a government which I feel is on my side?"
One of the many things that gives me hope is, in my experience working with hundreds of people, most folks educated or not figure out when they're being lied to. It may take them time to figure it out...but they do.
I believe people's lie-fatigue is an important part of what's driving their choices in the many electoral races today.
Having worked with medical doctors and nurses for years, I wasn't exactly surprised. I'd heard the story a hundred times: patient comes to see doc, patient doesn't feel well, doc sees no signs of serious illness but knows patient won't feel satisfied if s/he walks away empty-handed. Caught in an ethical bind doc prescribes something innocuous.
Studies show not only that placebos are effective (and cheap!) but also more expensive placebos work better than cheap ones and dark-colored placebos work better than white ones. Go figure!
Docs usually frame it along these lines: "I'm going to give you something not usually prescribed for this but I think it will help." As dishonest as this is, it seems to me like a healthy way to harvest the power of the mind to help the body heal without using unnecessary chemicals.
But according to a NY Times article: "The American Medical Association discourages the use of placebos by doctors when represented as helpful", stating it might undermine trust.
This notion of trust and people in powerful positions got me thinking about my own life.
Before working as a therapist I worked as a journalist and occasionally as a copywriter. Basically I sold my writing skills to big corporations. The job was simple: find all the positives about a product or service and omit all the negatives. Here in America it's our national sport. We call it marketing when we're happy, spin when we're angry. Students come from all over the world to study business and learn "le marketing." It's what we do.
And yet, it's still dishonest.
In my neighborhood hangs a poster with a 1950's sepia photo of a Latina-looking woman holding a babe in her arms. The tagline reads: "Because if I graduate it's like a part of her is making it too." Naively I thought this was an ad for a foundation offering scholarships for under-served populations. Then one day I bent down and read the fine print at the bottom: it's an ad for the US Navy.
Here's an example of the marketing that Defense creates with our tax dollars in times of war. It's dishonest. But somewhere there's a study and a focus group that showed that this dishonest approach would get people in a uniform.
Maybe it's just me but when I think about it I realize the list of subtle, socially-sanctioned lies is pervasive in my life from headlines to credit card mailers, from church pulpits to the White House.
Here are just a few of the recent examples that come to mind:
- "Yes, you can own with no money down..."
- Insurance companies refusing to pay up when you arrive with your claim.
- Axis of evil
- Sex-craved evangelical millionaires swearing they're pious.
- Not-to-be-beat mortgages for poor people.
- Weapons of Mass Destruction.
- "Sand-swept beach with an unobstructed view..."
- Political-favor-style home renovations.
- "This isn't about homophobia, it's about protecting our children".
- "This tax stimulus will turn things around".
- "We want to help working class people".
- Finally The Real Truth about Brad and Jen
I'm exhausted. I'm tired of being lied to. I'm tired of being given political and corporate Vicodin when all I'm really getting is sugar pills.
And of course spokespersons, politicians and CEO's spend tens of thousands of dollars on consultants who train and rehearse them so that they can tell us these lies in believable ways, without their body language betraying them. It's called 'effective communication skills'.
We know why people lie: because they benefit from it somehow. Power and profit tend to be the two big motors behind dishonest representation.
According to the OECD, a non-profit social and economic observatory that we belong to with 29 other relatively rich countries, our wealth gap has widened considerably since the beginning of the Bush administration. Today, of the 30 member countries, only Mexico and Turkey have a wider wealth gap than ours. A stagnant middle income and a rampant upper income has made it so that seventy-one percent of the wealth belongs to the top 10% of the population.
Clearly the lying has helped some people.
And that feeling of being manipulated by leaders who are way too close to those with money and only seem to be working to sustain one another has been pervasive.
It will be interesting to see how those alliances will shift now that the party has been seriously crashed by a recession that will not speak its name.
In a recent article the ex-Nixon speech writer/investor/actor/pro-lifer Ben Stein wrote about a talk he gave to disgruntled investors in comfy La Jolla, California. He finished by asking just whose side the government is on.
Funny I've been asking myself that for years...or more precisely: "When will I live under a government which I feel is on my side?"
One of the many things that gives me hope is, in my experience working with hundreds of people, most folks educated or not figure out when they're being lied to. It may take them time to figure it out...but they do.
I believe people's lie-fatigue is an important part of what's driving their choices in the many electoral races today.
I completely agree that it's unethical and soul destroying to be lied to. I am currently in Florida working on the campaign to stop amendment 2, which could erode the rights already granted to couples who are not married, straight and gay, it's an anti gay amendment, but couched in language, lies, to make it look like it's pro-tradtional marriage.
ReplyDeleteRegarding doctors, tHere is a difference between knowingly prescribing placebo and prescribing medications which have off label uses. It takes years for some medications to be approved by the FDA, even after doctors have found them to work, and so sometimes they are prescribed before approval...in the case of AIDS and bipolar depression, if doctors had waited for approval, there would be even greater casualties then there were/ are... I am sure there are doctors who patronize patients by giving them the proverbial sugar pill, telling them they are something else, but I can't believe it's fifty percent. I am a doctor and have never lied to a patient about what i am prescribing them. Sometimes that's hard because I have to give the whole dirt on what they are going to take....but it's their right to know. Lies are toxic.