Controlling the Uncontrollable

A Placebo Storytelling Poem

Photo by freestocks on Unsplash

The placebo effect is the result of storytelling. It is the story the patients tells themselves about the benefit of a particular substance or treatment. It is the story the doctor, researcher or healthcare practitioner tells the patient about their future, about their recovery. Are they believable? Does the way they tell the story of healing benefit the patient or does it create a nosebo effect?

The nosebo effect is when you believe something bad will happen as a result of a substance or treatment. When a doctor tells someone with cancer they have six months to live. I believe they are using storytelling to curse the person. The power of clinical stories should not be taken lightly.

In one of my favorite movies, The Last Holliday, Queen Latifah’s character is told she is going to die from a brain tumor and there is nothing she can do. She sets off to spend all her money doing things she has always wanted to do but didn’t take the money or time. It turns out she was misdiagnosed. The movie is really about how a person living fully, passionately, holding nothing back can do amazing things.

Here is a poem I wrote about the placebo effect in my own life.

Controling the Uncontrolable

Only nothing is nothing: placebo

psychology plays in your electric brain

physiologic effect in my blazing body

is not nothing

Only the placebo effect

white coat scientists mock my alternatives

You feel better, pain-free

She dances stronger, hips flexible

Tottering becomes balance,

a credit to all powerful placebo

I can live with that, I am good with that

Nosebo, placebo telling me I am, I have

a wicked genetic condition

Saying there is nothing

I can do anything

professional photographer

going blind

This is not okay!

Alternative medicine solutions

migraine-free years

genes without change

better vision than 40

Seeing the pattern of flow

Avoiding the car accident by a hair.

Placebo storied pattern recognition

new stories as every cell listens

telling hopeless doctors

I see you, placebo my eye.