The placebo as performance: speaking across domains of healing.
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.
Myers
W Benjamin
WB
University of South Carolina Upstate, Spartanburg, SC, USA. bmyers@uscupstate.edu
D006801:Humans; D010686:Philosophy, Medical; D010919:Placebos; D036301:Qualitative Research; D012107:Research Design
D010919:Placebos