< Independent

£23.50

By David Bychkov

The Placebo Life Technique

Paperback – 2 Mar 2015 | 192 pages | ISBN 1940813913 | ISBN-13 9781940813912

David Bychkov's The Placebo Life Technique is a deconstruction of ethical challenges to practitioners of medicine, psychotherapy and the various sciences of brain-body communication. Placebo is traditionally represented as an inert, harmless object disguised as an active substance. It is supposed to be invented, produced, administrated and otherwise controlled by its prescriber – no harm should come of this object and rather, this non-harm should directly cause benefit. We medical patients gladly partake of the communion wafer of the scientific method and find satisfaction in the ethos of our doctor, the form factor of our medications and the emotional relief of having “done something” about troubling symptom. What neither the physician nor his patient know is that they are thrown together into a non-linear world that will not conform to either of their expectations. No pill can be administered perfectly or guarantee any outcome and no Being can completely verbalize, communicate or otherwise spit out his condition. Both parties are blind to each others' totalities, but not to each others' finitudes. The Placebo Life Technique therefore is an embrace of both the potential and limitations of human healing, catharsis and caring.