SOME REMEDIES: MEDICAL MAGIC
Among the peasants and lower classes, pain treatments often consisted of piercing the painful areas of the body with a ‘vigorous’ twig of a tree and then burying the twig deep in the earth. It was assumed that the vigorous twig would absorb the patient’s pain and that burying the twig would prevent anyone from being exposed to the pain!
The non-active substitute for medication — the placebo, meaning ‘I please’ — is not to be scoffed at. It works because the patient believes it works. The more sophisticated ’sugar-coated pill’ of hard-pressed country doctors, with few resources, makes an important contribution to psychological factors in pain alleviation. It is now known that simply believing that a pill or potion is a powerful painkiller is enough to stimulate the brain to produce its own natural opiates.
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