Innumerable accounts of the placebo effect seem to indicate that there are classes of symptoms and pathological processes that people may be able to cure on their own, without the use of active drugs.
Certainly, much can be done behaviorally to prevent illness. The development and installation of strategies that encourage finer discriminations in, and a larger vocabulary for, proprioceptive feedback (this will come through Ki, and synesthetically through internal representations in the other systems) can assist in gaining more direct access to forms of self examination and regulation.
Pacing motivation and learning strategies can be used effectively to encourage and promote good health habits. In fact, health professionals could utilize the same tactics described in the advertising section of this book to promote health care plans and preventive programs.
4.431 Informed Consent and Bedside Manner.
As with any profession, there will be a division of labor in the medical field with respect to strategies — that is, some strategies will be more suited to certain tasks than to others. There will be a difference between a strategy for diagnosis and one for surgery. A good diagnostician may have a strategy designed for gathering information concerning symptoms from the patient, and then internally checking through lists of symptoms and textbook pages until he begins to find similarities or patterns between the recorded symptoms of other patients and the one he is confronted with. Such a person may do well as a medical school professor but poorly as a general practitioner because his strategies for establishing rapid rapport with individuals on a one–to–one basis are underdeveloped.
The ability to discern strategies and establish rapport can be critically important for many of a physician's duties like prescribing treatments to the patient and for informed consent, where the doctor must tell the patient the risks of his or her operation or treatment. The strategies of an individual patient will determine how you should package the information to be communicated to him. Some people, if you tell them there is a greater than 50% chance of death or serious impairment, will become depressed, apathetic or fatalistic (their strategy tends to carry out the weaker part of a statistic). Such persons may incorporate the statistics as self–fulfilling. For patients who have a polarity strategy, however, it may be useful to tell them they could die, to stimulate them to flip polarities to access the resources they need to recover from or change their condition.
Some patients will suddenly adopt symptoms if you describe them in too much detail or with too much emphasis.
If a heart patient uses stress (Ki-) as a motivator, he will also build up stress as a means to motivate themself to relax and exercise more! (This is the "hurry up and relax … or else" syndrome.)
It is important, then, for the physician to establish rapport with patients and gather information about patients' strategies before presenting them with consequential information. It is always a good idea to elicit and anchor a resource strategy with the patient. The strategy may then be reaccessed and utilized in situations that may be difficult or important.
4.44 Law
One of the primary tasks of an attorney is representation. The attorney's ability to gather information and establish rapport with clients, witnesses and judges will determine to a large degree his professional success. If a lawyer needs to present a brief or a case to a judge for a decision, for example, it will be extremely useful to know that judge's decision making strategy. By packaging your presentation so that it paces the judge's strategy, it will be easier for him to appreciate the value of your argument. The same principle applies, of course, to juries.
Because of their training in the use of language, we have found most lawyers and judges to be remarkably (though unconsciously) explicit in describing their internal processes through their speech. One of the authors was recently a plaintiff at a small claims trial. As the author waited for his case to be called, he listened to the judge and identified his decision making strategy. Every time the judge decided a case he would give an account of how he came to the decision, describing the form of his internal processes each time. For example, the judge might say, "Well, Mr. X, as I look over these records I see that this is not your first time in this courtroom, and I have to ask myself "How much longer will this go on? … How many more times?" I really feel that it's my responsibility to make sure that this doesn't happen again." This indicates a decision strategy of:
When it came time for the author to present his case, he packaged his presentation to pace this strategy. A skeletal paraphrasing of this presentation might go — "Your Honor, as you look over the case in front of you, you will clearly see that the defendant did not complete the work he contracted to do … And you'll have to ask yourself, 'Given the available information about the amount of work completed and the agreement made by the defendant, what is the best course of action?' … And I'm sure you will feel, as I do, that this matter should be decided in my favor."
After hearing the arguments the judge favored the author but questioned the amount of the claim presented (the author was asking for a full return of what he had paid the defendant even though the defendant had completed half of the work). The author again presented his argument in a way that paced the judge's strategy. The appeal was to the following effect: "Your Honor, I had to look at the amount of work the defendant did in perspective with the amount of time, difficulty and delay it cost me personally … and I had to ask myself, 'Is it fair to ask for compensation for all of the extra trouble I've been put through?' And I felt that the claim I was making was a reasonable compensation for all of the tension and frustration I had to go through."
The judge agreed and decided the case in the author's favor— for the full amount of the claim. Note that even though the author used himself as the referential index in this last argument — he talked about his own internal processes rather than directing the judge as he did earlier — it still served to pace the judge. The judge had to access the same sequence of representational systems to make sense of what the author was saying.
The arguments in this last example were paraphrased simply, and most of the content details were left out so that the form of what was being done would be more obvious. Most of the content involved in this kind of utilization will be provided by the situation, and, of course, should be fed back into the appropriate slots. Content considerations like picking up and pacing the appropriate legal terms and vocabulary, and relevant precedents, will also be extremely helpful, but as we have pointed out many times, the packaging is more influential than the content.