The Ritual Effect: The Healing Response to Forms and Performs

Abstract

This chapter is based on the hypothesis, that the major problem of the dominating biomedicine paradigm of western medicine lies in its inability to include the psychological and sociological realities in its theoretical foundation for describing the healthy embodied person and develop models of the causes of health and illness as a basis for finding ways to treat illness. I believe that this is most clearly shown in the lack of explanation of placebo effects. A way to understand placebo effects is that they are caused by psychological and sociological meaning producing effects and they are outside the scope of the biomedical paradigm's explanatory models.