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    Occasionally, your physician changes tactics.   He gives you a

    name  for  your  problem,  but  no  cure.    The  name  alone--like  a  magic

    talisman--makes you feel you have a problem your doctor can control.

    Or the doctor gives you a prescription.  Often it's simply for an

    anti-inflammatory drug, an imitation aspirin.  In most cases, an

    anti-inflammatory agent will not cure you.  But it may provide

    momentary relief from a symptom.  And it could produce the placebo

    effect, another benefit of the illusion of control.

    The doctor may send you to the hospital for tests.  But try asking

    him what treatments are available once the tests are over.  In many

    cases there are none--or at most one or two. The tests--and the

    elaborate equipment used to administer them--are frequently part of a

    show designed to enhance the illusion of a vast technology providing

    the doctor with control.

    Take, for example, one of the current age's most common

    afflictions-- the back problem.  If you come down with back pain and

    are sent for tests, you can have myelograms, x-rays, CAT scans or

    nuclear magnetic resonance scans.  But ask first what the doctor can do

    to treat you when the tests are over.  The range of remedies includes a

    laminectomy (surgical removal of a disk, after which two vertebrae are

    generally fused)38, an anti-inflammatory drug, a psychiatrist, physio-

    therapy or the injection of papain.  Will the test results influence the

    doctor's choice of cure?  Generally not.  So why the tests?  To cover the

    doctor against potential malpractice claims...and to sell the illusion of

    control.

    Medical science has made massive progress since the days of

    leeches and bleedings.   But it is still helpless in the face of many of

    mankind's ailments.  In fact, there is a good chance that the doctor's art

    has had far less to do with the advance of modern health than any of us

    would like to think.  Several medical authors in 1987 and 1988

    produced illuminating historical critiques of mortality statistics.  These

    analyses demonstrated a puzzling fact: that mankind's lengthening

    lifespan owes less than we might imagine to modern drugs, diagnostic

    techniques, surgery, hospitals, or any of the other tools of

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