The rise of effective somatic treatments—antibiotics, surgery, drugs to control conditions like diabetes, hypertension, all manner of hormone deficiencies—has contributed to the sense that healing is something that happens to us rather than something in which we are active participants. This attitude has had the effect of inducing a kind of passivity in those afflicted by physical disease. By the same token, the discovery in the last fifty years of medications that are efficacious in the treatment of anxiety, depression, and psychotic illnesses has created the expectation on the part of those
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