Physiological therapy

“For the patients who accepted the premises, physiological treatments did offer a proof of control that could be perceived as a service in its own right. . . . Some patients not only identified an independent value in the doctor’s control over disease, but seemed capable of sharing it vicariously” (Crenner II, 118) . . . The concrete facts of physiologic monitoring offered a shared territory lying between the patient’s unimpeachable, if inaccessible, claims about symptoms and the physician’s assumed expertise” (123).