The same medicine from different doctors has different effects; the same medicine has different effects on different patients from the same doctor because man is not an object.

 

It has been noted that three persons can be suffering the same disease, but the same medicine will not work. On one person it is working; on another it is just fifty-fifty, working and not working; but on the third it is not working at all. The disease is the same, but the interiorities are different. And if you take the interiority into consideration, then perhaps the doctor will make a different impact on different people for different reasons.

 

Now doctors know about placebos, and sometimes the results are very puzzling. In one hospital they were doing some experiments. To one group of twenty patients of the same disease medicine was given, and to the other twenty with the same disease, just water was given – just to see whether water can work. Neither the doctors nor the patients know which is water and which is medicine, because if the doctor knows, then even his behaviour will change. Giving water, he will not give it that seriously and that will make some suspicion arise in the patient. So neither the doctor nor the patient – nobody knows. The knowledge is kept in a vault, locked.

 

And the miracle is that the same number of patients are helped by water as are helped by medicine. Out of twenty, seventeen persons are healthy by the second week, from both the groups. And the more miraculous thing is, those who were kept on water remained healthy longer than those who were kept on medicine. The people who were kept on real medicine started coming back soon, after a few weeks.  What happened? Why did water help so much? The idea that it is medicine helps, not medicine. And because water is pure water, it cannot harm; medicine will harm. That’s why the people who had been given real medicine started coming back. They started creating some new desire, some new disease, some new problems… because no medicine can go without affecting your system in some way or other. It will have its reactions. Water cannot have any reaction. This is pure hypnosis.

 

One of Osho’s friend was a great surgeon in Nagpur — a great surgeon but not a good man. He never failed in his surgery, and he charged five times more than any other surgeon would charge. Osho was staying with him and Osho told him, “This is too much.  When other surgeons are charging a certain amount for the same disease, you charge five times as much.”

 

He said to Osho, “My success in many other things also has this basis: when a person gives me five times more, he is determined to survive. It is not only because of money that I am greedy. If he is willing to give me five times more — when he could get the operation at cheaper rates — he is determined to survive whatsoever the cost.  And his determination is almost fifty percent of my success.”

 

There are people who don’t want to survive; they are not willing to cooperate with the doctor. They are taking the medicine, but there is no will to survive; on the contrary, they are hoping that the medicine does not work so they will not be blamed for suicide, yet they can get rid of life. Now, from the inside that person has withdrawn already. Medicine cannot help his interiority, and without his interior support, the doctor is almost helpless — the medicine is not enough.

 

The surgeon would put the patient on the table in the operating theatre — doctors would be ready, nurses would be ready, students would be watching from the gallery above.

 

The surgeon would whisper in the patient’s ear, “We had agreed on a fee of ten thousand – that will not do. Your problem is more serious. Only if you are ready to give me twenty thousand, am I going to take the instruments in my hands; otherwise you get up and get out. You can find cheaper people.”

 

Now, in such a situation…. And the person has money, otherwise, how can he say yes? And he accepts it: “I will give twenty thousand, but save me.”

 

And he told Osho, “Any surgeon could have saved him, but not with such certainty.  Now that he is paying twenty thousand, he is absolutely with me; his whole interior being is supportive. People condemn me because they don’t understand me.  Certainly it is immoral to agree on ten thousand and then put the person in the operating theatre and whisper in his ear, ‘Twenty thousand, thirty thousand; otherwise, get up and get out – because I had not realized that the disease had gone so deep. I am taking a risk, and I am putting my whole reputation on the line.  For ten thousand I will not do that. And I have never failed in my life, success is my rule. I operate only when I am absolutely certain to succeed. So you decide. And I don’t have much time, because there are other patients waiting. You just decide within two minutes: either agree, or get up and get lost.’ Naturally, the person will say, ‘1 will give you anything you want, but please do the operation.’ It is illegal, immoral, but I cannot say that it is un psychological.”

 

Anything to do with man cannot be purely objective.

 

Osho had another friend, a doctor who was put to jail because he was not qualified at all. He had never been to any medical college; all the degrees that he had written on his sign were bogus. But still Osho was of the opinion that an injustice has been done to the man – because it does not matter whether he had degrees or not. He helped thousands of people, and particularly those who were becoming hopeless, going from one doctor to another – all with degrees – and getting tired. And this man was able to save them. He had a certain charisma – no degree. And he made his hospital almost a magic land. The moment a patient entered his office, immediately he would be surprised. He had been everywhere…because people used to go to him only as a last resort. Everybody knew that the man was bogus, it was not something hidden. It was an open secret. But if you are going to die, what is the harm in trying?

 

And as you entered his garden — he had beautiful garden — and then his office…. He had beautiful women as his receptionists, and it was all part of his medical treatment — because even if a person is dying, looking at a beautiful woman his will to live takes a jump; he wants to live. After the reception, the person would pass through his lab. It was absolutely unnecessary to take him through the lab, but he wanted the person to see that he was not an ordinary doctor. And the lab was a miracle — absolutely useless, there was nothing significant, but so many tubes, flasks, colored water moving from one tube into another tube, as if great experiments were going on.

 

Then you would reach the doctor. And he never used the ordinary methods of checking your pulse, no. You would have to lie down on an electric bed with a remote control. The bed would move far up into the air, and you are lying there looking up and hanging over you there are big tubes. And wires would be attached to your pulse and the pulse would make the water in the tubes jump. The heart would be checked in the same way — not by ordinary stethoscope. He had made all his arrangements visual for the patient — so that he could see he had come to some genius, an expert.

 

The man had no degrees, nothing at all. His pharmacist had all the degrees, and he used to prescribe the medicines because the man had no idea about medicine. In fact, he never did any criminal thing. He never prescribed medicines, he never signed for them. This was done by a man who had degrees, who was absolutely qualified to do it. But because he arranged all this, and because he had written strange degrees on his sign…and since those degrees don’t exist Osho didn’t think they can be illegal. He was not claiming that they were from any university that exists. It was all fiction —but the fiction was helpful.

 

Osho saw patients half cured just in the examination. Coming out, they said, We feel almost cured, and we have not taken the medicine yet. The prescription is here — now we will go and purchase the medicine,”

 

But because he had done all this…. He had not done anything illegal, he had not harmed anybody — but law was blind, and he was put to jail because he was “cheating people.” He has not cheated anybody. To help somebody to live longer, if that is cheating, then what is medical help?

 

Because of human beings, medicine can never become an absolutely solid, one hundred percent objective science. That’s why there are so many medical schools —ayurveda, homoeopathy, naturopathy, acupuncture, and many more — and they all help.

 

Homoeopathy is simply sugar pills, but it helps. The question is whether the person believes. There are people who are fanatic naturopaths — nothing else can help them, only naturopathy can help them. And it has no connection with the disease.

 

There are homoeopathy, fanatics who believe that homoeopathy is the only right medicine and all other medicines are dangerous — particularly allopathy is poison. If you go to a homoeopath, the first thing he will do is inquire about your whole history from your birth up to now. And you are suffering from a headache.

 

The first thing they will ask is about all your diseases because they believe that all diseases are connected, your whole life is one single whole. It does not matter whether you had something in your leg or your head — they are part of one body, and for the doctor to understand, he has to know everything. The homoeopath will ask you what kind of allopathic medicines you have been taking — because that is the root cause of all your diseases; all allopathic medicines are poison. That is the attitude of naturopathy too, that allopathy is poison. So first you have to do fasting, enemas…just to clean you of all allopathy. Once you are clean of allopathy….

 

Man is a subjective being. If the patient loves the doctor, then water can function as medicine. And if the patient hates the doctor, then no medicine can help. If the patient feels the doctor is indifferent — which is ordinarily the case with doctors, because they are also human beings, the whole day long seeing patients, the whole day long somebody is dying….

 

They slowly, slowly, become hard, they create a barrier to their emotions, sentiments, humanity. But this prevents their medicine from being effective. It is given almost in a robot-like way, as if a machine is giving you medicine.

 

With love the patient is not only getting medicine, around the medicine something invisible is also coming to him. Medicine will have to understand man’s subjectivity, his love, and will have to create some kind of synthesis in which love and medicine together are used to help people.

 

But one thing is absolutely certain: that medicine can never become entirely objective. That has been the effort of medical science up to now, to make it absolutely objective.

 

A new kind of therapy is arising they call placebo therapy. A placebo is false, pseudo ..medicine, with no medicinal qualities in it, but is has to be given in such a way that the patient thinks it is medicine. Not only that the patient thinks it is medicine, even the doctor has to think it is medicine, otherwise his gestures may show, may reveal the truth. The doctor is kept in ignorance; he is given just water to inject, or given just sugar pills with all the marks and names and labels of the true medicine. He knows that this is medicine. The patient knows this is medicine. And the miracle is that it works — and there is no medicine in it. The patient is healed. The very belief of the doctor that it is medicine creates an atmosphere, a psychology, a hypnosis, and the whole paraphernalia of the hospital…. The patient wants to get rid of his illness, and when a famous doctor gives the medicine it is bound to help; whether it is medicine or not doesn’t matter much.

 

It has been found that medicine or no medicine functions almost in the same proportion. If seventy percent of patients are cured by medicine, real medicine, then seventy percent of patients are cured by unreal medicine, placebo medicine. It is creating a great stir in the medical world. What is happening?

 

What is really happening is this, that in the first place the illness has been created, it is a mind phenomenon. And in the second place, if the mind is convinced that it is going to be cured, then it is going to be cured. That’s why if the doctor’s fee is not really big, medicine is not going to affect you much. The bigger the fee, the better the medicine. If the therapist has a big fee and you are paying fortunes, then it is going to affect you more, because then you want to be affected. When it is free, who bothers whether it works or not? “If it works, good; if it doesn’t work, okay — because we have not paid for it.” When you pay for it you are intent that it should work — and it works!

 

Buddha says mind is a conjurer; it creates illnesses, it can create cures. Mind creates all kinds of illusions — beauty and ugliness, success and failure, richness and poverty…mind goes on creating. And once the idea settles in you, your whole life energy functions to create it, to make it a reality. Every thought becomes a thing, and everything in the beginning was only a thought and nothing else. You live in a kind of hypnosis. Buddha says this hypnosis has to be broken, and no other religion has tried so hard to break this hypnosis. Man has to be dehypnotized.

Man has to be made aware that all is mind: pain and pleasure both, birth and death both. All is mind. And once this has been seen absolutely, the conjurer disappears…and then what is left is truth. And that truth liberates.”

 

In all the medical `pathies’ developed around the world — homoeopathy or ayurveda or acupuncture — except allopathy, nobody has exactly understood the inner function of nature in man’s body and mind,  except allopathy, because others may be sometimes helpful, but they are not scientific. And others are helpful not in a small way either; if you look at their help, it is tremendous.

 

In almost seventy percent of the cases ayurveda will be successful, acupuncture may be successful, homoeopathy may be successful, naturopathy may be successful. But remember the seventy percent — it is no more than that because seventy percent of diseases are false. They are just in your mind, they don’t really exist. That’s why you don’t need real medicine; any hocus-pocus will do. And seventy percent is not a small percentage so I would not like these `pathies’ to disappear from the world. I want them to be recognized, because seventy percent is a big percentage.

 

And strangely enough, those seventy percent of the cases are the most difficult as far as allopathy is concerned. Allopathy finds itself in a difficulty: how to deal with a person who has no disease but believes he has? Allopathy has no way to help such a person. So only thirty percent remain to be helped by allopathy. It is a strange world.

 

Thirty percent to the most scientific approach and seventy percent to all kinds of hocus-pocus — superstitious approaches which really don’t make any change, but they help. The most scientific approach of allopathy is based on a deep understanding of nature, and that is that the body has a resistance of its own.

 

Because of this fact, naturopathy condemns allopathy. Allopathy goes on injecting viruses into patients because the allopathic understanding is, the moment the body gets a virus, it immediately creates antibodies. It immediately starts fighting, it has a resistance of its own. The whole body immediately goes on red-alert to destroy the disease. Naturopathy condemns it because they think you are poisoning people with diseases. You are supposed to take out diseases and you are, on the contrary, putting poisonous viruses into people’s bodies.

 

Naturopathy cleans people’s bodies by fasting, by strange methods that you cannot believe. But they can help only those people who are not suffering from any real disease.