What's missing? To find out we remove the lab coat, step out of the scientist's shoes, take three steps back and look again. The scientist is missing. The model–maker, observer, measurer, mathematician, inventor of laws, theories and hypotheses — gone. According to its own empirical constraint, the syntax of science simultaneously defines an external model of "reality" and banishes the scientist from that model. By definition, the locus of behavioral control is "out there" in the model, not in us.

This pattern is particularly evident in the model of modern medicine. This model postulates that internal disorders such as tumors, infections, diseases and other pathological conditions inside the individual are caused primarily by environmental variables (such as germs, viruses, smog, heat, cold, ultraviolet light, etc.) and necessarily require external remedial treatment to restore the human body to health. Rather than utilize ways in which the biologicial system could be altered, regulated or adapted by the individual himself to change the pathological condition. Simplified, the remedial treatments of choice reduce to adding or subtracting something from the biological system — i.e., chemotherapy, radiation therapy, surgery or some combination of these. In this model even behavioral disorders such as schizophrenia are thought to originate from causes outside the behavior of the individual and to require external remedial treatment.

On the other hand, phenomena like the placebo effect, statistically important in all clinical drug research, are generally ignored because they can't be adequately explained in the context of the current medical model. When a patient responds to a placebo, a "fake" pill or injection of chemically inactive ingredients, by recovering from an ailment, he or she is considered an oddity who has been fooled by the fake medicine. Such cases are generally filed and forgotten, rather than being taken seriously as pointing in the direction of an alternative model of medicine.