If the behavior of those who respond well to placebos can be modeled, their strategies for self–healing might be taught to others, an option for recovery that wouldn't require the ingestion of chemically active drugs with their typically undesirable side–effects. In the current medical model, the patient places the locus of behavioral control in the physician; the physician places it in the model. The placebo effect suggests that "getting sick" and "getting well" are, in fact, behaviors and, further, that the locus of behavioral control is in the individual — that sickness can be a decision variable for the individual.

This pattern of placing behavioral control outside ourselves has undoubtedly evolved from the fact that scientists have always looked outside themselves for variables and for sources of instrumental control that more easily lend themselves to measurement and reproducible results. The original model of behavioral science, like that of modern medicine, adopted the pattern of locating behavioral control outside the individual. Because the internal sensory–motor processes of the organism aren't measurable by the instruments available to the behavioral scientist, they are not considered to be part of the domain of the model.

1.5 Extending the Modern Scientific Model

As we pointed out earlier in this chapter, neurolinguistic programming constitutes the next natural extension in the evolutionary development of cultural models. By understanding that human beings do not operate directly on the world they are experiencing but through sensory transforms of that world, we also understand that "truth" is a metaphor rather than a yardstick calibrated to some absolute standard of external reality. Cultural models, including that of science, do not express "truth," but prescribe domains of experience within which behavior is organized into certain patterns.