House was right, everybody lied. Wilson was no exception. He had let himself believe he was the warm one, the one who cared, but he had been too careless. He had been cold and believed his own lies and House's so thoroughly that reality had stopped mattering.
He brought out the calendar on his palm pilot and went over House's entries, they showed steadily increasing pain ratings from around the time he had treated Andy, long before House had sent Stacy away. He read House's notes on alternative treatments like the Ketamine and intrathecal morphine, and his consult of a pain specialist in New York at that time. The entries only contained facts, only the objective, but Wilson could feel House's desperation and indignation in them.
He suspected this binder held in it not only the truth of House's reality, but of his reality checks as well. House didn't write about his feelings of pain or humiliation at asking his most trusted friends, Wilson and Cuddy, for help only to be rejected and made a fool of. But there they were in black and white, the cold hard facts that House had sought for comfort when his friends had utterly failed to offer any.
A placebo is any medical treatment that works because of its
therapeutic intent rather than its chemical or physical properties.
Studies have disproven the widely held myth that if a placebo
relieves pain, the pain can't be severe. Placebos cannot be used to
distinguish real pain of physical origin from psychogenic pain.
In
a double blind study of patients with cancer pain that was classified
as moderate to severe, 77 percent obtained relief from placebos.
Placebos can produce measurable physiologic effects such as
increasing serum cortisone or decreasing blood sugar.
Responders
to placebos tend to be professionals, those with higher levels of
education, people recently divorced, widowed or separated, working
women and farmers. Unskilled workers, housewives, married women
without children, those with low level education and smokers tend to
be nonresponders.
Physical pain is in fact more likely to respond to placebo than
anxiety or psychogenic pain.
The highly motivated and highly
educated are more likely to respond to placebo than people with less
education or those who are less compliant.
Placebogenic situations arise from a high but reasonable expectation of benefit in an environment of trust. Placebo effects tend to decrease rapidly over time, and a placebo will not work if the patient is aware that he is not receiving the medication expected.
Pain Rating:8/10
Wilson felt a familiar sting in his nostrils as hot tears made their way to the surface. He let them fall. They had been so wrong. The angry scrawl left no mistake that House knew they were wrong and was as pissed as he had every right to be. He had expected the intrathecal morphine to provide him with relief, it was his well-researched back up plan for when the pain became unbearable. He fit the profile of a responder perfectly. He had trusted them and they'd failed.
Wilson wanted desperately to talk to House, Cuddy, the pain specialist House had consulted, but didn't want to wake House and knew he couldn't talk to Cuddy or the specialist without House's permission.
Instead he went to the fax machine and copied this and other entries that held information he never wanted to forget. House was right, when things went back to normal, all of this would be easy to forget. Wilson needed to remind himself. He couldn't change what had been, but he could make damn sure to do better from now on. He poured himself a drink and wallowed in his own sadness and dejection. He needed to let himself feel this. After a time, he put it away, ready to focus on House.
House was right, he was the patient, it wasn't his job to make things easier. Wilson watched him sleep. His anger was sure to rear its head again some time, but for now all he felt was regret and remorse.
He still wished House had told him more of these things, but also realized that if the situation had been reversed, Wilson wouldn't have had to tell House about any increases in pain or alternative treatments, House would have known. He'd have made it his business to know even if it required huge violations of privacy. It was his way. He didn't understand that others needed to be told things because he just figured them out.