I have one patient in each of my clinics with a long history of relentless abdominal pain, mild constipation, poor appetite and general malaise.

Neither one has any abnormality on any of the testing that I — or my colleagues at the clinic or in the nearest hospital — have done: An alphabet soup of blood tests, CT scans, ultrasounds, endoscopies, gastric emptying studies and I don’t know what.

Each one of these older gentlemen usually comes in looking pale and gaunt, saying “I just don’t feel good, Doc”.

Now, one of them seems to be cured, within three days of starting a new prescription, intended to treat something else.