Late in the second part (books 7–14) of the Therapeutikê methodos, which Galen was completing after a twenty-year gap since beginning the work as a whole, the text in Kühn (and in B = British Library Add. MS 6898 [xii cent.], at least) includes a comment which looks like a Galenic aside made parenthetically to himself while dictating. The sentence reads: ἐκεῖθεν οὖν αὐτὰ μεταφέρειν ἐνταῦθα σκοπούμενον ὅτῳ βέλτιον ἐξ αὐτῶν (so MS B, superior to K's ἑαυτῶν) χρῆσθαι, ‘So (I ought) to consider transferring them (namely, my discussion on the treatment of kakokhymia) to here from there (i.e. in the section on prophylaxis in the De san. tuenda) to make better use of them’. The rendering in the new Loeb volume 3, p. 345 is not clear.

We may suppose that the amanuensis was so focussed on writing down what he was hearing that he did not pick up that this was really a comment never intended by Galen to be included in the treatise. So it was incorporated into the text and, overlooked in any checking, remained in subsequent copies. Either χρή (sc. ἐμέ) may have fallen out by haplography with χρῆσθαι, or Galen never used the impersonal verb because he was talking to himself: he could afford the ellipse. The survival of the passage is a different kind of confirmation of dictation as the dominant modus operandi for the production of Galen's written treatises.