Overview of Mind/Body Control for good health

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Overview of Mind/Body Control

by National Institutes of Health

 

Most traditional medical systems make use of the interconnectedness of mind and body and the power of each to affect the other. During the past 30 years, there has been a growing scientific movement to explore the mind’s capacity to affect the body. The clinical aspect of this enterprise is called mind-body medicine. Mind and body are so integrally related that it makes little sense to refer to therapies as having impact just on the mind or the body.

 

Mind-body interventions often help patients experience and express their illness in new, clearer ways. Distinctions between

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curing and healing have little place in contemporary medical practice but are important to patients. Perceived meaning has direct consequences to health. The placebo response is one of the most widely known examples of mind-body interactions in contemporary, scientific medicine, yet it is also one of the most undervalued, neglected assets in medical practice. That the placebo response relies heavily on the relationship between doctor and patient says a great deal about the importance of the doctor-patient relationship and the need to provide further medical training on understanding and using this relationship. The therapeutic potential of spirituality as well as religion also has been neglected in the teaching and practice of medicine.

Interest in the mind’s role in the cause and course of cancer has been substantially stimulated by the discovery of the complex interactions between the mind and the neurological and immune systems, the subject of the rapidly expanding discipline of psychoneuroimmunology. The profound differences in the psychological stances taken by people who survive cancer suggest that there is extreme variation both among cultures and within cultures.

 

Adapted from Alternative Medicine: Expanding Medical Horizons, a report prepared under the auspices of the Workshop on Alternative Medicine, held in Chantilly VA.