Mind/Body/Spirit: Getting in Touch with Our Inner Thinker
Consider these two opposing views on the connection between mind and body when it comes to physical illness:
1. The Physically Emphatic View: The primary causes and cures for physical health problems are physical and biological.
2. The Mentally Emphatic View: The primary causes and cures for physical health problems are psychological and spiritual.
(For more complete statements of 1 and 2 see previous post.)
1. Inclusive and Holistic: The physically emphatic view does not rule out possible and known situations in which the mind may make the body sick or contribute to recovery. For example, there are the well known phenomena of psychosomatic illness and the placebo effect. Mental stress is known to exacerbate many medical conditions. And with regard to certain illnesses, for example cancer, some studies suggest that psychological and/or spiritual factors may in some cases contribute toward recovery. Note that the correlations are not nearly strong enough to substitute mental health approaches for drugs and surgery as the mainstays of treatment.
2. Distorting/Deceptive: The mentally emphatic view is contradicted by the fact that there is already overwhelming evidence that most physical health problems have primarily physical/biological causes and treatments. Here are just a few examples.
Public health policy centers on sanitation, hygiene and germ theory, not spiritual counseling or guided imagery. The strong cause-effect relationship between unsanitary living conditions and a wide variety of major illnesses is well documented and well known.
AIDS: The staple of AIDS counseling isn’t promoting emotional wholeness and healing; it’s advocating safe sex practices. Treatment consists of a cocktail of drugs now known to be effective against the AIDS virus, not positive visualizations.
Malaria: If you travel to an area featuring malaria-carrying mosquitoes, chances are you’ll pack your mosquito netting and not your relaxation tapes if you don’t have room for both.
Lung cancer was a rare disease prior to the rise of the tobacco industry.
Sickly Chickens and Stuff…
The mentally emphatic view has to contend with any number of further contradictions. Examples:
Last post I cite the good physical health of violent criminals. Even if it should be the case that they're not really as physically robust as they appear (as one commentator suggests), a minority of physically healthy violent criminals still doesn't fit well with view #2.
Last discussion thread SusieQ (linked at right in blog roll) mentioned that something eventually goes wrong with everyone’s bodies and kills them, tending to suggest a physical and not mental basis for ill health. I suppose we could attempt to resolve this by trying to wed New Age thinking with old time religion: if death is the wages of sin, then the reason all of us eventually get sick and die is because our negative thoughts eventually catch up to us and kill us. Saints are bad people too.
Even if this makes sense, it does leave you to wonder: what’s behind the deaths of trees and flowers?
And what’s up with those sickly chickens vs. the healthy ones? Too much time spent brooding?
1. The Physically Emphatic View: The primary causes and cures for physical health problems are physical and biological.
2. The Mentally Emphatic View: The primary causes and cures for physical health problems are psychological and spiritual.
(For more complete statements of 1 and 2 see previous post.)
1. Inclusive and Holistic: The physically emphatic view does not rule out possible and known situations in which the mind may make the body sick or contribute to recovery. For example, there are the well known phenomena of psychosomatic illness and the placebo effect. Mental stress is known to exacerbate many medical conditions. And with regard to certain illnesses, for example cancer, some studies suggest that psychological and/or spiritual factors may in some cases contribute toward recovery. Note that the correlations are not nearly strong enough to substitute mental health approaches for drugs and surgery as the mainstays of treatment.
2. Distorting/Deceptive: The mentally emphatic view is contradicted by the fact that there is already overwhelming evidence that most physical health problems have primarily physical/biological causes and treatments. Here are just a few examples.
Public health policy centers on sanitation, hygiene and germ theory, not spiritual counseling or guided imagery. The strong cause-effect relationship between unsanitary living conditions and a wide variety of major illnesses is well documented and well known.
AIDS: The staple of AIDS counseling isn’t promoting emotional wholeness and healing; it’s advocating safe sex practices. Treatment consists of a cocktail of drugs now known to be effective against the AIDS virus, not positive visualizations.
Malaria: If you travel to an area featuring malaria-carrying mosquitoes, chances are you’ll pack your mosquito netting and not your relaxation tapes if you don’t have room for both.
Lung cancer was a rare disease prior to the rise of the tobacco industry.
Sickly Chickens and Stuff…
The mentally emphatic view has to contend with any number of further contradictions. Examples:
Last post I cite the good physical health of violent criminals. Even if it should be the case that they're not really as physically robust as they appear (as one commentator suggests), a minority of physically healthy violent criminals still doesn't fit well with view #2.
Last discussion thread SusieQ (linked at right in blog roll) mentioned that something eventually goes wrong with everyone’s bodies and kills them, tending to suggest a physical and not mental basis for ill health. I suppose we could attempt to resolve this by trying to wed New Age thinking with old time religion: if death is the wages of sin, then the reason all of us eventually get sick and die is because our negative thoughts eventually catch up to us and kill us. Saints are bad people too.
Even if this makes sense, it does leave you to wonder: what’s behind the deaths of trees and flowers?
And what’s up with those sickly chickens vs. the healthy ones? Too much time spent brooding?
Posted by Paul at 2:22 PM Permalink
13 Comments:
Why do we get sick? I'm all for the mental/physical combination explanation. Diseases are out there. We attract them. Sometimes we repel them. Do we attract or repel them with our thoughts? Certainly our thoughts have something to do with how sick we get or how sick we stay - isn't that what mind/body connection means - that one affects the other?
As for the death of flowers and trees...all living things change form. And who are we to say they don't think unless we have an exceedingly narrow definition of the word.
why death?
Why would God create us to kill us?
For atheists it is perhaps a proof.
For the believer it can be a dilemma, if it isn't thought out... that is.
My main points are in the numbered sections and lead to the conclusion that physical and biological factors, not psychological and spiritual factors, are the primary causes of physical illness - without ignoring the fact that there are cases in which mental factors contribute.
While I've spelled it out in the post in empircal and logical terms to show just what makes view #2 untenable, view #1 really strikes me as essentially self evident.
I suppose it's conceivable that my personal experiences with others, self, and the larger world - reading the paper, listening to the news - are highly unusual. Otherwise, it's obvious just from living on this planet that sick people, like healthy people, represent the full spectrum of psychological and spiritual development, with most people in both groups being average. I've never noticed that physically healthy people are exceptional in their humanity; I've never noticed that people with health problems are exceptional in terms of stunted inner lives.
We all get to be there someday. And we all know this whether or not we think about it or talk about it.
If you go to that brink and step back from it, you look at it differently. If you stand on that brink for a long time without falling into it, you look at it differently.
It's not so much a matter of philosophy or spirit. Good or evil. Poor or wise choices. Godly or ungodly behavior. We are born to die. Just as the plants and the flowers and the sickly chickens are born to die.
Disease is a natural part of that process. Some of us start that process much sooner than others.
If we try to assign some sort of spiritual, mental or moral defect to those of us who start the process earlier than others, then what sort of defect would you assign to your own fate...your own death...or the illness that leads up to it? Because we must all get sick and die. Because that is how this world is. It just is.
It's nature. Dust to dust. The cycle of life. Birth to death.
Somewhere in the middle you get sick. And that doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing.
And I think that positive thinking has its place (and is definitely better than negative thinking, but it is no cure-all). I have known decent, well-adjusted people who have fallen victim to terrible diseases (both young and old) -- and who have suffered terribly (and died) from their infirmities, positive attitude notwithstanding.
All the same, there is certainly a class of illness which is real yet can be cured with non-physical interventions. I know this because it happened to me, suddenly and "miraculously", after a crippling illness which had lasted for many years and was getting worse. If it was "placebo" then placebo is something which requires detailed study, but I don't think it's a suitable label.
After my own cure, I trained in and practised the therapy for a while. It redraws the usual boundaries between mind and body, putting emotions in the sphere of body and thinking in the sphere of head.
On this model, the head can interfere with the proper function of body - e.g. by over-riding emotions - resulting in physical dysfunction. Head can always cause physical dysfunction of course, as in smoking & other excesses, poor diet and jumping in front of a moving train.
So I think your two choices slightly misrepresent the range of possibilities. I agree with you that #1 is the better model than #2. But #1 can incorporate results of one's own behaviour, including what caused me to get chronic fatigue syndrome. I would not use the words "psychological" and "spiritual" to characterise this behaviour. I would call it "ignorance of the role of emotions in the human animal".
As for as illness goes, I think those are ways of testing our endurance rather than sins.
Maybe I am not making sense but Karma is not all negative as most westerner think.
STACEY: Exactly. I'm not saying the mental aspects don't have a place, just that it's frankly absurd to exaggerate them to the point of adopting view #2.
YVES: You make a great point. Yes - my "view #1" is speaking to what I think is generally true of physicial illness and its causes.
However, people are individuals and not all illnesses are the same. In line with your comment, I just happened to read on another blog that it's thought there may be a connection between CFS and depression - also fibromyalgia.
So it may well be that with certain physical illnesses, the mind plays a greater role than in others. For example, I could imagine that there might be a biological predisposition to CFS with depression acting as the trigger for some individuals. And this wouldn't mean that someone with chronic fatigue syndrome has a "worse" depression or "more issues" than anybody else who becomes depressed.
As to the efficacy of alternative medicine, I think the fairest approach is to evaluate them individually. For example, I've read enough about acupuncture to suspect there's something to it even though it didn't happen to work for me. I've also run into things that appear completely fraudulent, which I suppose is what you'd expect - a minority of people behaving exploitatively.
GAUTAMI: No question there - I think anyone who's experienced chronic illness would agree it tests endurance.
The mind plays the same role in these illnesses as it does in causing smoking-related or diet-related or lifestyle-related diseases. That is to say, the mind dictates behaviour! Certain behaviours are bad for health.
To suppress emotions long-term is dangerous (like smoking!) because emotions are body's messages which help us maintain equilibrium and survive.
Ignoring emotional messages is not a psychological or spiritual problem but an adaptive stratagem which carries dangers. We risk getting ill that way just the same as people in more ignorant times risked getting cholera by drinking water from a river in which corpses had floated.
Health problems are caused by circumstance, ignorance and lack of choice, we could say. We can change some of these and restore a person to health, but only when we understand the mechanism.
I only understand a little, but still it's enough to get beyond being stuck in the ruts of psychological versus physical, placebo, psychosomatic and so on. They are well-worn ruts of second-hand thinking, that won't take us forward.
At the same time, I'd want to caution against overgeneralizing based on our own experiences. So when you say that your experiences with death lead you to support view #2, it leads me to wonder how that would work. I've known quite a few people who have died or had serious illnesses too. Even if they'd all happened to have had psychological problems, which they didn't, I still wouldn't be willing to generalize to view #2 for the broader reasons given in the post.
YVES: As far as smoking, diet, and the whole category of lifestyle goes, clearly the mind affects the body in thes cases because taking certain decisions involves doing things that are bad/good for our bodies. So this isn't a direct mind-body connection, it's indirect, running as follows:
Lifestyle choices are a mental activity; these lead to physical actions/inactions such as whether to smoke or jog; such physical actions/inactions impact our bodies.
The placebo effect is very real. They literally have to control for it to prove a new drug is effective. It's that powerful. There are that many people in the general population who, told that a placebo is medicine, will report improvement in their symptoms.
And no matter how interelated the psych and the body are, they're also differentiable. You break your arm, you go to the doctor. You have issues with your mother, you go to a psychologist.
Ignoring emotional messages certainly isn't helpful psychologically. As far as impacts on the body go, my guess would be that the indirect impacts via poor lifestyle choices would be substantial and contribute to a wide array of diseases.
I'm sure that for some individuals and some illnesses, the direct physical health impacts of ignoring our emotional status are significant too - but I'd keep this in the broader perspective I outlined in my detailing of view #1.
For example, you mentioned CFS and depression - seems like in a case like that, awareness of the causes of the depression would help. Or take hypertension. Anger can contribute to elevated blood pressure - although I don't know how much it matters whether the anger is repressed or expressed. I happen to know someone with this problem who's well aware that her blood pressure reaches dangerous levels at times when she very much feels angry in the moment. So it may be that the important thing here is being less characteristically angry, regardless of whether it's a seething or overt anger.
I think we have a different agenda. I'm trying to make discoveries and share them, whilst you take security in the views of the presumed-wise majority. Everything I say (& perhaps others say, I haven't monitored them so closely) you laboriously reshape to fit the ideas you've already established!
My posts and responses have been based on facts and drawing distinctions that appear sound to me. If you think otherwise I’m always open to substantive comments and other points of view. This doesn’t mean that I won’t think about them critically, just as I think critically about my own ideas in the course of developing them.
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