Leave a pendulum to its own devices and it most assuredly will swing the other way. So it has been lately with a theory of health and healing that treats the mind as a weapon at least as powerful as the best of modern medicaments. After nearly a century stuck on the side of the body, the pendulum has recently cut a wide arc towards the mind.
For most of human history, medicine was little more than a bag of mind altering tricks. Except for some potent herbs that later became the basis for effective pharmaceuticals, the early healers had little more going for them than their ability to inspire trust and invoke images of recovery.
In fact, it was not until the advent of scientific medicine near the turn of this century that physical ministrations began to overshadow and at times nearly obliterate the impact of mental states on resistance to and recovery from illness.
In the 1940's and 50's there was a brief revival of interest in the impact of mind on body as few renowned psychiatrists formulated and popularised what came to be known as psychosomatic medicine. This discipline depicted emotional upheaval and certain personality types as important contributors to certain physical ailments, suggesting that adjustments in feelings and thoughts might prevent disease or promote recovery. Unfortunately, rather than pursue scientifically the many remedial hints offered by psychosomatics, physicians who heeded the field at all tended to dismiss such diseases as all in the mind and their victims as crocks who took up far too much of the doctor's time or they simply shipped such patients off to psychiatrists.
Just in the last few years, researchers have shown, for example, placebos influence brain chemicals that in turn can relieve pain and promote healing that undue emotional stress can depress the body's immunological responses, and that an aggressive attitude toward illness can bolster those responses.
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Source: The News
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