Heroes Not Zombies

For a while I was quite taken by the idea of “mind body medicine”. I was even impressed by how, in the US and in Japan, I could find “Mind Body Medicine clinics”. However, for me, the idea has worn off. It just doesn’t work for me any more. Here’s why.

The good intention behind the “mind body medicine” idea is to stitch back together what the advocates claim Descartes separated. It signalled the intention to address the subjective experience of the patient, and not just the objective body. All well and good.

However, what I don’t like is that it continues the delusion of two separate entities – a body, and, a mind – as if these are two different “things” which are linked in some way. But I don’t think it’s like that. I’ve never met a mind without a body, and I’ve only met a body without a mind in the mortuary. Is it ever sensible to focus exclusively on the body, or on the mind, if your job is to provide health care to human beings? I don’t think so.

Worse than that, many people seem to associate “mind” with psychological issues (or in terms of mental health, with psychiatric ones). Yet there is a lot more to the mind than cognition – particularly once you start to understand the mind as “an embodied, relational, process of regulation of energy and information flow“. Or if you begin to understand both the embodied and the extended nature of mind. Discovering the phenomenon of neural networks around the hollow organs of the body, particularly the heart and the gut, made sense for me of those phrases which up to that point seemed mere metaphors – “heart felt”, “heart broken”, “gut feeling”. The mind can’t be corralled into the skull!

The other experience I encounter frequently is one where someone has pain, or dizziness, or nausea, or fatigue, or something, and “all the tests are normal”, so they are told, “Good news. There’s nothing wrong with you”. But they’re still debilitated by their symptoms…..so, what now? “It’s in your head” – which means, either “you’re making it up”, or, “you’re mentally ill”. I think that’s a lousy way to make a diagnosis. If someone has a mental illness, it should be properly diagnosed and understood. And, more importantly, why assume a person is “making it up” if you can’t find any abnormal blood tests? Isn’t trust a foundation of successful medical practice?

The understanding of the concept of “complex adaptive systems” helps us to see that people are whole organisms, that health cannot be reduced to the sum of component parts, and that any disturbance within the organism is likely to produce changes throughout that organism and not be confined to single organs – not even the brain!

I do hope the medicine of the future will start from this perspective – holistic and patient-centred, based on trust and the ability to avoid subdividing people into the delusional idea of two entities – a body, and a mind.