The Cure Within, Anne Harrington, medical history | Salon Life

[Guest guest]

Some of you may be interested in this article. It doesn't take long to read.

You have to get past the ad.

http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2008/01/26/cure_within/

Mind-body medicine is the belief that thoughts and feelings have the power

to both sicken the body and heal it. In " The Cure Within: A History of

Mind-Body Medicine, " Harvard professor Anne Harrington traces the migration

of this idea from the alternative-health margins into the mainstream. The

chairwoman of the history of science department at Harvard University,

Harrington is less concerned with debunking dubious theories about magically

thinking yourself well than she is with understanding where these beliefs

come from, how they shape our experience of illness and why they persist.

Snip

What is mind-body medicine?

It's a lot of different things, and that's what makes it both interesting

and controversial and why people fight so much about it. Mind-body medicine

is a patchwork of ideas about the way in which we think that our minds make

us sick, and might make us well. The big ideas influence how we think about

disease, how we seek out different care for ourselves, even how we

experience our bodies in health and illness.

Snip

In our fears around placebos and the effects of placebos.

The placebo effect was initially understood to be powered by the power of

suggestion. They're inert pills or tonics or powders -- why do they work?

Well, they don't really work, but patients think they work, and they think

they work because their doctors tell them they're going to work, and it's

really just suggestion.

Since the early 1980s, our thinking about the placebo effect has undergone a

sea change. We now think if you take a placebo, and you believe it's going

to work, your brain is going to change, and that might in turn lead to a

cascade of effects that will cause your body to heal faster.

Our thinking about the placebo has shifted from the power of the authority

figure to the power of our own positive thinking?