By Ronald Kotulak
Source: Chicago Tribune
Western medicine separated the mind from the body in the Middle Ages when the famous French philosopher and mathematician Rene Descartes agreed to accept flesh and bone as the province of physicians, while the Catholic Church claimed possession of the mind, insisting it was the creation of the soul.
But Descartes, whose works were placed on the Church's Index of Prohibited Books in 1667, believed the two really interacted in the brain. Using the fledging powers of observation and deductive reasoning that he was then developing, Descartes could conclude that "the mind is so intimately dependent upon the condition and relation of the organs of the body, that if any means can ever be found to render men wiser and more ingenious than hitherto, I believe that it is in medicine they must be sought for."
It's taken a long time, but doctors and psychologists are now bringing the mind and the body back together amid new evidence that the mind can improve the healing process in ways that traditional medicine can't.
Unlike earlier notions about the mind-body connection, which were often based on anecdotal stories or simply "gut" feelings, scientists now can document through powerful imaging technology what Descartes could only deduce, that our thoughts are capable of producing dramatic chemical and physical changes that directly affect our health.
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