MIND-BODY MEDICINE A CLINICIAN’S GUIDE TO

PSYCHONEURO- IMMUNOLOGY

EDITED BY ALAN WATKINS PUBLISHED BY

CHURCHILL LIVINGSTONE UK 525.00 / US $29.50 320 PAGES PAPERBACK ISBN: 0 443 05526 2

LC C omplementary alternative, and unconvenlional medical

practices are growing in popularity around the world. As the prevalence of these practices increases, it behoves the practitioner and scientist to sharpen both their critical thinking skills and their compassion to distinguish between what is useful and may become the medicine of the future and what is fanciful and should be discarded with the other ineffective methods of the past.”

These opening sentences well indicate the basic position - and tensions - upon which the book rests. The customers (patients) are voting with their feet as they seek complementary treatments. Allopathic

providers arc threatened, curious, and in increasing numbers aware that their role as all-knowing Iixers of disease is increasingly untenable and also uncomfortable.

I have no doubt that both clinicians (for which r-cad ‘doctors’) and many complementary therapists feel a great sense of relief at the relatively recent identification of the mind-body pathways by which ‘cellular intelligence’ works. Messenger molecules, receptors,

the quantum dimension of illness and healing help explain to allopathic medicine some of the evident and disquieting discrcpdncies in sickness, treatment and recovery, while at the same time offering the complementary practitioner a more rational and scientific basis for explaining how their therapies may actually operate. In this sense, a common language has been discovered which each community may begin to use to translate its concepts to the other, and to translate theirs in return.

Ernest Rossi as long ago as 1986 started to bring together cutting edge scientific research and known empirical hypnotic work on health. Deepak Chopra followed this in 1989 with his scintillating and lucid explorations. While this book lacks their pioneering excitement, it does a great favour to allopathic and complementary clinicians in summarising both the scientific infrastructure and the clinical implications and applications.

The word aromatherapy occurs only twice, in passing, but chapters on specific problem areas (the heart, cancer, HIV, the gut, allergies) and on issues (functional somatic symptoms, stress, nutrilion, substance misuse, ageing and self-care) can all be mined to underpin clinical work and to help build bridges to the medical profession, whose ultimate authority over the patient is still both legally and conventionally sanctioned. Allopathic clinicians, the book argues, have a duty to consider the wider picture: “. .to deliver high quality cart on all levels . ..it is necessary for them to broaden their understanding of how the different systems within the body interact and fully embrace the evidence demonstrating that taking care of the mental, emotional and spiritual aspects of a patient’s life is just as important as correcting physiological derangements.. Such notions are not fanciful, they are based on very sound scientific evidence.”

In turn, there is much here to help complementary colleagues with the identical aim in view.

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