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Mind-body medicine

Mind-body medicine can help to heal diseases and promote health. In order to understand how, we need first to understand the unified mindbody dynamics that make it possible, on a molecular level, for these emerging new therapies to work. This chapter updates the concept of the human organism as a psychosomatic network, rooted in neuropeptides and their receptors; provides recent data on the clinical relevance of neuropeptide receptor interactions for various human diseases; and offers new evidence that emotions are a bridge between mind and body, including data demonstrating that mind-body interventions that facilitate emotional expression can result in physiological healing. The broad view of the unified body-mind that emerges here is not only more complete; it is qualitatively different: a vision not only of mind-body interactions but also of dynamic mind-body unity. In this vision the integrity of the bodymind is protected and preserved by an internal healing system—a multidimensional entity guided by emotions and their biochemical substrates—vibrating with intelligence and purpose, with few, if any, functional boundaries inside the human organism.

While cells and substances we associate with mind and body are indeed connected by physical pathways, state-of-the-art investigations reveal that these very cells and substances can no longer be associated with just mind or just body. For instance, neurons make the same products that white blood cells do, and vice versa: the two groups of cells not only communicate with each other, they speak the same molecular language. Thus, the pathways “connecting” them do not join two otherwise unrelated entities. They are interlacing roadways within the geography of one vast, complex system of components that are frequently interchangeable with regard to functions we usually identify with mind or body.