Newsgroups: sci.med
Subject: Re: Bernie Siegel & Cancer
From: RGINZBERG@eagle.wesleyan.edu (Ruth Ginzberg)
Date: 16 Oct 92 10:02:04 EDT
Distribution: world
Organization: Philosophy Dept., Wesleyan University
X-News-Reader: VMS NEWS 1.20In-Reply-To: markr@sound.cts.com's message of Thu, 15 Oct 92 19:17:36 PDTLines: 62

In <2JTPsB3w165w@sound.cts.com> markr@sound.cts.com writes:
> 
> Bernie talks about asking your self "Why do I need this desease". After
> thinking about this, and finally telling myself that I don't need, I
> started to improve. It is now finally gone, 

Isn't this a throwback to a previous day, when people thought that disease was
punishment for sin?  I always thought that one of the more important advances
of the Scientific Revolution was to take away the guilt caused by magical
thinking  -- e.g., believing that one has a disease because one hasn't ______
(fill in the blank: prayed, worked, repented, believed, gotten one's act
together, etc.) enough. IMHO, this type of victim-blaming plays right into the
hands of those who think that (e.g.) AIDS is a punishment for some real or
imagined sin, so why spend money on research into curing it; babies are the
punishment for having heterosex, so why give women with unwanted pregnancies
the option of abortion; liver disease caused by drinking is less deserving of
treatment than liver disease in non-drinkers;  heart disease is the victim's
fault for not exercising enough, etc., etc., etc.  You know, the Kimberley
Bergalis (sp?) complaint:  she testified before the U.S. congress that she
didn't "deserve" AIDS because she "hadn't done anything wrong."

You claim that psychological self-examination cured your chronic bronchitis. 
While I don't doubt that psychological self-examination may help relieve stress
of some sorts, and freedom from stress certainly may help the immune system do
its job the best that it can, I seriously doubt that any kind of mental act
(other than maybe a decision to quit smoking, followed by actually doing so)
can have a positive causal impact on recovery from chronic bronchitis.  It may
help relieve a cough or vomiting (your symptoms) of psychological origin.  It
also may help you feel less stressed out while your *acute* (not chronic)
bronchitis plays itself out (it is a self-limiting disease).  Or it may help
you *feel* less (mentally) bothered by your chronic cough and/or vomiting.

Now, I don't mean to start a flame war here; <insert favorite higher power>
knows, we have enough of them in sci.med already.  But I think the sort of
belief you are espousing has very, very seriously damaging physical,
psychological, and social consequences if widely adopted, so I wanted to
object.

What's more, (proponants of holistic health, take note please before composing
flames:) as a philosopher, I am QUITE aware that naive mind-body dualism has
just as many pitfalls as naive holism.  But naive psychologism (attributing all
bodily ills to mental states) is just as stupid as naive physicalism
(attributing all mental/emotional/spiritual states to physical causes ONLY).

CLEARLY mind & body (if one wants even to speak of them as two entities) affect
each other in intimate ways. [EX1:  You can (mentally) DECIDE to raise your left
hand, and that mental act can cause you, physically, to do it;  EX2: physical
states (like being sleep-deprived or hungry) can cause you MENTALLY to *desire*
sleep, food, or whatever.]  Clearly, also, psychological well-being improves
one's subjective experience of physical misery.  Clearly, too, physical
well-being improves one's psychological/mental/spiritual state.  I also FULLY
believe the various studies that show that (e.g.) happy people's wounds heal
faster, people whose psyches are thriving catch fewer viral or bacterial
infections than people whose psyches are beleaguered, etc., etc., etc.  But 
extrapolating these results to form a belief in the possibility of healing
physical disease through act of will ... no.

Sorry this is so Long.

------------------------
Ruth Ginzberg <rginzberg@eagle.wesleyan.edu>
Philosophy Department;Wesleyan University;USA