Similarly, William Osler's description of diabetes as a disease of a neurotic temperament presumably resulted from an inadequate understanding of its pathological basis. Cancer is yet to be managed as effectively as tuberculosis or diabetes and remains ripe for psychological theories of cause and treatment. It is this attempt to make sense of the unknown, to control what cannot be controlled, that may explain the origin of some conceptions of mind-body medicine. Diseases like cancer seem to afflict and kill almost at random. They are beyond our control and our understanding.
Cancer becomes tamed, no longer such a threat.
It could be argued further that mind-body medicine is used to counter the spiritual malaise of increasingly secular societies. Mind-body medicine, with its simple arithmetic of mind and body, provides some straightforward answers. A number of forms of mind-body medicine can also be criticised on the grounds that they are profoundly parochial. In other words, they invoke beliefs about health in general which apply, if at all, only for say, middle-class, mentally competent adults in the late twentieth century in certain industrially developed countries. Evidence that mind-body medicine is determined by parochialism comes from the observation that the psychological states said to cause disease mirror prevailing social concerns.