The moment I walked in to teach my first class in medical ethics, I could see by the skepticism on the faces of the fledgling physicians that I had my work cut out for me.
Philosophers have ideas and theories.
My point made, we began a fruitful semester of thinking together about the nature of illness, dis-ease, and healing. A moment's reflection on the human condition should tell us that in principle we can never reduce the process of healing to a purely physical science. Our bodies are mechanisms, but they are strangely influenced and informed by the ways we think about them. Like a love affair, the body-mind relationship is in part a product of our beliefs about it. Who we are is inseparable from our myths of self.