How we think about illness
Dr. Jerome Groopman, a Beth Israel Deaconess physician whose most recent book is “How Doctors Think,” delivers a meditation on how we think about illness as he reviews “The Cure Within: A History of Mind-Body Medicine” by Anne Harrington in Sunday’s New York Times Book Review.
Harrington, chairman of the history of science department at Harvard, has written a “splendid” history explaining how we connect emotions and illness to make sense of disease, he writes.
“Sometimes, of course, standard treatments don’t work or simply don’t exist. And sometimes tests fail to uncover any physical cause for a patient’s suffering at all,” he writes. “But such failures, Harrington argues, explain only part of the widespread dissatisfaction with mainstream medicine. Of equal or greater import, she writes, is medicine’s failure to address the ‘existential’ aspect of illness, to answer the questions ‘Why me? Why now? What next?’ ”
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Elizabeth Cooney covers health for the Worcester Telegram & Gazette. She
previously reported on business and was an editor at the paper. Earlier in
her career, she edited medical books and journals at Little, Brown, and
worked for Boston magazine.Boston Globe Health and Science staff:
- Karen Weintraub, Deputy Health and Science Editor
- Gideon Gil, Health and Science Editor
- Ishani Ganguli, Short White Coat blogger
- Joshua U. Klein, M.D., Short White Coat blogger
When are they going to get it that it's not necessarily thimerosal that causes autism, it's the challenge that the vaccine presents to an immature immune system?
We really, really should wait until children are at least five years old before starting vaccinations.
The effect of the Mind on the body is most often seen in the miracles at Lourdes in the South of France. There are many more pilgrimage centres in India where people throng to get rid of diseases which the allopaths have given up as untreatable.
I have been reading about a quadriplegic running a marathon in the U
SA. It is the indomitable Human Will with the blessings of the Lord you believe in.
This blogger might want to review your comment before posting it.