For Hippocrates of Cos, father of medicine, the body had the intrinsic ability to heal itself and it was the physician’s duty to guide and facilitate this natural process. The disease was the result of an imbalance in which mind and character played an important role. Paper.
With the advent of modernity and the positivist scientific model, a new way of seeing and understanding the human body opens up. Descartes imposed his metaphysical vision, in which body and mind are separate and sometimes even opposite realities. I know him today, it was built on this basis. With the development of the humanities, the mind returned to medical practices, but still as a marginal factor, of irrelevant impact on health.
- Freud.
- An Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist.
- Faced these contradictions between mind and body during his training work.
- Patients who caught their interest had paralysis.
- Blindness and other symptoms.
- For which the medicine could not be explained.
- An intense research discipline and his fierce experimental spirit led him to discover the unconscious.
- This reality that would eventually allow to understand and cure these strange evils.
With the onset of psychoanalysis, the body is no longer a well-functioning organism, or badly, for strictly physical reasons, new discoveries have led to the conclusion that the body is also a space in which the unconscious is expressed. It had no place or cure in conventional medicine, it began to study with this new concept.
With Jacques Lacan, these ideas went even further and the body was defined as a book in which the mind writes its meanings.
These contributions did not influence daily medical practice, in fact, the unconscious and his influences are still seen with a certain smile of suspicion.
The mind is still considered a minor factor, and rarely taken into account, doctors seek peace of mind and good rest for patients, as it is clear that this helps in their healing, but, in general, it remains more faithful to the outcome of the laboratory than to the patient’s report. If you become depressed or very anxious during treatment, you will be given medication. There’s no time to solve otherwise.
As medicine and pharmaceuticals advance in history, other approaches are also gaining confidence and defending new perspectives in parallel, is this the case of homeopathy, ethnomedicine, bioenergy and this cluster of alternative medicines that sometimes resist, in the shadow?Scientism.
There are also more psychoanalytic orientations, as is the case with biopathography, heir to the studies of Viktor Von Weizsaecker, a German physician considered the father of anthropological medicine; from this perspective, the disease should be understood as an imbalance directly related to the unconscious, and cannot be cured without a detailed study of the history of each individual. In Argentina there is an important medical faculty, founded in 1967, which already has several studies and documents, which deserves to be taken seriously: the Chiozza Foundation.
Without a doubt, conventional medicine has made and continues to make decisive contributions to the relief of human pain, advances in this area defy imagination and turn out to be the difference between life and death, but alternative or complementary medicines also have much to contribute. Why are they treated like gamblers at the medical party?
The body and mind are an invisible unit. Hippocrates of Cos felt it from the beginning and, after a great historical journey, many other approaches coincide with what he proposed, it may not be a bad idea to listen to what the body tells us when it is sick, or to understand what it is. present in every discomfort. Maybe, if instead of drugs we were wondering, couldn’t we find him?Why, what if he? Our body decided to react this way.
Image credits: Dani Sardinian i Lizaran? Flickr