Mind-Body Medicine

1993

Bill Moyers (b. 1934)

Since the beginnings of recorded history, people have thought of the mind and body as linked in illness and health. Common examples include traditional Chinese medicine, with its concepts of chi and yin and yang, Ayurvedic and Unani medicine from India, and the temples of Asclepius in ancient Greece. It was only with the writings of the seventeenth-century philosopher René Descartes that the mind and body were separated to obviate potential religious objections to studying the functions of each. Closer to our own time, the Mind-Cure movement in America brought a renewed interest in mind and body relationships.

By the 1990s, the term mind-body medicine began to be used to refer to programmatic research and practice that incorporated a variety of techniques that made the whole person the focus of treatment. While no single individual was responsible for this change of focus, Bill Moyers’s 1993 book and television series Healing and the Mind presented mind-body medicine in a digestible format to millions of people around the world. Moyers’s show and book brought information about Stress reduction, meditation, the power of the Placebo Effect, non-Western healing practices, and other esoteric topics to a mass audience.

The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) television series had a large viewership, and the accompanying book was a best seller. Healing and the Mind became a major influence on the way Americans think about the role of the mind in health and sickness. For example, Moyers introduced Americans to the work of Jon Kabat-Zinn, a molecular biologist and professor at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. Kabat-Zinn founded the Stress Reduction Clinic there in 1979 and has taught hundreds of medical patients how to use Zen Buddhism–based mindfulness techniques to help them deal with their medical conditions. Mindfulness techniques have now spread to many domains of health care, including cognitive behavior therapy. Moyers’s influence played a major role in stimulating the US Congress to authorize the National Institutes of Health to create the Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. Thus, by the end of the twentieth century, psychological factors were officially recognized as playing a critical role in maintaining health and preventing disease.

SEE ALSO Mind-Cure (1859), Psychosomatic Medicine (1939), Stress (1950), Placebo Effect (1955), Biopsychosocial Model of Health (1977)

Theories of the mind–body linkage in illness and health date to at least 600 BCE, when the Yoga Upanishads made reference to chakras as psychic centers of consciousness. It was not until the eighth century CE, however, that Tantric Buddhism introduced the hierarchy of chakras running along the spine to the top of the head.