On FB I once suggested to group who called themselves Skeptics that when you next see your GP as him/her if there is more to chronic illness than pure biology? A woman who I suspect is a stooge for big pharma, replied she had too much respect to ask her GP such a question. Does this reply make sense to you? To my mind it is a typical nonsensical answer from corporate stooge. Whenever I have asked any doctor the question I have always got an affirmative answer.
Yes, but that seems to me to still be under the umbrella of "biology". I think if you mention in your question that you are referring to psychosomatic illness then you will get very different responses. The question as you stated it lacks context and sounds like you are looking for a supernatural answer.
I'm not sure. Some people I know, mainly older, people seem to have the attitude that doctors are some kind of demi gods whose word is absolute. But maybe this woman was a corporate drone. I think it's pretty obvious that there are psychological elements in a lot of chronic illnesses, as well as a purely physical side. On the other hand, I'm not at all sure about claims that are made by some that they've healed themselves of incurable conditions purely by the power of mind - positive thinking, refusal to accept defeat etc. But if you are ill but can still remain cheerful it probably does go some way towards mitigating the symptoms.
Years ago I came to realise that official medical advice was not always 100% correct but general practitioners have to act within certain dogmatic guidelines or they can be investigated.I was also thinking the the woman night have been a corporate drone.
i do indeed believe there are significant emotional and social factors. that stress has a serious negative effect of physical health as well as mental, and that even death can and sometimes does result from it. i don't believe these factors are a matter of the infuence of non-physical beings or anything like that, though cultural factors which create stress may often result from what people choose to believe about them.
When I first lived in Japan, I came down with a case of dysentary. There is a strain of bacillary dysentary in Japan that is not as common as it once was, but it still exists. The first night was pretty scary, until the next day when I felt a bit better---I got to the library of the university I was attending and was able to self-diagnose it in some english Medical texts. I then went to a docrtor and told him what I thought I had----his clinic (out of his home) was closed, but he listened while I described it----but I was saving the worse symptom for last-----he stopped me before I got to that symptom, and told me I didn't have it----he then gave me a bunch of medicine and told me to come back the next day when he was open. I walked away and through all the medicine in a trash can at the train station----I couldn't believe he would diagnose before I finished. The very next time I came back to America, I bought a Merck Manual-----all the years that I traveled and lived in Asia, I held onto that Merck Manual----It was very useful in the Philippines and possibly saved my life---when I developed asthma-----Philippine doctors generally believed that if I was not born with Asthma, I did not have it. I still have that Merck Manualm, and use it whenever I get medical advice. (I am not talking about the cheaper layman's merck that came out in later years-----but the bona fide one used by doctors.) By the way, the symptom that I never got to that would have completed the diagnosis of dysentary----has to do with the Japanese name for dysentary: sekiri----seki means red, and ri comes from geri, or diarrhea. In other words, red diarrhea. Anyway----in terms of alternative medicine and such things, I used to be pretty much a skeptic. Even herbal medicine never worked for me. But not anymore. I don't know if I could even remember all the miraculous healings I have seen over the past 7 or 8 years. I have experienced all these while participating in indigenous spiritual ways. I have written about this in a few other threads. Most recently I saw spirits heal a man of heart disease in a yuwipi (spirit calling ceremony), A man was healed of kidney stones in a healing ceremony in a sweat lodge. A woman was cured of breast cancer in another healing ceremony in a sweat lodge. In the first case the individual never returned to IHS (Indian Health Services) for treatment, but all his symptoms left him (They wanted to crush the numerous stones with sound waves). We had the sweat for the woman in the latter case a week and a half after her biopsy. We tried to do it the previous weekend but she was too sick to make it, so we just held the sweat and prayed for her. The healing sweat was a week later when she was able to come. After that she returned to IHS and they said there was no sign of any cancer and the tumors were gone. The list goes on...
Mental diseas is still biological because it happens in the brain so this question doesn't make sense . Maybe you could word it diffrently?
The same woman called me "incredibly dim-witted" because I did not consider a press release from a pharmaceutical company to be a source of expert, unbiased, disinterested information.
those begin as perceptions, but become physiological. the body does respond to perception. but once they begin to manifest in some phsiological manor, then, whatever their origen, they have become biological. so this does nothing to change the nonsensicalness of the origeonal question. now there are lots of other forms of trauma besides illness, mechanical injuries of all sorts for example, gunshot wounds, car wrecks and so on, but illness specifically refers a disfunction of an individual's internal environment, usually itself of a biological source, e.g. bactiria and virus, though it can sometimes begin from other causes such as mechanical traumas or radiation. and yes, illness inducing traumas can originate with 'phantom' perceptions. but there are no logical answers to a question that excludes logic. other then the exclusion of logic itself being at its source.
Biology is a physical science, in other words a science based in, and about, physicality. This is especially true after Kant separated science from religion, metaphysics, and abstract mental things in his Critique of Pure Reason. The mind, by definition, is nonphysical. While the brain reflects physical phenomena associated with the mind, and therefore represents biological aspects of mental illness and psychomsomatic diseases. But there is a greater nonphysical component to this issue. A biologist, for example, is not a psychologist. In both cases of psychosomatic illness and mental illness, biological cures, drugs for example, do not cure the illness, or the underlying causes of the illness, they simply control the illness, or lessen its symptoms. (Granted psychedelics have been shown to help patients deal directly with mental problems that are at the root of such illnesses, but this is not through biology but through the nonphysical states their biology induces---hallucinations are no more physical than the mind, and that is also by definition of the physical.) But let me bring up another case. My dad had prostate cancer. He had been doing radiation therapy and at first he seemed to get better. The doctor was insisting that he was getting better. But then he seemed to get worse. My mom kept insisting that he go to a different doctor. Finally he did and that doctor said that it was not getting better, in fact, it had metastized into his bone. When I heard about this, I suggested that it was time that he considered doing ceremony--let a medicine man heal him. Now my parents are christians, there is no Native blood in any of us as far aswe know, and so I didn't think he would do it, but I explained how I had seen so many healings through the Native ways. To my surprise and delight, he agreed to try that. We took him to a Lakota Medicine Man I knew to do an opagi---this is a ceremony where you go to a medicine man bringing a sacred pipe, or at least a gift of tobacco, and ask for help. The Medicine Man will pray with the pipe (or his if you don't have one) and pass the pipe around (my parents also don't smoke--another reason why I thought they would not do this), and will then advise you on the problem and then typically tells you exactly what will happen (how the person will be healed or the problem resolved). He told my dad that he should do a yuwipi ceremony--a spirit calling ceremony, and, as often happens, told him exactly how he would be healed. My mom and dad had no idea what they were in for, but they prepared as they were told, and on the night of the ceremony, with all kinds of natives from all over the Denver Metro area in attendance--they experienced the nonphysical in a way that cannot be rationally defined. There were no tricks, no gimmicks, but spirits came in and healed my dad. That was a year or two ago (you can see my post in the Animism section about the time it happened.) A few months ago, my dad had another follow up physical and he is still cancer free today. His healing took place just as the Medicine Man said. Medically speaking, the cancer was a biological condition. But biology was not healing him, in fact it was making him worse. Nothing physical happened to him in that ceremony. There was no fake incisions where a healer pulled out chicken blood and a gizzard for example---like so many fakes in the Philippines were doing. No one even touched my dad. But the spirits came in and surrounded my dad, my mom, and myself, nothing entered him, we were brushed with feathers and wings from the spirits, which included an eagle and another bird (and other spirits), and he was healed. Therefore in the case of my dad, the question of the OP is even more valid than you guys are accepting it to be...
