WHEN it comes to determining the causes of illness, medical doctors generally pay little or no importance at all to the role the patient?s mind plays.

During the late 1930s, it was presumed by medical science that all diseases are caused by some disease-causing agent or organism known as pathogens, such as microbes, bacteria or viruses. All that the doctor needs to do is to find the pathogen, kill them with antibiotics or remove them through surgery, and the patient gets well.

This simplistic view of the causes of a person?s illness did not sit well with Austro-Hungarian physician named Doctor Hans Selye. So he took a leave of absence from his medical practice to embark on a pioneering research which forever changed the way medical science regarded the causes of illness.

Studying at first the behavior of animals, Selye discovered what has since become known as the ?fight-or-flight? syndrome, which was the animal?s survival mechanism. If the fight-or-flight syndrome is suppressed, or not allowed to take its natural course, it led to disease.

The suppression of the fight-or-flight syndrome is what gives rise to stress. Stress, he found, can lead to organic ailments. What are some of these diseases which Selye and later researchers discovered to be caused by stress? Headaches and migraines, gastritis and hyperacidity, ulcers, insomnia, asthma, premenstrual syndrome in women, certain types of heart ailments and even some types of cancer.

Greek, Egyptian healers

That our mind can make us ill is nothing new. The early Greek and Egyptian healers before the time of Christ knew that all along. What they did not know was the mechanism by which the mind affects the body. It was only in the mid-20th century with the advance of neuro-science and the development of modern sensitive instruments that science began to realize the intimate connections among the mind, body and emotions.

A documented classic example of how the mind affects the body is illustrated by the following case as related by Emile Coue, a French pharmacist and healer who was a pioneer in what has become known as suggestology, that is, that the mind can create actual physical changes by suggestion or affirmation.

A man who suffered from asthmatic attacks went to another town and checked in a hotel he was not familiar with. One evening, while in bed, he felt the onset of impending asthmatic attack. Usually all he had to do when having an attack was to open the window, breathe some fresh air and his asthmatic attack would go away.

But he was in a dark room in an unfamiliar place. He was getting desperate because he could now feel the asthmatic attack getting worse. Not wasting time to open the unfamiliar window, he got hold of a chair and hurled it against the glass which broke into pieces. Then he put his head out and breathed in what he thought was fresh air and his asthmatic attack was soon gone. Then he went back to sleep.

Next morning, he looked at what he had broken and discovered it was an old grandfather?s clock. His hotel room did not have any window.

There are many documented examples of the tremendous influence of our mind and emotions over our physical body. And therefore medical doctors can no longer ignore the role that the patient mind plays in what causes illness. Giving him a drug or pill may work for most people but may not work at all for some, unless how he thinks is taken into consideration. The mind can certainly cause illness, but it can also effect a cure.

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