This article in The Guardian written by Carmine M Pariante, a medical researcher and clinician who specialises in the biological communication between the body and the brain, is a great read for anyone interested in the mind-body approach to healing physical illnesses like Long Covid and CFS/ME. I find it so encouraging that western medicine is starting to acknowledge the importance of mental and emotional health in the treatment of physical illness. I pulled the following quote from the article:
“Stressful life events, such as bereavement, unemployment, incidents of abuse and violence, poverty or discrimination, can precipitate or exacerbate both mental and physical disorders. These events can lead to hypertension, an autoimmune flare-up, a cardiovascular problem or depression. Why would we want to separate these health impacts and put depression, or any mental disorder, in a separate box to the rest?
Conversely, changes in lifestyle and behaviour, and psychological therapies (which work by challenging unhelpful ways we think about ourselves and world around us), have been shown to help patients with physical disorders including cancer, irritable bowel syndrome, diabetes, multiple sclerosis and stroke, to name just a few.
This point is particularly important in the context of CFS/ME and, more recently, long Covid. Offering lifestyle changes or psychotherapeutic approaches to these patients does not mean that their symptoms are “not real”. Medics routinely help cancer patients with these approaches every day, yet I never hear anyone accusing doctors of suggesting cancer is all in the mind.”