The Myth of Normal 40

disease, but in many conditions, they represent dominant influences.”[13] The revered Hungarian-American clinician added that “mental factors represent as active a force in the treatment of patients as chemical and physical agents.” He made these comments not as a psychoanalytic theoretician, but as a respected practitioner of pathophysiology and pharmacotherapy—the use of medications in treating illness. At Harvard Medical School, Weiss’s memory is kept alive by a yearly research day in his honor, yet his integrative perspective, and the extensive scientific literature now supporting it, still elude conventional medical thinking. “The mind-body stuff is historically something that one pursues at great peril to their career at Harvard,” a leading physician and academic at that hallowed institution told me recently. “That’s starting to change, but it’s a very difficult thing.”[14] Difficult indeed. When I give talks, I often ask audience members to raise their hands if, in the past five years, they have visited a neurologist, cardiologist, respirologist, rheumatologist, gastroenterologist, dermatologist, immunologist—“any kind of a medical ologist,” I say. Many hands shoot up. “Now keep your hands up,” I continue, “if these specialists asked you about your childhood stresses or traumas, your relationship with your parents, the quality of your current relationships, your degree of loneliness or companionship, your job satisfaction and how you relate to work, how you feel about your boss or how your boss treats you, your experience of joy or anger, any present stresses, or how you feel about yourself as a person.” In rooms packed with hundreds of people, the number of hands remaining elevated can most often be counted on the fingers of one of them. “And yet,” I add, “those unasked questions had everything to do with why most of you had reason to seek medical help.” For all that, a clear picture is emerging as modern research confirms traditional wisdom. A (relatively) new science, psychoneuroimmunology maps the myriad pathways of the bodymind unity; its field of study includes the connections between emotions and our nervous and immune systems, and how stress might instigate disease. Even “connection” is a misleading word: only entities distinct from each other can be connected, whereas reality knows only oneness. Sometimes referred to even more tongue-twistingly as