Historically, medicine in modern society has defined its mission in terms of curing disease —the medical disorder—while overlooking illness —the patient's experience of disease. Patients, by going along with this view of their problem, join a quiet conspiracy to ignore how they are reacting emotionally to their medical problems—or to dismiss those reactions as irrelevant to the course of the problem itself. That attitude is reinforced by a medical model that dismisses entirely the idea that mind influences body in any consequential way.
