When the Body Says No

by Gabor Maté

That a specialist would dismiss the link between body and mind was not astonishing. Dualism—cleaving into two that which is one—colours all our beliefs on health and illness. We attempt to understand the body in isolation from the mind. We want to describe human beings—healthy or otherwise—as though they function in isolation from the environment in which they develop, live, work, play, love and die. These are the built-in, hidden biases of the medical orthodoxy that most physicians absorb during their training and carry into their practice. Unlike many other disciplines, medicine has yet to assimilate an important lesson of Einstein’s theory of relativity: that the position of an observer will influence the phenomenon being observed and affect the results of the observation. The unexamined assumptions of the scientist both determine and limit what he or she will discover, as the pioneering Czech-Canadian stress researcher Hans Selye pointed out. “Most people do not fully realize to what extent the spirit of scientific research and the lessons learned from it depend upon the personal viewpoints of the discoverers,” he wrote in The Stress of Life. “In an age so largely dependent upon science and scientists, this fundamental point deserves special attention.”1