Mind-body connection

Western medicine needs to study the mind-body connection more.

The year was 1932, and Mary Knight was nine months pregnant. She had felt the baby kicking for a while now, and she knew it was nearly due. But, as money was tight, Mary had put off seeing a doctor. She only made a visit to Dr. Monroe when she felt she was close to delivering.

During the check-up, everything looked as it should. Mary’s abdomen was enlarged, her breasts were swollen, and her nipples were mottled. But something wasn’t right. Her navel wasn’t pushed out. When the doctor put his stethoscope to her belly, he couldn’t find the baby’s heartbeat. Had she miscarried? No, she hadn’t. As it turned out, there had never been a fetus at all.

Mary had a case of pseudocyesis, or phantom pregnancy. This is a real, albeit quite rare, disorder that still affects women today. They develop all the physical symptoms of a real pregnancy – their menstruation stops, lactation begins, they even feel morning sickness. But there’s one critical difference: there’s no fetus.

Pseudocyesis is a curious syndrome because it seems to be a case of the mind acting on the body in a profound way. It seems to occur only in women who have a deep desire to be pregnant or, conversely, a deep desire not to be. This desire produces actual bodily symptoms of pregnancy, which then reinforce the woman’s belief that she is pregnant.

It’s also further cause to examine the relationship between the mind and the body. If the mind can conjure a pregnancy, what else can it do?

The medical literature is full of similarly strange, and sometimes dubious, cases of apparent mind-body interaction – for instance, cases of people’s hair turning stark white after a terrible fright. There are cases of people with a pollen allergy suffering a reaction after exposure to a plastic flower. There are even instances where warts have fallen off the body after hypnosis.

Western doctors have been generally skeptical of mind-body interaction, and they’re quite right to be. Skepticism is healthy in science and truly a virtue in scientific inquiry. However, when skepticism takes the form of an unjustified prejudice against unusual ideas, then it may actually obstruct potentially useful research.

It’s time that scientists let go of their prejudices against mind-body interaction and, instead, submit these claims to rigorous testing.