The best weapon against established facts is septicism

Hey !!

We've finally made it back to Iqaluit...from Japan and Montreal That was a hell of a ride. But we made it. Now its back to our -29 degrees and gorgious sceneries.

While in Japan I was talking to a friend about a theory that wants psychosocial behavior impacts on your health. The first reaction could be to say "well obviously" or not. But it is a very interesting way to start rethinking health.

If it does, what are the mechanisms behind? What would a scientific approach look like?

So I bought the book I was told about. It's called "Le langage de la guérison" or "the words that cures" (my own translation of the title) by Jean-Jacques Crèvecoeur. I'm not sure if it was ever translated in English. He started a PhD in physics and ended up studying the epistemology of science.

The book is quite interesting and at the same time disappointing. It is interesting as it offers a impressively complete framework to start studying psychosocial behavior's impact on health issues such as Breast Cancer. It suggest that unresolved psychosocial conflicts with your immediate family (brothers and sisters, parents, children) could result in the long term into cancer. But if the conflict is identified by the patient and that the patient works on it by talking and solving its psychosocial issue with its immediate family, the cancer will reverse and go away.

The disappointing part of the book, is that to explain it, rather than quoting studies on the mechanism behind this reaction of the brain from psychosocial stress and link them with patients health, he sites the work of a controversial German doctor Ryke Geerd Hamer. Dr. Hamer studies are no where to be found, never published, banned from hospitals, universities and imprisoned because he supposedly cured thousands of people from cancer without conventional medicine and was a treat to pharmaceutical corporations. Or, the other side of the coin, he was imprisoned because he asks people to stop taking their medication and they eventually die.. thus representing a public health risk.

The results of such imprisonment was a sudden raise of hundreds of "doctors" that can cure all kinds of disease with Dr. Hammer's theory.

The book's theory is somehow really interesting and absolutely worth the investments to better understand this approach. The benefit of such studies would :

(A) potentially allow us to better understand the relation of our psychosocial behavior and its environment on our health and

(B) allow us to properly certify doctors wishing to use this alternative medicine to eliminate any "charlatan". Just like other alternative medicine.

Finally, as for health or climate change, the best weapon against established facts is septicism ;)

jb