Lynne Malcolm: Hello, you're with All in the Mind on RN, I'm Lynne Malcolm. And today the powerful connection between the mind, the body and our health.

Excerpt from The Connection:

It was always obvious in the ancient wisdom traditions that mind and body were interconnected, but somewhere along the line we created a dichotomy as if they were separate.

We came to believe that everything could be cured by drugs and surgeries, whereas to this day they can't.

When we talk about much of mind body phenomena we are talking about the nonphysical mind affecting the physical body. That's not allowed for in the Western scientific paradigm.

Modern science has shown us that the mind has the power to heal. We should use that capacity.

George Jelinek: I think this is a notion and a paradigm whose time has come. It makes much more sense for us to look at how people can be empowered to take control of their own health, to use their own initiative, their own healing resources to change their lifestyles rather than rely on a pharmaceutical maker to provide us with a drug that might ameliorate the symptoms for some time but do nothing much about the underlying disease.

Lynne Malcolm: That's George Jelinek, professor of emergency medicine at St Vincent's Hospital in Melbourne.

Before him, an excerpt from The Connection. It's a documentary produced by a young woman whose chronic illness led her to investigate the compelling field of mind body medicine. Shannon Harvey:

Shannon Harvey: Mind body medicine is the application of some of the remarkable research that is coming out proving that our mind, our brain and all our other systems in our body all interact to have an impact on our health. Scientists are calling the field psycho neuro immunology, and what they are talking about there is the way that the brain interacts with the immune system interacting with the endocrine system. And it has only really been in the last 5 to 10 years that scientists have been actually able to look at the mind and how it directly impacts our body, because of the development of wonderful scientific technologies like MRIs that enable us to actually look at what's going on in the brain and then be able to extend from that to look at what's going on in things like the immune system.

More here:
Mind body connection