Psychosomatic Medicine: a Meeting Ground for Oriental and Occidental Medical Theory and Practice

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Abstract
This paper makes three major points indicating that the field of psychosomatic medicine represents a common meeting ground for Eastern-Western medical theory and practice. The first point emphasizes that oriental physicians raised in Eastern religious and philosophical environment can more readily accept the importance of spiritual experience in their practice of medicine as well as in the conduct of family life and social relationships. Oriental theories of medicine and treatment have for some time reflected, accommodated, and incorporated principles, techniques, and practices from Zen, Yoga, various forms of meditation, etc. On the other hand, Western physicians have been grounded in a more mechanistic philosophical matrix and developed more and more sophistication in biology and increasingly reductionistic biomedical models of disease. While they remained mindful of the clinical correlations between psychosocial stress and vicissitudes of illness, they preferred to a large degree to relegate this aspect to the ‘art of medicine’ and with some notable exceptions left the field largely to the psychiatric, psychologic and social disciplines. The second point is that the past two decades, however, have seen tremendous advances in neurobiological sciences which powerfully implicate central nervous system mechanisms – particularly psychoneuroendocrine reactions to stress, including psychosocial stress, in pathogenesis of medical illness. These developments virtually demand a bio-psychosocial model and are forcing the attention of physicians – both internists and psychiatrists – in the United States (and many other parts of the West) back to confronting mysteries of mind-brain and brain-body relationships. These developments point increasingly as well to the importance and great potential of psychoanalysis both as theory and method for participating in and contributing to further progress in psychosomatic medicine. The major thrust of these advances has made it clear that states of health and illness can only be understood fully in terms of three parameters, the biological, psychological, and social. The third point is that the complex of central nervous system mechanisms that link the psychosocial realm with the physiologic realm are vitally involved in maintenance of health. For a variety of empirical and theoretical reasons, relaxation and biofeedback methods as well as various forms of psychotherapy and sociotherapy are now finding their way into medical practice and research in the United States along with more conventional and long accepted procedures and practices. The East-West gap or polarity is fast disappearing.

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