A Fighting Spirit Won’t Save Your Life

[groovedaddy]

(What about the placebo effect? gd)

GABRIELLE GIFFORDS’S remarkable recovery from a bullet to her head has provided a heartening respite from a national calamity. Representative Giffords’s husband describes her as a “fighter,” and no doubt she is one. Whether her recovery has anything to do with a fighting spirit, however, is another matter entirely.

The idea that an individual has power over his health has a long history in American popular culture. The “mind cure” movements of the 1800s were based on the premise that we can control our well-being. In the middle of that century, Phineas Quimby, a philosopher and healer, popularized the view that illness was the product of mistaken beliefs, that it was possible to cure yourself by correcting your thoughts. Fifty years later, the New Thought movement, which the psychologist and philosopher William James called “the religion of the healthy minded,” expressed a very similar view: by focusing on positive thoughts and avoiding negative ones, people could banish illness.

The idea that people can control their own health has persisted through Norman Vincent Peale’s “Power of Positive Thinking,” in 1952, to a popular book today, “The Secret,” by Rhonda Byrne, which teaches that to achieve good health all we have to do is to direct our requests to the universe.

It’s true that in some respects we do have control over our health. By exercising, eating nutritious foods and not smoking, we reduce our risk of heart disease and cancer. But the belief that a fighting spirit helps us to recover from injury or illness goes beyond healthful behavior. It reflects the persistent view that personality or a way of thinking can raise or reduce the likelihood of illness.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/25/opinion/25sloan.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha212

[bemildred]

1. It is magical thinking, yes ... nt

[snagglepuss]

3. Not completely. Someone with a fighting spirit is probably more apt to

seek a second opinion, follow doctors orders, change behaviours.

[bemildred]

4. How did they get that "fighting spirit"?

Where did it come from? Did they will themselves to have a "fighting spirit" or is it something that happened to them? Isn't there a chicken or egg problem there, a circular argument? I am not advocating being depressed and passive, every day is precious, but it is magical thinking to think that you can just make yourself something you are not by an act of will, by gritting your teeth hard.

[Big Blue Marble]

7. Is that not what we do everyday of our lives?

Make ourselves something we are not. It is called growth. I lost 55 pounds last year by an act of will. I am now
a fitter, stronger, and yes a healthier person. I fought quite hard to achieve these goals as I continue do so everyday.

If that is your definition of magical thinking, I'll take it
It surely worked for me!

[bemildred]

12. That is not my definition of magical thinking, that is my definition of doing something.

I would wager you did more than think positively about it. I am just pointing out, as Dirty Harry said, that a man has to know his limitations.

(And good for you, you can be rightly proud.)

[patrice]

15. Magical thinkers do something too, like make the sign of the cross etc., so the

questions are about the perception and the validity of connections between doing and effect.

Perception may be necessary, but not sufficient, for the validity of some connections; other connections are more directly hardwired, no matter how they are perceived.

[bemildred]

16. "Reality is that which, when you stop believeing in it, it doesn't go away." – Philip K. Dick

Magical thinkers, to me, are people who think that words (and other symbols) have effects all by themselves, as opposed to people who understand that words have effect solely by virtue of human beings and what they get human beings to do.

[patrice]

10. Not necessarily. Depends upon the inertial states of relevant systems. That's what biofeedback is.nt

[bemildred]

13. Thanks for clearing that up. nt

[patrice]

14. Even emergent properties have their root causes in physical events. This is why

it is possible to say something like, "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts."

Though limitations inherent to the nature of proof allow us to hypothesize anything, we should avoid abusing gestalts and avoiding the abuse of hypothetical gestalts includes not only that we should avoid embracing too many of them too completely, but also that we should avoid rejecting too many of them out of hand.

[bemildred]

17. Emergent properties occur in the context of changes in scale.

Collections of things often are able to self-organize in interesting ways, one can even see this in quite simple formal systems like the game of life, not to mention real life. And it is worth remembering that formal systems - to the extent they are interesting - also turn out to be incomplete, simplifications. I am certainly not trying to say that strange and magical things never happen, but one ought not think that such things are something we have a good handle on.

[ladjf]

2. The best way to control your health is to learn all you can about

nutrition and healthy lifestyles. Beyond that it is very important the individuals have regular checkups for the main life health threats. Many lives are saved by regular reviews of vital aspects of your health, i.e. blood tests, stress tests.

[Big Blue Marble]

5. This is Dr. sloan's opinion written in his op-ed

not a news headline. One must subscribe to his definition of person and personality are to understand his agenda. If you agree with
those basic assumptions, his arguments may well seem sound. If your model of human personality is more expansive, then you will
strongly disagree with his premise and his conclusion as I do.

The worst aspect of the modern medical model of healing is that it attempts to strip inner personal empowerment from every nearly every
vestige of the process. This is yet one more example of this chilling aspect of our medical industry.

[trotsky]

6. You let us know when someone's "inner personal empowerment" regrows a limb.

Or for that matter, just a finger. Surely that can't be impossible for a "more expansive... model of human personality," right?

[groovedaddy]

8. There are spontaneous remissions and, as I said when I posted the op-ed, there is the

placebo effect, which are medically viewed as 2 distinct phenomenon. Not that either has anything to do with a "fighting spirit." We are gaining more and more understanding about how the mind works (wherein the personality resides, right?) but when you talk to researchers, they will admit that we are only scratching the surface.

[patrice]

9. Something is not nothing. The difference in the two perspectives could be a matter of different

inertial states in process(es).

You are correct, there are configurations of physical processes for which psychological adaptations ARE too "after-the-fact", or if psychology does have an effect in such environments, it's in an order that we cannot perceive, perhaps just a difference of degree between one qualitative state as compared to another in some sub-set.

That doesn't mean, given a different set of inertial conditions in significant process(es), before they reach critical mass/inertia, that those conditions can't be affected by a psychological adaptation that leads to one "small" functionally adaptive behavior, which leads to another "small" behavior, which leads to another . . .

[trotsky]

18. So there *are* limits.

The power of spirit is limited and isn't enough. Thanks for acknowledging.

[patrice]

11. A "fighting spirit" is likely to cause you to go exercise, rather than get the gun off of the

closet shelf, when you're depressed.