Behavioural conditioning of the
|The brain hemispheres and immunity|
|The role of the autonomic nervous system|
|The HPA axis|
|Behavioural conditioning and placebo
|Clinical significance of immune
It was an experimental study of conditioning effects that launched the whole field of psychoneuroimmunology. When I first learned in the early eighties that Robert Ader had (inadvertently) conditioned a down‐ regulation of his laboratory rats' immune system, it was like hearing the missing link had been discovered. Dr Clow deftly overviews the short history of PNI, leading us into a fascinating territory of pathways that translate psychological experiences into physiological and pathophysiological change. This chapter begins to put pieces of the jigsaw together: mind, brain, stress, self-healing and immunity. She demonstrates just how far we have come from the idea that non-pharmacological therapeutic effects are simply 'all in the mind'. For there is more to the new psychosomatics than that: if the term formerly implied that the mind can undermine well-being, then here she presents some of the experimental evidence for beneficial psychosomatic processes. Does this mean mainstream medicine could embrace a scientific approach to triggering self-healing? Could they be integrated into conventional treatment—even, as research alluded to here suggests, into high-tech areas such as cancer chemotherapy? This chapter gives grounds for believing that the term 'placebo' response may disguise quite specific effects, and this has important implications for our understanding of complementary and mind—body therapies.
The study of the relationship between the brain and immune system has given rise to the interdisciplinary area of research known as