Name: Is Western Medicine Ignoring the Mind / Body Connection?
Uploaded: 2024-10-17T15:00:53.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Is Western Medicine Ignoring the Mind / Body Connection?' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-10-17. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Is Western Medicine Ignoring the Mind / Body Connection?' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-10-17. Transcript available.

a lot of your book that i've read so far it's about it's getting the part where
it's like
uh that western medicine doesn't always take into context as much that the body
and the mind like
us as an entire thing as our society as you know it's almost like in like if
safe like the whole
world and time and culture and everything were a car you know instead of the
doctor looking at the
car they just look at the human which would just be one part of the car yeah
and so they're always
just working on this one part instead of looking at the whole car which could
also be a cause of why
the part isn't doing well that's the whole point and um see what we have to
make a distinction here
there's western science okay then there's medical practice understood the two
are not the same
necessarily okay so i was trained as a medical doctor nobody ever taught taught
me about the mind
body unity but physiologically you can't separate the mind from the body so
that our emotional circuits
and the immune system and the hormonal apparatus and the nervous system are
actually one system
they're not separate systems so when things happen emotionally naturally they
have a physiological
effect yeah you know so i could give you 10 000 examples children whose parents
are stressed are much more likely
to have asthma okay so their the airway is narrow and they get inflamed black
there's a study that showed
that black american women the more episodes of racism they experience the
higher the risk of asthma wow um
it's been shown that women with severe ptsd have doubled the risk of ovarian
cancer wow this is a study
out of harvard university um adults who experience the loss of an adult child
have a higher risk of
malignancy of the of the bone marrow and and the blood grief grief a danish
study parents who lost a child
have doubled the risk of multiple sclerosis there are hundreds of studies
showing the physical
physiological impact of stress and trauma and loss on the physiology so manifesting
itself in our
bodies as a disease or contributing to the onset of the disease got it and yeah
because cancer it's like
you know you you you say in the book like people get cancer a lot of times you
hear like the guy got cancer he
died three weeks later right you hear that all the time but the cancer had been
there forever yeah and
it just enough had happened i guess that it turned over into being well we know
that stress for example
can turn off genes that protect you against cancer and turn on genes that can
cause cancer really
yeah yeah yeah it's not even controversial and we know that people that repress
their healthy anger
they're actually suppressing their immune system and this this stuff has been
studied over and over again
and great clinicians have been recognizing this forever and in 2400 years ago
socrates the greek philosopher said
that the problem with the doctors of today is that they separate the mind from
the body wow 2400 years ago
now i can name you any number of great medical pioneers i mentioned someone in
the book 250 years ago 100 years ago
80 years ago 40 years ago pointed out that mind and body can't be separated
that in fact we are
valuable psychosocial creatures which means that our biology is inseparable
from our psyche or emotional
apparatus and from our social relationships wow so all of it it's all one it's
scientifically it's all one
the problem is medical practice doesn't recognize that oneness so most of the
time
you go to a physician with rheumatoid arthritis or multiple sclerosis for both
of which there's plenty of
evidence about the role of trauma and stress but the doctor's never going to
ask you about any of that
stuff they're just going to do you with the deal with the physical aspects of
it which they should
deal with right but they also need to look at the whole you know what happened
in this person's life
and what's stressing them now and how can we help with that part of it you know
so medical practice
as a doctor i don't have to be told how miraculously
effective the achievements of modern medicine for sure but at the same time
there's a huge piece that
we're missing and that piece is not just intuitive or spiritual woohoo it's
science but they don't
teach that mind body unity science in the medical schools yeah in fact the
piece is a whole that's what
they're missing they're missing the wholeness now if you look at indigenous
medicine yeah there's the
medicine wheel which consists of four quadrants there's the physical our
physiology there's the
mental which is our emotions and our thoughts there's the social which is our
relationships with other
people and other creatures and then there's the spiritual which is our
connection with something
greater than just a little ego however you define that and health they say
depends on the balance
between those four quadrants scientifically that's totally true but
unfortunately that science is
largely ignored in medical training i'm sure yeah well especially now a lot of
our medicine has kind of
been compromised or i think our industry has you know oh yeah maybe i don't
know and i don't know your
industry i'm not trying to offend it but it certainly seems like just you know
the it's been comp most
industries have been a lot of comp have been compromised you know the fact to
have better
you know balance sheets than um but look if you continue with depression by the
way that's another
diagnosis that i've had so i've i've actually taken medication for depression
so i'm not here to
you know you're not just guessing you know you know to dismiss them yeah but if
you look at the word
depression what does it actually mean to depress something hold it back it's to
push it down yeah
now what gets pushed on in depression your feelings our feelings but why would
a person pushed on their
feelings one of the needs of the child one of the essential needs of the child
as i point out in this book
i don't make this stuff up i just reported is to be able to experience all the
emotions anger grief fear
panic um love playfulness curiosity um uh lust for life and just hunger for
life the child doesn't need to
express all those emotions when they arise and have that understood accepted
and validated by the adults
now if i'm in an environment where the parents can't do that you've had guests
on this program i won't
mention them by name who teach that an angry child should be made to sit by
themselves until they come
back to normal no right i don't know two-year-old kid gets frustrated they get
angry if you give that kid
the message that if you're angry you can't be with me the child is an
impossible dilemma am i going to
separate myself from the person on whom my life depends or will i push down my
anger well give that
message to the kid often enough what are they going to do depress their
feelings 30 years later they're
diagnosed with this disease called depression you know now if you come to me
with depression
i might decide that temporarily it might be a good idea for you to be in antidepressants
and i've taken them they helped me for a while you know but it's not enough
let's also look at what made you pushed on your feelings what happened to you
now prescribing the antidepressant takes me three minutes right talking with
you
about what actually happened to you that made you pushed on your feelings
that takes a long time right and doctors are not even trained to raise that
question
so even if as a physician i don't have the expertise to deal with that question
at least
i could refer you to somebody who does yeah but no most of the time it's just
the industrial model
you come in i got five minutes with you here's a prescription goodbye well that
doesn't deal with
the underlying problem it deals with the symptom which may sometimes be helpful
sometimes it isn't
but whether it's helpful or not it does not deal with the underlying dynamic