Despite this growing evidence, there are still doubters who do not believe that what goes on in our heads profoundly affects the health of our bodies. Some people do not want to believe, because if the brain has such power over what happens in our bodies, then we might have to watch our attitudes if we wish to be healthy. Others gladly accept such responsibility in return for the control it bestows on each of us in contributing to our own Physical destinies.

Still others, who continue to believe simplistically in single causes (viruses, genes, etc.) as sufficient to explain disease, angrily charge that anyone who suggests that our attitudes and moods contribute to whether we get sick is "blaming the victim" and implying the person "caused" his own illness. This is not true. Recognizing that mind and body are one with the evidence clearly showing that each constantly affects the other is not blaming the victim but acknowledging that disease is multi-determined, and the mind cannot be ignored as an influence. How important the influence is will vary with the disease or the stage of illness. Many professionals, as well as people in general, have been reluctant to accept the role of the mind in health and disease because they simply could not understand how having certain attitudes or moods could make any difference one way or the other in whether a person gets sick. How could being cynical or pessimistic or believing everything is beyond control possibly do damage to the body? How could our thinking style affect our immune system? The biological mechanisms seemed all too mysterious.

One of the reasons the cognitive has been neglected is that the evidence was lacking on the ways, the mechanisms, by which psychological factors affect physical processes.

To show the physical impact, for instance, of what happens when people perceive no control in their lives awaited development of instrumentation and techniques that could measure fluctuations in hormone and immune responses in the course of daily activity. Detecting the degree to which a person's hostile attitude correlates with blockage of his coronary arteries required the bringing together of angiography and psychological inventories.

Determining the effect of poor coping on the natural killer cells that help defend us against cancer has come only after the discovery that such cells exist and can be compromised by stress chemicals. The development of monoclonal antibodies has made it more possible to identify and quantify specific subunits of the immune system, like helper and suppressor T cells, which are affected by our stressful appraisals or ways of viewing things.

The ability to use saliva, instead of blood samples, to detect and measure our stress hormones has facilitated research on how our attitudes and coping styles influence our physical health. It is now possible to demonstrate the differences that such feelings as love, intimacy and affiliations opposed to the need for power and domination have on certain antibody levels.

Physicians and scientists who doubt that there is any physical impact of thoughts and feelings have resisted the findings of mind body research. A distinguished psychologist at Harvard sought out a Nobel Prize winning scientist to consult about the ways that thoughts and motives can affect the immune system. He was promptly told that there are no psychological effects on the immune system. When the psychologist noted that receptor sites for stress hormones have been found on a variety of immune system cells, the noted scientist admitted that was true but denied that our heads have anything to do with the state of our immunity against' illness.

As Candace Pert, whose landmark work on receptors helped spark the neuroscience explosion, has observed:

Even Eccles, speaking before a packed house at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in 1985, became the target of heated rebuttal when he presented "the first statement" on how neural events such as thoughts could affect the probability of neurotranstpitter release, using quantum mechanics as a model.

Scientific revolutions are very interesting. The way they happen is that most people deny them and resist them. And then there's more and more of an explosion, and there's a paradigm shift.