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The Vancouver-based Dr. Gabor Maté argues too many doctors seem to have forgotten what was once a commonplace assumption, that emotions are deeply implicated in both the development of illness and in the restoration of health. Based on medical studies and his own experience with chronically ill patients at the Palliative Care Unit at Vancouver Hospital, where he was the medical coordinator for seven years, Dr. Gabor Maté makes the case there are important links between the mind and the immune system. He finds stress and individual emotional makeup play critical roles in an array of diseases, including cancer, heart disease, diabetes, irritable bowel syndrome, multiple sclerosis and arthritis.

The point now is that the emotional centers of the brain, which regulate our behaviors and our responses and our reactions, are physiologically connected with - and we know exactly how they're connected - with the immune system, the nervous system and the hormonal apparatus. In fact, it's no longer possible, scientifically, to speak of these as separate systems, as if immunity was separate from emotions, as if the nervous system was separate from the hormonal apparatus. There's one system, and they're wired together by the nervous system itself and joined together by chemical messengers that they all secrete, and so that whatever happens emotionally has an impact immunologically, and vice versa. So, for example, we know now that the white cells in the circulation of our - of the blood can manufacture every hormone that the brain can manufacture, and vice versa, so that the brain and the immune system are always talking to one another.

So, in short, we have one system. The science that studies it is called psychoneuroimmunology. And scientifically, it's not even controversial, but it's completely lacking from medical practice.

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