Mind-body relationship and fertility

Mind-body relationships may help cure incurable diseases, help inexplicable symptoms and help couples struggling to get pregnant. In this paper there will accounted of the mind-body relationship as it is presented in the four texts given to this assignment, comment on the language and structure of one of the texts and finally discuss some social and/or religious consequences of the modern mind-body relationship.

Every day couples struggle with infertility and what infertility may cause of further complications like stress perhaps. However, stress can affect fertility, so to help the struggling couples an organisation in Boston created an alternative 10 week program called the mind-body program, where counsellors help with cutting back on caffeine and alcohol, teach the applicants to use relaxation techniques (yoga and meditation) and give cognitive behavioural therapy. An example who benefitted from this organization is Melissa, who entered the program, when she was trying to get pregnant. She hampered her fertility with excessive exorcising in an attempt to remove her stress, but the alternative methods of the organization helped her conceive. Michael C. Miller believes that a trustful, pleasant relationship between a doctor and a patient can help the patient significantly even though the doctor does not have a treatment for the patient. Michael C. Explains what the doctor should do with inspiration from the Hungarian psychoanalyst Michael Balint:” Listen to patients’ stories, Balint urged his colleagues. Treat them as friends. They may need a dose of the strongest drug of all: the doctor.”Michael C. Miller is absolutely sure that medicine is not always the right treatment to heal a person, but the mind-body relationship can be very effective. Text 3 Steven Pinker challenges the term soul. He explains soul and brain is the same thing, because one’s brain actually controls all the moods like depressions for example. Due to high tech science it is now possible to connect emotions and so on to brain activity. ” New imaging techniques have tied every though and emotion to neural activity.”In the only fictional text of the 4 texts given to the assignment Hanif Kureishi presents what a brain transplant could mean in an extract from his novel, The Body. It does not contain any real facts, but rather a possible outcome of a mind transplant.