194 | Integration of Brain, Mind, and Body – A Conversation With Dr. Mark Edwards

[on-hold music] We are here with Mark Edwards.

Mark, thanks so much for being with us.

It's a pleasure.

Today's topic is all about links between the brain, mind, and body and how this impacts clinical care for patients with neuropsychiatric disorders.

In today's world, many people do understand that the brain controls our thinking and that it's relevant for neurology.

So for example, if I have memory loss or a seizure, I should go to a brain doctor.

And in my perception anyway, there's gradual progress in recognizing the overlap between brain and mind as we combat Cartesian dualism, meaning so-called psychiatric conditions like depression and schizophrenia truly are neurobiological in nature.

But I think less well appreciated are the really deep and critical links between our brains, minds, and in the various organ systems in our bodies, such as cardiovascular, immune, GI, endocrine, musculoskeletal, and others.

We know brain health is not just about protecting an organ in a jar.

There's dynamic two-way street between brain, mind, and body.

And the lack of recognition of this fact is really manifested in our training models and healthcare systems, which tend to operate more in silos with cardiology over there and neurology over here as if they exist in discrete buckets.

So in a few minutes, we'll get more into the weeds with respect to specific clinical disorders.

But for now, give us your take on the interplay between brain, mind, and body in general, how you think about these issues.

So it's a, a great introduction, and I, I think it's a, on one level, a really simple thing, but feels almost impossible to implement in healthcare systems and actually in societal thinking and in health professionals' thinking.

So I find it a very strange issue the way that, for example, uh, many people in society are very happy to think that, for example, acupuncture or therapeutic massage or meditation or mindfulness would be good for health in general.

But then when it comes to thinking about something which they might consider as a medical problem, those things often completely go out the window, as does a lot of agency as well over illness.

So there's a, a really significant passivity, I think, that's engendered in s- healthcare encounters where, you know, people come to be fixed and health professionals fix people.

And that doesn't really leave much space for the mind and connections between the mind, brain, and body, even though those are fantastically important.

So overall, for me, it's something which would be a massive, um, potential impact on human health if it was possible to kind of get into that more and to understand how we could improve, uh, our sort of overall function through things which are not necessarily traditionally medical in nature.