Introducing Psychoneuroimmunology

     Ancient cultures in America, Asia, Africa, and Europe seemed to have accepted an interconnection between the brain and our ability to ward off disease. Since the late nineteenth century, scientific evidence has been illuminating the bidirectional com ...

The Scientific Method of Investigation

     The goal of this section is to help health consumers (at one time or another that is all of us) better understand biomedical research, and to sort out scientific fact from fiction. It will help in making sense of new research as distilled in the popu ...

Placebo Effect

     A placebo can be used in two ways. One way is as a therapeutic procedure devoid of all specific activity that is given deliberately to have an effect on a patient, a symptom, a syndrome, or a disease. The second way is as a substance that is inert in ...

Individuality: The Trees in the Forest

      PNI research has several goals. One of these is to understand how the mind-body interaction works and then to apply what has been learned to prevent or lessen the grip of disease. Ultimately, we need to remember that psychosocial support treat ...

Free Will: Inheritance and Psychosocial Stress

      A central question in applied psychoneuroimmunology is: How much freedom do we really have to make life-altering choices?       Studies of identical twins have often been used to examine inherited vs. environmental contributions to indiv ...

Evidence Based Medicine

      The minireview on the scientific method of investigation dealt mainly with individual studies. There is another level of concern when we look at review articles that attempt to synthesize the results of multiple studies, especially when ...

Why People do What They Do: Qualitative Research

      Explorations of personal and social aspects of medical care inevitably lead to areas of social sciences and qualitative research. Qualitative research investigates, interprets, and describes social events or experiences in relationship to th ...

The Function of Complementary and Alternative Medicine

      Who Uses CAM and What is Used Exploitation of the mind body connection is often considered part of the arsenal of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). CAM is an array of heterogeneous health and medical systems, practices, and prod ...

Cognition and Psychoneuroimmunology

      The first PNI milestone is generally considered to be classical conditioning experiments conducted in the 1920’s by Metal’nikov at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. Although they were controversial at the time, they were repeated and enlarged up ...

Stress and Psychoneuroimmunology

      What do you Mean I’m Stressed out? Stress may be most simply defined as a physical or psychological stimulus that when intruding upon a person produces disequilibrium or strain (S). The nature of stress can be examined in terms of the str ...

Anxiety and Disease Risk

      Higher levels of anxiety (fear and distress) prior to surgery has been linked to more complicated and slower recovery. Part of the explanation for the connection is delayed wound healing that is associated with stres ...

Anger and Disease Risk

      Less investigated than depression and anxiety, anger traits and hostility also appears to predispose to diseases. By meta-analysis, conducted in 1996 of 45 studies, hostility as measured by the Cook-Medley Hostility Scale has been s ...

Depression and Disease Risk

      What is depression? Depression can range from a sinking of spirits to frank clinical mood disorders. Sadness is normal depression that we all get now and then. It is a reaction to adverse events and may be adaptive in that it allows us to ...

PNI and Cardiovascular Disease

      The number one cause of death in the USA (and in most of Western society), and on its way to becoming number one in the developing countries worldwide, is atherothrombotic, coronary artery disease (CAD), also known as coronary heart disease (C ...

Cognitive Behavioral Stress Management of Cancer

      Early approaches to cognitive stress intervention focused on helping police officers cope with stress (517465), and a cognitive behavioral stress management training for treating migraine (7314771). A report published in 1986 compared a ...

Spontaneous Remissions in Cancer

     Spontaneous remission or regression of cancer is usually considered a temporary or permanent, partial or complete vanishment of some or all of the relevant parameters of an accurately diagnosed malignant disease without medical treatment, or with med ...

Cognitive Behavioral Stress Management of HIV Infections

      Early approaches to cognitive stress intervention focused on helping police officers cope with stress (517465), and a cognitive behavioral stress management training for treating migraine (7314771). A report published in 1986 compared a pr ...

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)

     Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is chronic and fairly common following an overpowering trauma (3683502, 11068961, 16891576). It is classified as an anxiety disorder by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition, Te ...

Cognitive Behavioral Stress Management for Healthy Folks

     How well does cognitive behavioral stress management (CBSM) work with a population not suffering from a disease? Here are a few studies. ...