Coronavirus, Psychosomatics, and UU Materialists

Me- This is a good time for some fuller dissemination of Psychosomatic Medicine. Here´s part of a series taken from Barbara Bradley Hagerty´s book, in which she interviews Gail Ironson MD PhD on her findings that belief in and practice around a benevolent God correlates with a 4.5 more vigorous immune response to viral load in HIV. She also interviewed one subject, Sheri Kaplan who id´d as raised Jewish but now unaffiliated and spiritual, has never used medication. https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=104351710 ***

Car Bal This is on a par of NPR running an interview with a prominent anti-vaxxer about a week and a half ago; wrong at any time, but during this pandemic it's especially harmful. ***

M R Mo @ Clyn Balda Gossipy referring to "anti-vaxxers," whatever their actual position, and your presumptuous, simplistic, and confusedly glib smear talk about NPR as wrong and harmful based on unjustified, and untenable, insinuation is a polarized, and apparently ideological, stereotype that is ad hominem, not substantive nor even conversational. Your superficial talk lacks logical clarity and uses philosophical fallacy to divert from honest talk, argument, and integrity. The issue is the value of a benevolent God in belief and practice and a medical finding about immune system vigor in the case of a viral illness by a medical doctor, her collaborators, and as part of the growing and established professional discipline of Complementary and Integrative, aka Psychosomatic, Medicine (CIM-PS). Not only is there no vaccine yet for COVID-19, none is anticipated until 2021 because it takes research and development time, effort, and expense. Even with vaccines, in general vaccines themselves are not without risk and limitations, which is why smallpox vaccine is no longer a standard. As in antibiotics, combined therapy is the most advantageous strategy in general, so that speaking against Psychosomatic Medicine results that demonstrate anti-viral and immune system vigor is indeed harmful. In fact, you are a repeat offender with your offensive manner and superficial standards, and deserve a warning. ***

JM Tw your post strikes against our 5th source of wisdom, the humanist teachings that advise us to respect the findings of science. But it's not like we've got an orthodoxy or we're going to kick you out over it. ***

Me As mistakes go, your comment reveals a form of ideological bias verging on worse. If such blatantly disrespectful and errant bias is flaunted, you should be grateful you won´t get kicked out. Your reasoning is incorrect, and rather absurdly reflects a view using the sources and principles without understanding their meaning. As in the case of JCH´s citation, "findings of science" is actually misleading, since science makes efforts to understand, and even more precisely, science makes philosophical efforts to understand observable phenomena using empirical methodology. Philosopher of Science Thomas Kuhn is pretty well-known for identifying the philosophical and psychosocial basis of scientific paradigms and their shifts, as in Newtonian mechanics working in relation to Einstein´s relativity and Schrodinger et al´s Quantum mechanics. In this case, G. Ironson and collaborators´ work is the main subject here in which they study psychosomatic phenomena in terms of psychologically-based, Transpersonally-oriented religious variables. Certainly, Pasteur, Einstein, Freud, and Salk are more famous names. Psychosomatics, "mind-body dynamics," is an extension of brain-body processes based, from the biological basis, on homeostasis and pretty famous work on stress. Hans Selye wrote a 1950s book, Stress for Life, about his identifying the three stages of stress: shock, response, and recovery/exhaustion. That´s not so strange sounding knowledge nowadays, but Selye is no household name. Another researcher, G Solomon in the 1960s, observed that highly stressed, severely mentally ill patients had lower immune response to vaccination. He innovated the term "psychoimmunity." In the 1970s, researchers like R Ader and N Cohen, D Felten, H Besedovsky et al made various advances until in 1985, Candace Pert et al at NIH at Georgetown U discovered key neuropeptide receptors in the cell walls of the immune system. Scientists started using the term "Psychoneuroimmunology." However, scientific efforts to understand don´t just happen under the microscope. If stress is the negative side of psychosomatics, the positive side was already observed in the placebo effect by H Beecher MD in his 1955 paper "The Powerful Placebo." OC Simonton MD and his wife associate psychotherapist Stephanie Matthews developed visualization and support group techniques to help cancer patients with their clinic in 1971 and book by 1978. Harvard´s Herb Benson MD then studied Transcendental Meditation practitioners and found that chanting meditation stimulates healthful relaxation, and he called it the opposite of stress in his 1972 book The Relaxation Response. Coming back to this case and Ironson MD´s study, they now use a psychocultural variable, "religious belief and practice," conduct a procedure, and get results. They then interpret those results and draw conclusions. For you to fail to recognize that as science, you are make an egregious mistake. For you to leap to the comment, "we won´t kick you out over it" is hardly the issue. You at least tried to reason, despite your telling mistake because a scientist found benefits in religious attitudes and practice, you were unwilling or unable to recognize it as science. ***

J M Tw We don't have to think alike to love alike ***

Mark R M J M Twe If people misunderstand basic things and make disrespectful, gossipy, and even accusatory comments based on those misunderstandings, and others associate attempting to reinforce some or all of key aspects of that misunderstanding, the love is in the appropriate combination of attention to non- or anti-intellectual and obnoxiously presumptuous conduct and mistaken notions. That love, moreover, cannot merely be assumed, but in its relative clarity and exercise, it very much reveals that UUism´s full spectrum of Principles and Sources are sophisticated and not separable from the educational University culture that Christians developed in much ignored and actually fairly obscured historical and varying principled basis of modernization. It is similar to UUism´s own origins, except that the University and its standard in society-at-large demands some exercise of scholarship. Bureaucratic tolerance without demanding intellectual rigor and avoiding anti- and non-intellectual and obnoxiously presumptuous gossipy bias and intolerance is certainly the bottom of the barrel of love. Love benefits vigorously from quality and modeling, and while Freud, Jung, Adler began a key field that contributes richly to understanding that four-letter word, its origins and levels of continuity in the Judeo-Christian tradition are ignored at a great loss. It´s not just the fundamentalist Christians who have been overwhelmingly manipulated and misled, but those who become anti-intellectual and obnoxiously presumptuous in superficial and gossipy bias twisted to the extreme even of misguided accusation, and their unreflective supporters who unquestioningly perpetuate such distortions. ***

Jn M Twt Thanks, Jn & Clyn. Obviously, opinions vary a lot, so let's humbly respect science.

*** M R M Jn M Twt Genuine humility requires integrity, and respecting science requires nothing less, and any opinion worth its salt needs its own empirical and philosophical exercise to differentiate it from Jay Leno´s erstwhile Quiz Fails. Thinking that science requires anti-theist prejudice and that that is not unscientific, or even that successful demonstrations of theistic health benefits threatens the relevance of mechanistic science, is simply unfounded and a blurring of key distinctions. Besides N Krause of U MI´s statement at Harvard about 3,000 studies finding positive benefits of religion on health, Duke U´s H Koenig MD has reviewed massive amounts of literature and concluded, "A large volume of research shows that people who are more R/S (religious/spiritual) have better mental health and adapt more quickly to health problems compared to those who are less R/S." It comes down to respecting the truth, and yourself. UUism hardly suffers in that case, and in fact its full scope of Principles and Sources gets the vindication that has been denied it. As for gratitude, thankfully UU theists clearly have an opportunity to make clear that Uuism is not the American Humanist Association. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3671693/