What’s all this talk then, about the mind/body connection? What does The Body Keeps the Score mean? Why do we keep connecting gut health to mental health, and what the heck is the vagal response? Why does a mental doctor (psychiatrist) go to medical school, and why do all medical doctors do a psychiatry rotation? 

               It’s almost as if your brain is a part of your body. 

               Let’s explore that. 

Dualism, the separation from the part of us that forms thought and experiences the world from the physical form, follows us from perhaps the dawn of time, across cultures. That’s cool. That’s a thing, and worth following, But it’s constant undercurrent in our understanding of how we as living beings work has been counterproductive to learning how to help us live our best lives and interact in a healthy, balanced and harmonious way.  It took the advent of fMRI to start to accept this, and that understanding has begun a revolution in healthcare, mental health care, and the integration of the two.

               Integrated Health is a holistic approach to caring for the entire being, rather than trying to separate the deeply connected brain and body. Why we are so insistent on treating the organ that controls the entire organism as separate is a little silly and a subject for a book that should be required in pre-med education, but we’re learning and growing from that. Meanwhile, we now get that depression often involves underactivation in the prefrontal cortex and overactivation in the amygdala (emotion regulation), that anxiety disorders show heightened activity in threat-detection regions (e.g. amygdala, insula), and that PTSD involves disrupted connectivity between emotional regulation centers and memory areas (like the hippocampus). Thank you, fMRI. 

               Now we can use this to address how chronic stress or trauma can affect physical systems—immune, cardiovascular, and endocrine, or how physical illnesses (like chronic pain or inflammation) impact mood and cognition. We can finally concede that treatment isn’t one-directional: treating the mind can help the body, and vice versa, and act on that knowledge. 

               It’s not all in your head. It’s in your body. It’s in you. And it’s a bi-directional system. We’re operating on a feedback loop. Integrated health is not only innovative, it is the essential future of healthcare.