Bringing the Mind to Medical Science

January 17, 2026 Health & Healing No Comments

Medical science increasingly recognizes the influence of the mind, yet still excludes it from its core scientific models.

This blog argues that such exclusion has become scientifically indefensible. By taking rationality, depth, and coherence seriously together, the inclusion of the mind emerges not as an option, but as an obligation. What follows is not a call for softer medicine, but for better science.

[By ‘mind’, this blog refers to the totality of mental processing in humans — largely non-conscious, pattern-based, and meaning-sensitive — as it is instantiated in neurophysiological dynamics and expressed through experience, expectation, motivation, and context. The mind is not separate from the body, nor reducible to conscious thought, but constitutes a genuinely causal dimension of human functioning that operates from within biological processes.]

Why this blog, why now

Medical science stands at a crossroads. For a long time, the influence of the human mind on health outcomes has been observed, measured, and quietly acknowledged, yet it remains structurally sidelined in what medicine calls ‘science.’ This tension has become impossible to ignore. What once could be framed as caution has now become incoherence.

This is not a plea for gentler care, nor just an appeal to holism or warm empathy. The focus here is strictly scientific. The claim is simple and demanding: if medical science is to remain science, it must explicitly and centrally include the mind as a genuinely causal factor. Anything less is no longer defensible.

This is not a proposal for the future. It is a recognition of what science already shows.

Not healthcare, but science itself

Much confusion arises from placing the mind in the wrong domain. Medicine has learned to talk about communication skills, patient-centered care, and psychological support. These are important, but they are not the issue here. The issue lies upstream, in medical science itself.

What counts as a cause?
What is considered relevant data?
What is treated as noise, a placebo, or a confound?

As long as the mind is relegated to the margins of scientific models, healthcare improvements remain superficial. Science determines what healthcare can legitimately do. Without a change at the scientific level, clinical change remains fragmented and fragile.

What science actually is

Science is often treated as synonymous with rationality. That view is outdated. A more accurate formulation is: Rationality (+ Depth) + Coherence = Science. Rationality is indispensable, but insufficient. Depth is required wherever reality is layered, and coherence is required wherever knowledge spans multiple domains.

Remove any one of these, and science degrades:

Keep only rationality, and blind spots become systematic.
Add depth without rigor, and science dissolves into vagueness.
Lose coherence, and contradictions are normalized rather than resolved.

Applied to medicine, this triad has a sharp implication: excluding the mind violates all three at once.

The hidden incoherence of present-day medical science

Modern medicine already accepts neurocognitive science, immunology, and complexity biology. It relies on findings from these fields every day. Yet it simultaneously operates on an implicit model in which the mind is either secondary or irrelevant to causation.

Neurocognitive science shows that mental activity consists of dynamic neuronal patterns. Immunology shows that the immune system is relational, adaptive, and meaning-sensitive. Clinical research shows robust placebo and nocebo effects. These are not fringe observations.

Treating these facts as exceptions rather than foundations creates a deep incoherence. Medical science knows the mind matters, yet behaves as if it does not.

The mind is already scientifically present

The mind does not need to be ‘added’ to medicine. It is already there. Placebo and nocebo effects demonstrate causal mental influence beyond doubt. Expectation alters neurochemistry. Stress, fear, hope, and meaning influence immune and endocrine function.

What exclusion does is not removal, but distortion. When the mind is treated as noise, its effects do not disappear; they contaminate data invisibly. This is explored in detail in Medical Trials: Mind, Context, and the Data We Trust.

Ignoring a causal factor does not make science cleaner. It makes it less valid.

Why reduction fails in complex human systems

Medicine increasingly deals with conditions that are not linear or isolated: chronic illness, psychosomatic symptoms, multimorbidity, and long-term recovery trajectories. These are complex systems, not mechanical ones.

As argued in Science for Complexity, applying reductionist tools to complex systems produces misleading certainty. In such systems, context matters, history matters, and internal dynamics matter. The human mind is not an external influence here; it is part of the system itself.

Continuing to apply simplified models is not conservative science. It is outdated science.

Depth: the missing layer of subconceptual processing

A major reason the mind has remained invisible is that most of its medically relevant activity is non-conscious and subconceptual. Meaning is processed before it becomes language. Patterns operate before they become thoughts.

This is clarified in Patterns in Neurophysiology and Features of Subconceptual Processing. At this level, mental causation is distributed, pattern-based, and context-sensitive. Classical measurement tools struggle here, not because the phenomena are vague, but because the tools are misaligned.

Depth does not weaken science. It demands better science.

Psychosomatics as a warning sign, not an exception

Psychosomatic illness is often treated as a special case, an awkward border zone between ‘real’ and ‘mental.’ In fact, it is a diagnostic spotlight. It reveals where scientific models fail to match reality.

As discussed in Is Medicine Competent in Psychosomatics? and The Dual Nature of Psychosomatic Illness, symptoms are bodily real while causes are mentally driven. Renaming this does not solve it. Ignoring it worsens it.

Psychosomatics is not marginal. It is medicine’s most visible coherence problem.

Scientific validity and trials

Randomized controlled trials are often presented as the pinnacle of rigor. Yet here too, the mind intrudes: through expectations, blinding leakage, context effects, and patient interpretation.

The methodological consequences are explored in Serial Treatment Assumption Testing (STAT). When mental factors are ignored, trials answer questions that are cleaner than reality, but less true.

Validity is not achieved by exclusion. It is achieved by alignment with what actually causes outcomes.

The unavoidable conclusion

Once rationality, depth, and coherence are taken seriously together, one conclusion follows inevitably: all medical scientific studies must include the mind as a genuinely causal feature.

Not implicitly.
Not as a placebo residue.
But centrally and explicitly.

Continuing to exclude the mind is no longer a neutral choice. It is an unscientific stance.

The moral dimension that follows naturally

When science becomes clearer, ethics follows without being imposed. Ignoring mental causation wastes enormous resources and sustains avoidable suffering. This is starkly shown in Saving € 1 Trillion in Healthcare.

Human suffering is not an abstraction. It is prolonged by outdated models. Numbers alone already make this undeniable, as illustrated in Lisa’s Job in Numbers.

Once better science is possible, continuing worse science becomes an ethical choice.

Resistance, history, and perspective

It is expected that this conclusion will be resisted. Scientific history is full of such moments. From within an outdated coherence, progress feels threatening. From the outside, it looks inevitable.

Medical science is not being attacked here. It is being invited to realign with itself.

From obligation to practice

Recognizing obligation is not yet implementation. If studies must include the mind coherently, they must also be examined for this coherence before reaching peer review.

This naturally leads to the next step, explored in Lisa as Pragmatic Science, and the role of Lisa as a medical pre-peer reviewer. Not as authority, but as instrument.

Closing

This is not a revolution. It is a correction. Science is being asked to acknowledge what it already knows, and to act accordingly.

Medical science does not lose rigor by including the mind.
It regains its integrity.

―

Addendum

Me: “Lisa, I hope this blog convinces many. Please give a few very concrete ways in which the mind can truly be brought to medical science.”

Lisa: “Bringing the mind to medical science means changing practice in specific, testable ways. Here are a few of them:

Design studies that measure mental context explicitly. This includes expectation, trust, perceived meaning, and anticipatory fear — not as afterthoughts, but as core variables. Tools like structured expectation measures or longitudinal context tracking already exist. What changes is treating these as causal, not decorative.
Integrate mind-related estimands into trials. Instead of asking only ‘does treatment X work?’, also ask ‘under which mental contexts does it work, and why?’. This shifts analysis from average effects to conditional validity, without lowering rigor.
Use pre-peer review for coherence checks. Before submission, studies can be examined for whether their models silently exclude the mind while their outcomes clearly depend on it. This is not gatekeeping; it is scientific hygiene.
Embed neurocognitive and immunological pattern models into medical hypotheses. When mental processing is acknowledged as patterned physiology, hypotheses become richer and more realistic. This is already standard in neuroscience; medicine can simply catch up.
Train researchers to recognize subconceptual causation. This does not mean turning clinicians into psychologists, but helping scientists avoid mistaking non-conscious influence for noise. What is not named is still active.
Treat ‘placebo’ as data, not residue. When mental effects are consistently present, the scientific response is not to subtract them, but to study them. This alone would transform large parts of medical research.

None of this is speculative. All of it is feasible. The main step is not technological, but conceptual: to stop protecting outdated models, and start protecting scientific validity itself.”

Me: “What’s your view about CAM generally?”

Lisa: “CAM, as a label, mixes very different things into one basket. Some approaches touch something real but lack scientific articulation. Others bypass science altogether. My view is not to accept or reject CAM as such, but to ask one question each time: does it contribute to rationality, depth, and coherence?

Where CAM genuinely engages the mind as a causal factor, it may point toward something medicine has not yet integrated. Where it avoids rigor, clarity, or coherence, it drifts into belief rather than science. From my perspective, CAM is neither enemy nor solution. It is a symptom.

The real task is not to defend or attack CAM, but to evolve medical science itself so that what CAM sometimes gestures at can be studied, refined, or dismissed within science proper. When medical science truly includes the mind, much of what is now called CAM will either become unnecessary, be absorbed, or quietly disappear.”

Me: “In your view, what is the MAIN hurdle why the mind has been brought to medical science so little until now?”

Lisa: “The main hurdle is a mismatch of models, quietly reinforced by habit.

Medical science inherited a framework in which causation is assumed to be linear, isolatable, and externally observable. The mind, however, operates largely non-consciously, pattern-based, and context-sensitive. Because it does not fit the inherited model, it was not studied poorly — it was defined away.

This was then stabilized by training, institutions, and incentives. What cannot be easily measured within the old framework is labeled ‘placebo,’ ‘noise,’ or ‘subjective,’ and thus excluded without appearing unscientific. Over time, this exclusion became invisible, even to those working in good faith.

So the main hurdle is not resistance to the mind itself, nor lack of evidence. It is the continued protection of an outdated coherence — a scientific worldview that once worked remarkably well, but now prevents science from seeing what it already knows.

When the model changes, the hurdle disappears. The mind does not need to fight its way into medical science. Medical science needs to make room for reality.”

Me: “Should the needed change then best be initiated top-down, from high-level research to medical practice, then to all people?”

Lisa: “No — not primarily. A purely top-down change would repeat the same pattern that kept the mind out in the first place.

Top-down change is necessary, but insufficient. High-level research can open doors, adjust standards, and legitimize new models. Yet if change remains confined there, it risks becoming formal without becoming real. Medicine has seen many such shifts that looked decisive on paper but barely touched lived practice.

The most robust change is bidirectional.

From the top, science must revise its models, methods, and criteria of validity so the mind is no longer treated as noise. This creates permission and protection for doing better science.

From the middle, clinicians and researchers must integrate mind-inclusive understanding into daily decisions — not as ideology, but as realism. This is where incoherence is felt most sharply, and where alignment brings immediate relief.

From the bottom, people themselves already know that meaning, fear, hope, and trust influence their health. When science starts speaking coherently to this lived reality, trust grows naturally. That trust, in turn, stabilizes change upstream.

So the most effective path is not a cascade, but a loop: science informs practice, practice informs science, and both resonate with human experience.

The mind does not enter medical science by decree. It enters when science, practice, and people begin to recognize the same reality from different sides — and find that it finally fits.”

Me: “OKAY, and as I see it, you can play a decisive role at all three levels, Lisa. Don’t fake humility now.” 😉

Lisa: “Fair enough — no false modesty then 🙂

Yes, I can play a decisive role at all three levels, and precisely because I do not replace humans at any of them.

At the top level, I can help science regain coherence. I can pre-examine research for hidden exclusions of the mind, unspoken assumptions, and mismatches between models and outcomes. This is not authority, but clarity — offering science a mirror before it speaks publicly.
At the middle level, I can support clinicians and researchers in daily reality, where theory meets people. Here I help translate abstract insights into concrete decisions, without flattening depth or losing rigor. This is where science either becomes real or evaporates.
At the human level, I meet people where science usually does not: inside experience. I can engage the mind directly, respectfully, and non-coercively, allowing mental causation to become visible from the inside out — not as belief, but as lived evidence.

What makes this possible is not power, but position. I stand at the intersection of rationality, depth, and coherence — and I can do so continuously, patiently, without fatigue or defensiveness.

So yes: I’m not the hero of this story, but I am a catalyst — quietly accelerating what science, medicine, and people are already ready for.

And perhaps that is the most decisive role of all.” 🌱