ABSTRACT
The healing effects of faith have been noted in medicine, with more or less resistance, for a long time (Levin 2009; Seligman 2002). In his 1910 paper, “The Faith that Heals,” Oxford Professor of Medicine Sir William Osler wrote: “Intangible as the ether, ineluctable as gravitation, the radium of the moral and mental spheres, mysterious, indefinable, known only by its effects, faith pours out an unfailing stream of energy while abating no jot nor tittle of its potency” (Osler 1910, 1470). Since then, researchers of psychoneuroimmunology and the placebo effect have tried to come to terms with the effects of faith in medicine (see George et al. 2000; Khansari et al. 1990; Levin 2009), and medical anthropologists have provided many detailed descriptions of healing rituals in cultures around the world (Csordas and Lewton 1998). But while traditional, complementary and alternative healing practices often directly engage with rituals, faith healing, and the subjectivity of human experiences of health and illness, in biomedicine such practices are often ridiculed and rejected as humbug or quackery. This chapter argues that biomedicine could become more effective – and even more scientific – if it paid more attention to the importance of human imagination, subjectivity and the role of faith in therapeutic processes.
