Peter Todd–Jan 14, 2010 (last modified on Jan 22, 2010)
I have just completed my personal profile for membership of the proposed psychoneuroimmunology discussion group within ResearchGATE. This interdisciplinary science which emerged from the field of psychosomatic research, was founded by such pioneers as the late Professor George Solomon M.D. with whom I had the privelege of working during the early 1980's as a member of the Biopsychosocial AIDS Project at the University of California, San Francisco, USA. Professors Solomon, Klaus Bahnson, George Engel and others, including myself had previously worked in the field now known as psycho-oncology and with other immunologically mediated and resisted disease, including autoimmune disorders and infections.
Engel (1977) had published a seminal paper titled "The need for a new medical model: a challenge for biomedicine" Science, 196, pages 129-36 as one of the figurative chorus of researchers who had perceived Kuhnian anomalies in biomedical research and hence the need for a paradigm shift in the scientific understanding of disease. The proposed paradigm shift implied multifactorial concepts of causality in which psychosocial and mental factors, including such unconscious variables as ego-defences and affects would be encompassed in the derivation of robust and useful scientific predictions of illness morbidity and mortality.
The biological mediators of the impact of psychosocial and mental factors would need to be included in research studies which would move the psychosomatic and psychoneuroimmunological fields beyond mere correlations without necessarily implying causality. In the HIV/AIDS field, the simultaneous analysis of psychosocial factors, biological mediators including neuroendocrine, cytokine and immune system variables and HIV progression still remains an important issue for future psychoneuroimmunological research. Perhaps partly because of funding priorities in HIV related research.
My recent paper "Unconscious Mental Factors in HIV Infection", published in the journal "Mind and Matter", Volume 6, Issue 2, (2009) explores the history of psychoneuroimmunology while suggesting a new paradigm of scientific understanding due to Kuhnian anomalies (such as multiple drug resistance and rapid mutation) with the traditional medical and Jenner/Pasteur models of infectious disease. The traditional medical model is neither multifactorial nor biopsychosocial in its understanding of the determinants of disease onset, morbidity and mortaity.
I would value comments.
Peter B. Todd
