Recognizing the profound interconnection of mind and body, the body's innate curing capabilities, and the role of self-responsibility in the curing process, mind/body medicine uses a wide range of modalities, including biofeedback, imagery, hypnotherapy, meditation, and yoga.

  For the last three hundred years Western civilization has been shaped by a rational, scientific, mechanistic world view that has helped to bring about enormous technological and material advances. James S. Gordon, M.D., Director of the Center for Mind/Body Studies, and Clinical Professor in the Departments of Psychiatry and Community and Family Medicine at the Georgetown University School of Medicine states that the practice of Western medicine reflects this mind-set and relies upon the technology it has produced. Since the philosopher Descartes separated a transcendent and nonmaterial mind from the material and mechanical operations of the body, science has been concerned with ever more accurately resolving the body into its component parts. This approach has produced extraordinary achievements-in the treatment of infectious diseases, in the synthesis of such desperately needed substances as insulin, and in the creation of exquisitely sophisticated and life-saving surgical procedures.

  Unfortunately, the power and real achievements of this biomedical model have tended to narrow human perspective over time. People have come to view all illness as primarily a malfunction of mechanical parts and to regard physicians as technicians responsible for their repair. People have lost sight of the importance of the psychological, social, economic, and environmental influences on health and illness and of the extraordinary power of the mind to affect the body.