Dennis H. Novack, MD
Drexel University College of Medicine
Excerpted from The New Medicine Interviews

George Engel, perhaps, said it best that human beings are at once biological, psychological, and social beings. That’s how we’ve evolved, that’s who we are. And if there’s a disturbance in any one of those aspects of being, it affects every aspect of being.

What that means is that number one, we have to understand, not only the biology, but also the biology of the interactions of mind and body and psychology and the social environment...

If there’s upsetting things happening in our social environment, it affects our biology. Stress hormones start getting released. It can change our anatomy. Neurons in our brain are proliferating and changing in certain ways in response to what’s happening in the environment. It affects our behavior, so if we’re stressed we may say, "Oh I don’t have time to take all this medicine. " Or, "I don’t want to take all this medicine; I don’t want to see a doctor."

If we’re depressed and feeling hopeless, that’s going to make us feel a certain way. [It might make us] hopeless about ever getting better. And, that may lead us to not do all that we can to get better or not work with our doctors to get better.

You know if we… understand what a patient is going through, what’s happening to a patient, we’ll understand their disease and we can seek cures. [Doctors need to] allow the patient to share their values freely and feel like they’re heard.