Biosemiotic Medicine: Healing in the World of Meaning (Studies in Neuroscience, Consciousness and Spirituality Book 5)

This book presents an interpretation of pharmaceutical, surgical and psychotherapeutic interventions based on a univalent metalanguage: biosemiotics. It proposes that a metalanguage for the physical, mental, social, and cultural aspects of health and medicine could bring all parts and aspects of human life together and thus shape a picture of the human being as a whole, made up from the heterogeneous images of the vast variety of sciences and technologies in medicine discourse. The book adopts a biosemiotics clinical model of thinking because, similar to the ancient principle of alchemy, __tam ethice quam physice__, everything in this model is physical as much as it is mental. Signs in the forms of vibrations, molecules, cells, words, images, reflections and rites conform cultural, mental, physical, and social phenomena. The book decodes healing, dealing with health, illness and therapy by emphasizing the first-person experience as well as objective events. It allows readers to follow the energy-information flows through and between embodied minds and to see how they form physiological functions such as our emotions and narratives. Front Matter....Pages i-xiii An Introduction to the Semiotic Approach to the Placebo Responses....Pages 1-21 Cybersemiotics as a Transdisciplinary Model for Interdisciplinary Biosemiotic Pharmacology and Medicine....Pages 23-84 Some Reflections on Non-substance Bound Healing Effects and the Concept of Narrative Medicine....Pages 85-94 How Can We Reconstruct the Health Anticipation?....Pages 95-115 The Ritual Effect: The Healing Response to Forms and Performs....Pages 117-132 Hypnosis, Placebo, and Performance: Recovering the Relational Aspects of Medicine....Pages 133-150 How to Prescribe Information: Health Education Without Health Anxiety and Nocebo Effects....Pages 151-193 Making Sense in the Medical System: Placebo, Biosemiotics, and the Pseudomachine....Pages 195-215 Medical Practice in/with the Semiosphere....Pages 217-239 Back Matter....Pages 241-247