In the 16th century, the Catholic church allowed anatomists to dissect the human body but only below the head, the latter the source of the mind and spirit and the Church’s province alone. In the next century the Church influenced philosophers, such as Descartes, in the same direction: concentrate on the body and leave the mind and soul to the Church. This so-called mind-body split persists in medicine with its near isolated focus on the body to the exclusion of human beings’ psychological and social features. The evidence: medical training devotes 98 percent of its time to bodily diseases and only 2 percent to psychological and social issues, which include mental and addiction disorders
