Mind ‘useless as remedy for sick’

FIGHTING cancer with a mind-over-matter approach lacks any scientific backing and can scare patients, according to a Geelong academic.
Deakin University Medical School lecturer Michael Vagg said remaining blindly and unrelentingly positive could actually burden sufferers.
Mr Vagg wrote on academic website The Conversation that relying on mental force could leave sufferers fearful of reducing their survival chances when they felt scared, depressed or angry about their disease.
Mr Vagg said cancer patients needed reassurance that emotional or personality factors were not behind their illnesses.
“Don’t believe those who tell you your illness is your fault somehow or that you wouldn’t have it if you’d somehow been a better person.”
Mr Vagg slammed the concept of positivity curing physical illness as “callous and false”.
Positive psychology interventions had only been studied in mental health disease, he said.