Poststructuralist Musings on the Mind/Body Question in Health Care

Abstract

Consideration of mind/body phenomena in health care has been grounded in the constraints of overt and covert paradigmatic assumptions and the mechanisms of power/knowledge that poststructuralists pose as characteristic of empiricism. This article examines the development and conceptualization of mind/body phenomena within the context of evidence considered fitting in health care, that is, within the disciplinary matrix of empiricism. Discussion focuses particularly on inference, probability, and cause and effect, significant components of empiricism, as they have influenced the direction of the mind/body debate in health care during the 20th and early 21st centuries. A focus on disciplinary structure and rules of force subtly grounding empiricism may be the best we have for grasping the place of a phenomenon like mind/body within nursing and the health care disciplines, if such grasping is warranted at all.