More breaking news from the Center for Really Obvious Things in a rare joint collaboration with the No Sh*t Sherlock Society:

Western medicine separated the mind from the body in the Middle Ages when the famous French philosopher and mathematician Rene Descartes agreed to accept flesh and bone as the province of physicians, while the Catholic Church claimed possession of the mind, insisting it was the creation of the soul.

But Descartes, whose works were placed on the Church's Index of Prohibited Books in 1667, believed the two really interacted in the brain. Using the fledging powers of observation and deductive reasoning that he was then developing, Descartes could conclude that "the mind is so intimately dependent upon the condition and relation of the organs of the body, that if any means can ever be found to render men wiser and more ingenious than hitherto, I believe that it is in medicine they must be sought for."

It's taken a long time, but doctors and psychologists are now bringing the mind and the body back together amid new evidence that the mind can improve the healing process in ways that traditional medicine can't.

After all those years of documenting the power of the placebo effect, so much so that double-blind studies are a requirement for any respectable study, suddenly western medicine is willing to concede the possibility that we have the power to aid in our own healing process?