Since I have been spending a fair amount of time in my first semester of med school combing the medical literature, my wife asked me to dig up some information on positive thinking in coping with illness. I was happy to oblige. Like most med students with a $30,000/year subscription to PubMed, I looked there first. I tried the keywords, "positive thinking cancer," thinking that might yield a large initial result. Nothing. Next, I tried "positive psychology." Still nothing. I checked my internet connection at that point, because not five minutes earlier I had entered the keyword "pigeon," and had 346 hits. My connection was fine, and so I tried every trick I knew to navigate the unimaginable hugeness of medical peer-reviewed literature. Finding nothing, I switched over to PsychInfo, the go-to database for peer-reviewed journals during my music therapy graduate studies. There I found a few articles, none of which demonstrated any clinically significant benefit to positive thinking. I found it interesting that no one had thought to include these on the PubMed database, where plenty of other non-biomedical topics are well-represented. Then I came across this article on my Twitter feed by Dr. Kevin Pho, MD (@KevinMD):
http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2011/06/positive-thinking-affects-patients-illnesses.html
I always thought that my own grouchiness in the face of adversity was a flaw, but according to the scientific literature, perhaps not. Each person is uniquely equipped to cope with difficulties, and there is no reason to deem one coping strategy better than another.
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