There was general rejoicing last week when Wal-Mart announced that it was reducing the price of 150 generic drugs to as little as $4 a month, a move quickly followed by Target and K-mart. Forecasters in the drug industry predict that this move will pressure other huge retailers to lower their prices and expand the range to 400 generics or more.

Good news all around.

Yet beneath the surface lies the fact that the average senior in America is taking 7 prescription drugs. That's not a step in the right direction, no matter how cheap the price. The field of mind-body medicine has reached the stage where we know a great deal about preventing disease through means far less toxic than prescription drugs. This knowledge isn't being taken advantage of nearly as much as it should be.

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Deepak Chopra: I'm Not Hysterical, It's My Brain
(The Mind-Body Bridge, Part 2)

Many people are turning their backs on the real value of mind-body medicine, at just the wrong time.

..[R]ecent studies in compulsive-obsessive disorder have shown that the same regions of the brain are improved through talk therapy as through psychotropic drugs like Prozac. So confronting your problems is "real" medicine. This point is overlooked in our rush to drug the brain and make symptoms subside.

There's no guarantee that talk therapy will be permanent, yet that's not the issue. The fact is that talking isn't a brain function but a mental one. A drug may fix a specific chemical imbalance, but that's the same as fixing a broken radio. You wouldn't claim that fixing a radio is the same as fixing the programs playing through it. The brain receives messages from the mind and turns them into physical functions. Fixing the receiver doesn't cure a disturbed mind.

It's understandable that science dismisses the mind as invisible and therefore illusory, while the brain, being an object, can be endlessly tinkered with. Some philosophical skeptics assert that mind is a complete fiction to begin with, a ghost we've learned to live with but never proven the existence of. The refutation of that position stares us squarely in the face, though, because every time we respond to words, a mental event changes the brain, not vice versa.

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