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How to win wars and influence people

Correspondence to:
Correspondence to:
Dr R Persaud
Consultant Psychiatrist and Gresham Professor For Public Understanding Of Psychiatry, The Maudsley Hospital, Westways Clinic, 49 St James Road, Croydon CR9 2RR, UK; r.persaud@iop.kcl.ac.uk

Keywords: war

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Doctors treat an ever increasing number of the casualties arising from violent conflicts around the world.¹ Given prevention is inestimably better than cure, should the medical profession, besides patching up victims, also assist resolution of these conflicts, which are becoming the source of spiralling mortality and morbidity?²

After all, there is much that constitutes the experience and expertise of the medical world from which conflict resolution approaches could benefit; should our leaders listen to doctors more as they attempt to tackle mounting geo-political instability?

The neurobiology of violence is increasingly well understood and this knowledge could be of benefit to politicians wrestling with the problem—the brain’s prefrontal cortex is now implicated in various forms of antisocial personality problems and intriguingly, it is also implicated in understanding other’s mental states³ otherwise referred to as "theory of mind".

It has been suggested that our progress from non-human primate to . . . [Full text of this article]