I am surprised to hear that's the case, and also it absolutely does not match my experience of the scientifically minded people I know, all of whom are familiar with both the placebo effect and the term psychosomatic.
Sure, but those concepts are more often regarded with dismissiveness in the context I'm talking about.
Try proposing to such a person that chronic auto-immune illness, that has resisted treatment by conventional medicine, could be remedied via non-mainstream subconscious healing techniques.
It's notable that zealots end up tying themselves in knots over these topics. In attacking homeopathy (which, to be clear, I’m not into), Science Based Medicine [1] goes as far as claiming that the placebo effect doesn't bring about any actual physiological improvement, but rather just brings about a feeling of wellbeing.
This seems to contradict the way in which it the concept is used in mainstream medical trials.
It also presumes that "feeling good" and physiological healing are unrelated concepts, which would be surprising from an evolutionary perspective.
But hey what do I know? I'm no doctor, just a poor shmo trying to make sense of it all while trying whatever means possible to get well.
[1] https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/placebo-myths-debunked/
Just to pick one particularly interesting study from way back in 1978, Levine, Gordon, and Fields [1] reported in the Lancet that naxolone (better known now as Narcan) can actually block placebo pain relief (in this case, in the context of dental surgery), implying that the placebo analgesia is mediated by actual physiological release of neurotransmitters (in this case, endorphins).
This isn't the place for an extended discussion/debate about this stuff, as I've long learned that it's driven far more by ideology and ego than actual science.
But I've heard it said by a leading proponent of mind-body health hypotheses and practices, that there's a pattern the debate so often seems to follow when discussing this stuff with materialist hardliners:
You start by suggesting that physiological illnesses can be (at last partially) treated with emotion-based therapies, and they scoff, "that's preposterous".
You then carefully explain it using known, established science, to do with factors like cortisol, the fight/flight response, priority resource allocation, etc.
They then respond "well of course, everyone knows that, there's nothing novel about this at all".
Yet after many years of people talking about, actual practice of this kind of treatment is still confined to the fringes and beyond.
The point that they make constantly is that there are too many shysters selling sham treatments, that when studied turn out no better than the placebo baseline.
I do think it's pretty well established at this point that stress causes inflammation [1]. Chronic inflammation looks like it wrecks havoc on the body and can turn up as all sorts of symptoms. Addressing the psychological issues that are causing the stress absolutely should help. Where the skeptics get caught up, and I believe rightly so, is when practitioners start talking about woo or chi.
[1] https://www.everydayhealth.com/wellness/united-states-of-str...
The way I think about it is that we are missing a bunch of words for things that we don't have a very good handle on. We could spend a ton of time analyzing and categorizing, and come up with dozens of new words with satisfyingly precise meaning. Or we could (ab)use qi to mean whatever we want it to mean in a particularly context, and be horribly sloppy about it. From a theoretical mindset, the former is obviously superior; it's the only way to ensure you're making forward progress in understanding. But from a practical perspective, lots of people who aren't hung up on definitions are improving their lives every (well, most) days.
And that's not coincidental. It turns out that one of the biggest barriers to progress (in "life cultivation", but also elsewhere) is insisting on fully understanding every single thing before making use of it. It's a good way to avoid looking at the uncomfortable parts of yourself - just keep insisting "I don't get it. What exactly do you mean by '... sentence involving qi....'?"
We don't do that with power tools or computers. We have to take things on faith somewhere. Which is not to say you can't screw up by being too loose about it. There are plenty of people who say deep-sounding and nonsensical things while everyone nods wisely and knowingly. (But not all of those listeners are fooling themselves, either. Some are ignoring the details of the gibberish and are instead mapping it to what they think the person is trying to say based on what they know to be true from examining themselves.) And because of the imprecise language used, you're limited in what you can use to distinguish people who really have something to say from idiots parroting nonsense. Look at outcomes, if you can.
So it doesn't bother me too much when people say speed instead of velocity, or qi instead of the 100 different things it might mean: energy, blood, nerve impulses, the flow of cause and effect, change, rate of change, acceleration of change,... If someone has something to say but no shared words to say it with, I can't blame them for using a placeholder.
All that being said, 99% of what you'll read that mentions qi is really and truly nonsense. The imprecision is too good a place to hide bullshit, and there is an overwhelming quantity of bullshit to be hidden.
Casually speaking, it might seem easy to wave off such body changes in response to emotion as a temporary thing. That would be premature. Cortisol is another hormone associated with stress and people with stressful lives show elevated cortisol levels which may be related to weight gain and obesity [1].
[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1038/oby.2009.76