The Power of Positive Thinking
When Bonnie Anderson’s water purifier sprang a leak, she slipped on the wet tiles in her kitchen and cracked a bone in her spine. The 75-year-old, formerly an avid golfer, was crippled by pain and insomnia. In desperation, she volunteered for an experimental procedure called vertebroplasty, in which medical cement is pumped into the fracture. The treatment succeeded beyond all expectations: Bonnie walked out of the hospital and soon returned to the golf course. “Except,” as science journalist Jo Marchant writes in “Cure,” “there’s something Bonnie didn’t know when she took part in the trial: she wasn’t in the vertebroplasty group. The surgery she received was fake.” The operating team went through all the motions without actually injecting the cement.
Ms. Marchant’s “Cure” is a cautious, scrupulous investigation of how the brain can help heal our bodies. It is also an important look at the flip side of this coin, which is how brains damaged by stress may make bodies succumb to physical illness or accelerated aging.
The best known brain-body interaction in medicine is the placebo effect. Ms. Marchant documents some rather astonishing examples: In a laboratory on a cliff in the Alps, fake oxygen prevents an attack of altitude sickness; tremor and rigidity in a patient with Parkinson’s disease abate with a phony infusion of dopamine; an autistic child becomes more interactive after a sham medication. Some patients respond to placebos even when they know they are taking placebos.
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Ms. Marchant cautions that placebos have limitations: “Any effects caused by belief in a treatment are limited to the natural tools that the body has available.” In fact, the effects of placebos “tend to be limited to symptoms—things that we are consciously aware of, such as pain, itches, rashes or diarrhea.” According to Ms. Marchant, “placebo effects also seem to be particularly strong for psychiatric disorders such as depression, anxiety and addiction. In fact, they may be the main mode of action for many psychiatric drugs.”
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Ms. Marchant travels to rural Georgia to investigate the relationship between income and well-being. As she writes, “there’s a linear health gradient through the entire socioeconomic spectrum.” This is especially true in the United States, where those in the top 10% of income live about 10 years longer than those in the bottom 10%. This effect holds up even after controlling for health behaviors such as alcohol, tobacco and drug use. Poverty and lack of control leads to chronic stress, which damages the cardiovascular system and hinders the immune system. Chronic stress even affects our ability to maintain the integrity of our chromosomes. According to Ms. Marchant, “feeling stressed doesn’t just make us ill. It ages us.”
In the last chapters of “Cure,” Ms. Marchant examines the possible benefits of a variety of stress-reduction techniques, including meditation and mindfulness training, compassion training, biofeedback, and a rewarding social life. Regular churchgoers seem to live longer than non-churchgoers, an effect that may be mediated by stress reduction and stronger social networks rather than divine intervention.
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http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-power-of-positive-thinking-1455578018
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