Wednesday, February 27, 2008

London Times article on mind affecting health

I find it odd when articles appear out of the blue, lacking any particular context for why it is appearing in a given publication at a given time, but that seems to be what happens in newspapers in particular. So here's an out-of-the-blue article about the mind-body connection in the (London) Times. The article's lead source is Harvard's Herbert Benson, although we are not told why the Times in London is abruptly quoting him.

The title--"Mind Control: Meditate Your Way to a Healthier Body"--is kind of random too. The article is basically about some actual, documented ways the mind can affect the body, not always having to do with meditation. Comments from actual, traditional medical folks who are open to the concept are included. This is not any sort of self-help article, as the title may imply.

The article is straightforward and informative, but I can't help feeling that its utter randomness is connected to how we culturally tend to look at mind-body medicine topics, when we bother to look at all, in this sort of cordoned off manner. We put some aspect of it on display in a sort of curio case; we can read it, go, "Hmmm. Interesting," and then proceed on with our usual world view.

Oddly enough, the article even pays lip service to the idea of using this information effectively, asking at one point, "So can we implement this mind over matter approach in our daily lives?" It proceeds, however, to fail to answer the question in any but the most general of terms.

"By repeating mantras to yourself, or practicing conscious repetitive actions such as tapping each time you think about the relevant topic," we are told, "you can manipulate your mind."

Oh, okay. Will do!

Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Weary of gender assumptions

There's an interesting article in the Boston Globe about psychologist Alice Domar and her study of something she calls the "perception deception"--the tendency for women to be very critical of themselves at all times, which can often lead to health problems.

Domar is executive director of the Domar Center for Mind/Body Health in Waltham, Massachusetts; she is also an assistant professor at the Harvard Medical School. She has a new book on this very topic coming out next month, entitled Be Happy Without Being Perfect: How to Break Free from the Perception Deception.

All of this is well and good and informative. But I am growing weary of the way discussions like this proceed along such strict gender lines. Women do this; men do that.

I understand the need to paint in broad strokes. But when I read this article, I find myself emotionally aligned with many of the issues discussed as "women's" issues. This happens to me a lot.

The bottom line is that these matters are not always so clear-cut. It is probably more accurate to talk about feminine and masculine tendencies, to reflect the underlying energy picture informing our emotional realities, rather than "women are like this" and "men are like this."

I am a heterosexual man who happens to have a fairly well-developed feminine side. I know it complicates matters in these sorts of discussions but I am real and I know there are others like me and I wish there could be a way to have these discussions that would include me rather than leave me yet again with the idea that I am some sort of alien being--neither from Venus nor from Mars.

Friday, February 22, 2008

Friday quotation

"When one is pretending the entire body revolts."
- Anaïs Nin

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Mind-body medicine in the mainstream media

U.S. News & World Report has an article on a new study that shows that daily stress has an impact on how a woman's immune system responds to the cancer-causing virus HPV, and then an accompanying article featuring a short interview with Anne Harrington, author of The Cure Within, for some perspective on the mind-body connection at work here.

The feeling of stress continues to be just about the only emotional state that we feel okay, culturally, about relating to health issues. And even then it seems we do it at arm's length, continually looking to biology for the "real" reasons something may be physically wrong with us.

Friday, February 15, 2008

Back pain persists; the New York Times is puzzled

"Americans are spending more money than ever to treat spine problems, but their backs are not getting any better."

That's the first line in an article in Wednesday's New York Times, and that pretty much tells you the story.

As strong as the article is on statistics and evidence of the widespread problem, the Times remains as puzzled about it as the medical mainstream whose actions are being tracked, and, seemingly, as close-minded:

"It is not clear why more people appear to be suffering from back and neck pain," writes health reporter Tara Parker-Pope. "It could be because of rising obesity rates, researchers suggested. Or excessive treatment of back problems could lead to more problems."

More accurate it would be to say that it is not clear to tradition-bound western medical practitioners why more people appear to be suffering from back and neck pain. But to other experts--Dr. John Sarno among them--it's very clear. Our culture is in the midst of an epidemic of mind-body disorders. The back pain is largely psychogenic.

But that is not, apparently, for the Times to say, or even insinuate. Had the article left it an unaccountable mystery, we would have been better off. Instead, Parker-Pope passes along two suggestions from her medical sources that are, frankly, unscientific and borderline comical.

"Rising obesity rates"? Someone should tell that to *my* back. And note the ever-popular evasive attribution: "researchers suggested." The obesity witch hunt continues, and it is not, I don't think, unrelated to our medical establishment's inability to absorb the reality of an intimate mind-body connection. I'll save that for another post someday.

As for the second suggestion--the idea that "more people appear to be suffering from back and neck pain" because "excessive treatment of back problems could lead to more problems": um, well...huh? I can understand how excessive treatment of back problems could prolong existing conditions. But how could excessive treatment of people who already have back pain create more people with back pain? That was the original puzzle: "why more people appear to be suffering from back and neck pain."

That American doctors might actually think that this makes more sense than acknowledging the fact that our bodies and minds are connected and influence each other shows us, sadly, how far we yet have to go in moving mind-body medicine into the mainstream here in the U.S.

Friday quotation

"We tend to be particularly unaware that we are thinking virtually all the time. The incessant stream of thoughts flowing through our minds leaves us very little respite for inner quiet. And we leave precious little room for ourselves anyway just to be, without having to run around doing things all the time. Our actions are all too frequently driven rather than undertaken in awareness, driven by those perfectly ordinary thoughts and impulses that run through the mind like a coursing river, if not a waterfall. We get caught up in the torrent and it winds up submerging our lives as it carries us to places we may not wish to go and may not even realize we are headed for."
- Jon Kabat-Zinn, Wherever You Go, There You Are (Hyperion, 1994)

Wednesday, February 13, 2008

The pursuit of happiness

In Newsweek, an article on how "The push for ever-greater well-being is facing a backlash, fueled by research on the value of sadness."

The rather mindless cultural drive to assure us that we're all supposed to be happy practically all the time strikes me as an insidious symptom of the lack of general medical understanding of the mind-body connection. We treat the body as only body; we treat the mind as only mind.

Working hard to convince everyone that our goal is unalloyed, 24/7 happiness seems to be the emotional equivalent of attempting to gain a bulked-up, Mr. Universe-style physique--neither natural nor desirable for most people, and loaded with unintended side effects for later in life.

Sunday, February 10, 2008

Mind Body medicine in Fort Wayne

A 71-year-old neurosurgeon in Fort Wayne, Indiana named Rudy Kachmann has just opened the Kachmann Mind Body Institute within the Lutheran Hospital in Fort Wayne.

Kachmann tells the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel:

"I am an unyielding believer in biomedicine’s ability to overcome most of the challenges presented by a life-threatening injury or pathological process. But I also believe the abdication of treating the whole person, medicine’s detachment from the mind, is a false, outdated dichotomy that scientific discoveries, contemporary needs and economic realities no longer support."

Some day, people will look back upon western medical practices in our time with as much disbelief and distaste as we today look back at medieval "medical" treatments.

In the meantime, three cheers for Dr. Kachmann.

Friday, February 8, 2008

Friday quotation

"As I've watched as well as participated in this process, I've come to believe that virtually all illness, if not psychosomatic in foundation, has a definite psychosomatic component. Recent technological innovations have allowed us to examine the molecular basis of the emotions, and to begin to understand how the molecules of our emotions share intimate connections with, and are indeed inseparable from, our physiology. It is the emotions, I have come to see, that link mind and body."
- Candace Pert, Molecules of Emotion (Scribner, 1997)

Tuesday, February 5, 2008

The Mindbody Syndrome (Tension Myositis Syndrome)

While I have been interested in mind-body issues for many years, and have read widely in the field (such as it is), the immediate trigger for starting this blog has been my close encounter with a condition known as TMS. Originally TMS stood for tension myositis syndrome; there is a movement afoot to rename it The Mindbody Syndrome, which is more immediately understandable, and manages to salvage the acronym.

TMS is the name for the condition in which your mind converts deep emotional content into physical symptoms. The symptoms--and the pain and discomfort attendent with them-- are very real. Emotions can and do have a real, physical impact on the body.

And TMS makes far more sense than the explanations most American doctors offer for the sort of chronic back pain that is one hallmark of the condition. My MRI, for instance, revealed arthritis of the facet joints of the spine. This was therefore posited as the source of my pain.

The fact that arthritis of the facet joints is a degenerative condition associated with aging, and rather common, and not in fact the cause of any pain in most people who have it, didn't seem to matter. Neither did the fact that the pain I was experiencing managed to be in my hip a lot of the time, although it also tended to jump around from day to day, even moment to moment. All they could quantify was the arthritis. That was their story and they were sticking to it.

It would be one thing if medical people here could more readily acknowledge what they don't know. Instead, all too many of us are treated to arrogant--and ignorant--presumption. The first day I was in physical therapy, I made a tentative general statement about how I have had the idea that my back pain was part of something larger, how it was connected to what's been going on in my life for a long time. The physical therapist looked me in the eye and said, with the patronizing tone of a parent talking to a child: "Jeremy. This is a mechanical problem. We will fix it mechanically."

Is it really so outlandish for me to have suggested that my body could be influenced by strong emotional content in my life? Is the suggestion that the mind can influence and control the body in such a way as to cause physical symptoms really that far-fetched?

Haven't these folks ever seen anyone blush? Haven't any of them ever felt butterflies in their stomachs?

As for TMS, whole books have been written on the subject, starting with the pioneering work of Dr. John Sarno. Dr. Howard Schubiner--one of a handful of other MDs who supports this diagnosis and understands TMS--offers this concise description of what TMS is about:

"Your body is producing pain because it's manifesting unresolved stress, possibly from your childhood, or from stressful events in your adulthood, or from your present circumstances, and as a result of your personality traits (which affects how you respond to stress and how much pressure you tend to put upon yourself)."

At a certain level, it's that simple. But of course there's a lot going on within that description. I suggest watching Schubiner's instructive video on YouTube about TMS for more information.

And I promise not to turn this blog into a boring, ridiculous account of my own condition. But to the extent that my struggles with TMS highlights interesting aspects of the incontrovertible reality of the mind-body connection--and the way that informed doctors can actually work with it rather than ridicule the very idea--I will return to the subject as the story unfolds.

Sunday, February 3, 2008

Better Harrington interview

The Boston Globe has one that positions Harrington more reasonably than Salon managed to.

What too many journalists miss is the reasonably expansive area between the extremes. They miss, willfully or otherwise, the fact that the mind-body connection is not a black and white scenario with "only physical causes" on one side and "the mind generates all disease" on the other. Writers (such as in the Slate review, previously noted) love to pretend it's black and white, so you get western medicine wearing the white hat and (as the Slate headline had it) "The unscientific allure of mind-body medicine" embodying everything silly and superstitious.

But that's a false and foolish dichotomy. Just because western medicine has a powerful understanding of the physical side of disease does not in any way rule out that the mind can play a very important role as well.

If over time I appear here to berate western medicine, it's not because I don't believe that germs cause disease, or that there aren't actual physical circumstances happening when something is wrong with your body. But there is no way--absolutely no way--that western research can prove its position, and by and large its practitioners, and followers, have no justifiable reason to dismiss the psychological/emotional element of bodily disorders. And yet that's all most of them seem to do.

That's what I've had enough of, and will continue to write about.

Friday, February 1, 2008

Friday quotation

"The body-mind, as a dynamic field of energy, is inherently attuned to the larger patterns and flows of the universe. Out of this attunement emerge sudden and surprising insights, creative inspirations and discoveries, and larger, transpersonal qualities, such as clarit, compassion, joy, or spontaneity."
-- John Welwood, Towards a Psychology of Awakening (Shambala, 2002)