Some illness is indeed in the mind

By Dan Linehan

MANKATO — Feeling sick?

That bile-y sensation rising in your gut seems to rule out just about everything except sleeping and feeling miserable.

Our language does a curious little runaround when one “feels sick” — linking a word about emotions with another about physical displeasure. Turns out it’s no mistake. It’s your brain, not your gut, that’s confining you to bed and making you grumpy.

If our brain makes us feel sick when we’re physically ill or just plain stressed, can it help us feel well?

There’s a complex word, psychoneuroimmunology, for the field of science exploring the connection between mind and body — between how we think and what we feel.

Esther Sternberg is at the vanguard of this research. She works at the National Institute of Mental Health as the chief of the Section on Neuroendocrine Immun-ology and Behavior.

Sternberg will be in St. Peter this week to give a pair of free lectures at Gustavus Adolphus College. The first, on Monday evening, will be targeted at a public audience, while her Tuesday speech will be directed at a students and professors in the field.

She argues that explosive growth in immunology and brain is beginning to confirm what people have known innately for thousands of years: Stress can make you sick and believing can make you well.

Greeks had it right

Sternberg begins her book, “The Balance Within: The Science Connecting Health and Emotions,” with an account of how modern medicine found then lost an understanding of that connection.

Healing in ancient Greece would probably fall under the “alternative medicine” umbrella today. Sleep, music and prayer were considered as essential as hygiene and a healthy diet.

And a statue of the Greek god of healing, Asclepius, carried the universally recognized symbol of medicine — a staff with a serpent curled around it. For the Greeks, those symbols evoked the relationship between body and soul.

But the advent of rationalism devalued everything that can’t be objectively measured, feelings and thoughts included.

“Until recently, we couldn’t measure an emotion, or measure exactly what the immune system was doing,” Sternberg said during a phone interview Friday.

The irony is striking — the same rationalism that discarded the mind-body connection is now being used to prove it.

“It took 400 years of technological development before we could apply rationality principles, before we could understand how these systems work,” she said.

Stressing out

One of the fruits of that research has focused on the effects of stress on the immune system. (Hint: it’s not good)

But, at least for those without personal helicopters to avoid traffic, some stress is unavoidable. It’s even helpful in small doses because it revs the body up to deal with whatever is causing the stress.

In some people, though, stress becomes a continuous cycle, as the brain is constantly releasing hormones that should be reserved for crisis. These hormones suppress the immune system (after all, why worry about catching the flu with more immediate concerns at hand?) and can damage areas of the brain, sometimes causing depression.

According to the American Academy of Family Physicians, two-thirds of all visits to primary care clinics are due to stress-related symptoms.

And a 2005 study by an Ohio State University team found that the wounds of married couples who fight heal 40 percent slower than couples who don’t.

Sternberg argues that the answer to continuous stress is, most simply, balance. Mindfulness and belief are the counterweights to stress.

Calming down

Liz Power Hawkinson is on the front lines of medicine’s newest response to fighting the effects of stress.

As a psychotherapist at the St. Peter Clinic, she leads an eight-week course in what’s called “mindfulness-based stress reduction.”

Mindfulness is a Buddhist principle characterized with a non-judgmental awareness of the present. Basically, it’s about being aware of your body using a combination of meditation tactics and yoga.

But it’s also about calming down in everyday life.

“We can’t control stressors,” Power Hawkinson said. “We can control how we think about and respond to them.”

Even given our ability to control how we feel, Sternberg warns against interpreting stress as a personal failure.

“You take your car to the garage without guilt,” she says, so there should never be any shame in a visit to the doctor.

Believe (in anything)

If Power Hawkinson is bringing an informed view on the mind-body connection to medicine, Rachel Larson has her feet planted firmly in both realms.

Larson, a chaplain at Gustavus Adolphus College and a former nurse, splits her time between counseling and leading prayer sessions. She calls Sternberg’s work “wonderful.”

“Often times, the world of science and medicine has just kind of dismissed the role of prayer, religion, worship, that kind of thing as a part of healing and health,” she said.

For Larson, belief revolves around her life as a Christian. The rituals — “the smells and bells” — act in a similar way to Power Hawkinson’s mindfulness training.

She draws the connection herself by saying she enjoys walking and doing yoga while praying. It may not be verbal praying, but rather “trying to reconnect with the body.”

Too often, she says, Christians ascribe to a dualistic perspective where the mind is placed on a pedestal and the body is debased.

To Sternberg, belief isn’t limited to Christianity, organized religion or even spirituality in general. It includes prayer and meditation, but it also can mean exercise and social support.

No single way will work for everyone, and no single person can rely on one method, Sternberg says.

“I mean belief in anything.”