Saturday, November 12, 2011

Treating The Body Right

Science has begun to realise that diseases cannot be treated in medically specialised isolation, writes Mukul Sharma.

Way back in 1964, well-known journalist, writer and world peace activist Norman Cousins was diagnosed with a crippling, degenerative and incurable disease called ankylosing spondylitis and given only a few months to live. However, even though he was severely paralysed, Cousins left the hospital and checked into a hotel where he began megadosing himself with vitamin C and continuously watching comedy films. “A hospital,” as he put it, “is no place for a person who is seriously ill.”

Laughter Is The Best Medicine

Contrary to all medical expectations, his condition started improving almost immediately. “I made the joyous discovery that 10 minutes of genuine belly laughter had an anaesthetic effect and would give me at least two hours of pain-free sleep,” he wrote in Anatomy of an Illness. “When the pain-killing effect of the laughter wore off, (I) would switch on the motion picture projector again and not infrequently, it would lead to another pain-free interval.” In fact, soon he was able to return to his full-time job as editor of Saturday Review.

But Cousins’ problems were far from over. Fifteen years later at the age of about 65, he suffered a massive and near fatal heart attack. While being taken into the emergency room, he told his caregivers, “Gentlemen, I want you to know that you’re looking at the darnedest healing machine that’s ever been wheeled into this hospital.” Yet, after recovery, he began to seriously wonder if he could survive two life-threatening conditions in one lifetime. He did.

Norman Cousins finally died of heart failure in 1990, having survived much longer than his physicians predicted: 10 years after his first heart attack, 26 years after his collagen illness, and 36 years after his doctors first diagnosed that he had a heart disease and was told he had a one in 500 chance of surviving.

Creativity Ushers Wellness

So, what happened here? Or was it just a placebo effect attributable to the huge amounts of vitamin C that he was taking? Perhaps, but in that case, pharmaceutical industries would do well to target their multibillion dollar R&D into investigating something that can have such remarkable effects.

Cousins, on the other hand, spoke to famous endocrinologist Ana Aslan who was of the opinion that creativity was the central trigger of the placebo effect as it sets up a chain of events in the body’s systems that eventually restores homeostasis and feelings of wellness. Could laughter have also played a role? It certainly appears so.

According to one analyst, when the pain would return, Cousins would simply turn the projector back on and the laughter would not only re-induce sleep, but he was able to actually gauge physical changes in his body by measuring his blood sedimentation rate which is a key indicator of inflammation and infection in the blood. He found that this dropped by at least five points each time he watched one of the comedy movies.
Interdisciplinary Approach

In the case of Norman Cousins, it’s plain that many of the principles underpinning his self-treatment and substantial recovery are becoming accepted as based on hard science rather than new age quackery. What used to be once dismissed as mumbo-jumbo is now being borne out by researchers in one of the newest field of medicine — in the growing area of psychoneuroimmunology, or PNI, which is the study of the interaction between psychological processes and the nervous and immune systems of the human body.

Today PNI takes an interdisciplinary approach, incorporating psychology, neuroscience, immunology, physiology, pharmacology, molecular biology, psychiatry, behavioural medicine, infectious diseases, endocrinology and rheumatology. That may be a lot, but it’s also becoming apparent that there’s still a whole lot to be learnt about the human body — in particular that a disease cannot be treated in medically specialised isolation.

Or as Cousins put it: “The life force may be the least understood force on earth...human beings are not locked into fixed limitations. The quest for perfectibility is not a presumption or a blasphemy but the highest manifestation of a great design.”

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