Brain Check
Scientists are mapping the pathways that link emotion to health. The
challenge for the rest of us is to put the discoveries to work
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6038621/site/newsweek/


Photo illustration by Mark Hooper for Newsweek
By Herbert Benson, M.D., Julie Corliss and Geoffrey Cowley
NewsweekSept. 27 issue - Imagine you're allergic to the oil of the
Japanese lacquer tree-so allergic that the brush of a leaf against your
skin provokes an angry rash. Strapping a blindfold over your eyes, a
scientist tells you she's going to rub your right arm with lacquer leaf
and your left arm with the innocuous leaf of a chestnut tree. The
rubbing commences, and before long your right arm is covered with
burning, itchy welts. Your left side feels fine. No surprise, until you
learn that your left arm-not the right-is the one that got lacquered. Or
imagine that Parkinson's disease has reduced your walk to a shuffle and
left your hands too shaky to grasp a pencil. You enroll in a study and
receive an experimental surgical treatment, which dramatically improves
both your gait and your grip. You're ready to declare it a miracle of
modern medicine, when you discover that the operation was a sham. The
surgeons merely drilled a small hole in your skull and then patched it.

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That thoughts and feelings can affect our health is hardly news. In the
span of a few decades, mind-body medicine has evolved from heresy into
something approaching cliche. So why is NEWSWEEK devoting this Health
for Life report to the mind-body connection? Because the relationship
between emotion and health is turning out to be more interesting, and
more important, than most of us could have imagined. Viewed through the
lens of 21st-century science, anxiety, alienation and hopelessness are
not just feelings. Neither are love, serenity and optimism. All are
physiological states that affect our health just as clearly as obesity
or physical fitness. And the brain, as the source of such states, offers
a potential gateway to countless other tissues and organs-from the heart
and blood vessels to the gut and the immune system. The challenge is to
map the pathways linking mental states to medical ones, and learn how to
travel them at will.

 HEALTH FOR LIFE | September 27, 2004 issue
. Brain Check
. Relaxation: Ways to Calm Your Mind
. Buddha Lessons
. Forgive and Let Live
. Pain and Mood: Depression Hurts
. For a Happy Heart
. Cut Stress-Cut Sugar
. Health For Life MD: Answers to Your Questions
. We All Need a Dose of the Doctor
. The Serenity Workout
. Cancer: Combination Therapy
. Digestion: Soothing a Sensitive Gut
. A New Fertility Factor
. Menopause: Easing the Transition
. Hypnosis: Altered States
. Neurofeedback: This is Serious Fun
. How to Think About the Mind
. Live Talk: Using the Mind to Heal the Body

That effort is now burgeoning. The federal government's five-year-old
Integrated Neural Immune Program will spend $16 million on mind-body
research next year, and private foundations will spend millions more. At
least one leading managed-care organization, HIP USA, has started to
cover mind-body practices, and Medicare now reimburses for certain
relaxation techniques administered by psychologists. Hospitals, for
their part, are opening mind-body clinics-and yoga classes are spreading
from health clubs into shopping malls. According to a recent government
survey, nearly half of all Americans used mind-body interventions in
2002. The respondents embraced practices ranging from deep breathing and
progressive muscle relaxation to meditation, hypnosis and guided
imagery. Close to half of them also said they prayed-perhaps the oldest
and most basic form of mind-body medicine.

 INTERACTIVES AND QUIZZES
 . Quiz: What's your stress level?
. Conflict: What's your style?
. Quiz: Are you at risk of an eating disorder?

They had plenty to pray for. Modern life is rife with potential
stressors, and there is now little question that uncontrolled stress can
kill. Harvard physiologist Walter Cannon recognized 90 years ago that
when confronted by a threat-physical or emotional, real or imagined-the
body responds with a rise in blood pressure, heart rate, muscle tension
and breathing rate. We now know that this physiological "stress
response" involves hormones and inflammatory chemicals that, while
valuable in measured bursts, can foster everything from headaches to
heart attacks in overdose. Cannon verified that people who believed
they'd been hexed by voodoo witch doctors could drop dead from a sudden
and massive stress response. We now know that chronic stress, though not
always fatal, can disrupt the digestive system, worsen symptoms of
menopause and interfere with fertility. Indeed, experts now believe that
60 to 90 percent of all doctor visits involve stress-related complaints.

 LIVE TALK: Mind and Body
. Using our minds, can we teach ourselves to be healthier? Geoffrey
Cowley will discuss the mind-body connection in a Live Talk on
Wednesday, Sept. 22, at noon ET. Submit  questions below.
 Enter your City and State

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As researchers chart the health effects of hostility and hopelessness,
they're also gaining unprecedented insights into the mind's power to
heal. The "placebo response" has been widely recognized since the 1950s,
when Harvard's Dr. Henry Beecher described the phenomenon. Until
recently, most experts dismissed it as a feat of self-deception, in
which people who remain sick (or never were) convince themselves they're
better. But we're now discovering that expectations can directly alter a
disease process. Consider those Parkinson's sufferers who improved with
sham surgery. Using PET scans, researchers compared their brains with
those of patients who received an active treatment. As expected, the
active intervention caused a significant rise in dopamine, the
neurotransmitter that people with Parkinson's lack. But the patients who
improved on placebo experienced a similar dopamine surge. A related
study found that fake analgesics could boost the brain's own
pain-fighting mechanisms. In both cases, the placebo response was not an
imaginary lessening of symptoms but an objective, measurable change in
brain chemistry.


Placebos are just the beginning. Mounting evidence suggests that any
number of soothing emotional experiences can improve our physical
health. At Duke University, researchers have found that religious
observance is associated with lower rates of illness and
hospitalization. In studies of HIV-positive men, researchers at UCLA
have found that optimism is associated with stronger immune-cell
function. And research at Harvard suggests that the "relaxation
response"-the deep sense of calm we can achieve through yoga, prayer or
simple deep-breathing exercises-can help counter the effects of chronic
stress. We now believe that the body produces more nitric oxide when
deeply relaxed, and that this molecule acts as an antidote to cortisol
and other potentially toxic stress hormones.

 NEWSWEEK ON AIR | 9/19/04
Health-For-Life: The Mind-Body Frontier
Dr. Herbert Benson, President, The Mind-Body Medical Institute in Boston
& Associate Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Claudia Kalb,
NEWSWEEK General Editor and Dr. Michael Miller, Editor in Chief, Harvard
Mental Health Letter

. Listen to the audio
. Listen to the complete On Air show

Can we teach ourselves to be healthier? That is the central question of
mind-body medicine, and the answer is not an unqualified yes. Stressful
life circumstances are sometimes inescapable (no one chooses poverty or
discrimination). Heredity and temperament leave some of us more
stress-prone than others. And prayer is clearly no substitute for
penicillin or a decent diet. Yet mind-body techniques can improve almost
anyone's quality of life. Meditation may not cure cancer, but by
alleviating fear and softening the side effects of treatment, it leaves
many patients feeling less victimized. Stress-related illness often
defies conventional remedies, and when we persist with high-tech pills
and procedures, the costs of treatment can easily outweigh the benefits.
Mind-body medicine offers a saner starting place. If it fulfills half
its promise, it could reduce medical costs while improving our health
and our lives. And whatever its limitations, it has the advantage of
doing no harm.

Benson is the Mind/Body Medical Institute Associate Professor of
Medicine at Harvard Medical School and founding president of the
Mind/Body Medical Institute in Boston. CORLISS is a medical writer at
Harvard Medical School. Cowley is NEWSWEEK's health editor. For more
information go to health.harvard.edu/NEWSWEEK.

C 2004 Newsweek, Inc.

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 MORE FROM NEWSWEEK HEALTH
Relaxation: Ways to Calm Your Mind
. Brain Check. Relaxation: Ways to Calm Your Mind. Buddha Lessons.
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