UpClose & Personal

One of my mentors has been Joan Borysenko, PhD. She was a pioneer in the domain of mind/body medicine with Herbert Benson. She has shared lots of research and stories in the field of mind/body medicine, one of which I would like to share with you.

One of my favorite research experiments dealt with powerful link between the body and mind via conditioning response. This study was done by Dr. G. Richard Smith and Sandra McDaniel. They were testing the immune reactions in humans and inadvertently discovered what a huge player the human mind is in our ability to respond to very physical stimuli.

The first part of the study was done over a period of five months. Once a month, volunteers who had previously had a positive reaction to tuberculin skin tests came into the same room with the same arrangement of furniture and the same nurse. Each time there was a red and green vial on the desk within their view. The red vial contained tuberculin. The green vial contained a salt solution. Each time the volunteers came in they were injected in the right arm with the red vial and in the left arm with the green vial.

Month after month the same procedure was followed, and month after month the same reaction to the tuberculin was observed in the volunteers? a red swollen patch on their right arm.

On the sixth month the contents of the two vials were switched without the volunteer's knowledge. The researchers were injecting the tuberculin, now contained in the green vial, into the left arm and injecting the salt solution, now contained in the red vial, into the right arm. This time the volunteer's had almost no reaction to the tuberculin. The volunteer's expectation that nothing ever happened in the past when they had an injection from the green vial had apparently been enough to inhibit the immune system's powerful inflammatory response to tuberculin.

Our minds are so powerful in conjunction with our bodies, yet we forget that fact when we are internally talking or describing how we feel. Some examples are:

   "My back is killing me"
   "I have a huge knot in my stomach!"
   "That just kills me when that happens!”
   "My job drives me crazy!”
   "That keeps eating away at me!”
   "I have the biggest butt!”
   “I don’t like the way I look!”
   "I'm a nervous wreck!”
   "Nobody loves me!"

We think or blurt out these self-fulfilling prophesies without a second thought as to what we are doing to ourselves. Words mean things. The mind cannot separate our "over expressing" from reality. That is how the mind works.

Much research has been done and many books have been written in the past 45 years on mind/body medicine. From Herbert Benson to Joan Borysenko to Larry Dossey to Bernie Siegel. The irony is we have always, from the beginning of time, had the power to have some control over our health or illness. Some cultures have not lost the importance of treating the whole person in their medicine. Others are just now rediscovering this connection.

I will share more of the research that has been done in mind-body medicine in my next column. In the meantime, be conscious of what you are thinking and saying to and about yourself.