Rev. Anthony David
March 5, 2007
Today we begin a three part sermon series on the connection between spirituality and health. Bring those two together—spirituality and health—and so many questions come up, as in: What role does the mind play in our physical health? When you have an illness that seems never-ending, or one you can’t easily recover from, how do you cope, and is there still a sense in which you can achieve healing? Yet a third question is: is there such a thing as an enlightened diet, and what might that look like? Three questions, and three parts to the sermon series that we are entering into.
Starting this morning: mind-body medicine. The role that beliefs, attitudes, and emotions can play in our physical health. The power of relaxation, hypnosis, biofeedback, meditation, prayer, and other mind-based strategies to heal sickness and promote wellbeing. All of this belongs to the realm of mind-body medicine, and that is what we turn to right now.
Let’s jump in with a story that comes from one of the best known and most respected leaders in the field of mind-body medicine: Dr. Andrew Weil. He says, “[Several years ago], I saw an unusual and difficult patient, a man in his early fifties who worked as a wholesale produce manager. Except for mild hypertension that had not required medication, he had been in good health—until he quit smoking. He had been a two-pack-a-day cigarette smoker for most of his adult life, but, increasingly, his family had put pressure on him to stop. Finally, he did. ‘It wasn’t that hard,’ he told me. ‘I just put my mind to it and only really suffered for the first three days.’ But two months after he stopped, he developed ulcerative colitis ‘out of the blue,’ never having had any digestive problems before. He went to a gastroenterologist, who started him on medication, told him not to drink milk, and sent him on his way. The medication did not control the patient’s cramping and diarrhea and produced unpleasant side effects. After a month, he decided to follow his intuition that if he resumed smoking, his colitis would disappear. He did, and it did—very promptly. By the time he came to see me, he had repeated this pattern three times. Each time the colitis appeared faster after he quit smoking and took longer to disappear when he resumed. Now he feared he was going to be an addicted smoker with ulcerative colitis.”
And that’s most of the story. A bit more in a moment. For now, can you sympathize with the poor man? He had been in a good way, generally speaking, until he took the admirable step of hearing and responding to the concerns of his family about his smoking. So he does a difficult thing, he stops smoking, and then two months later, bam, ulcerative colitis. I’m talking gut pain, rectal bleeding, diarrhea up to 10-20 times a day. Other symptoms include constipation, fever, and loss of appetite. It’s horrible. His body feels like it’s coming apart at the seams. He goes to see the gastroenterologist, and the gastroenterologist identifies a strictly physical cause. It’s an infectious disease, due to the activity of a bacterium, Helicobacter pylori. This was the cause, as the gastroenterologist saw it, and so the treatment stayed on the same level: a regimine of antiobiotics. Pop some pills, don’t drink milk, and the ulcerative colitis will go away. But it doesn’t go away. In fact, it gets worse, together with unfriendly side-effects from the medication. The man is at the end of his rope. And that’s why he puts himself on Dr. Andrew Weil’s doorstep. Help!
Ever found yourself in a similar situation? You or someone you know is sick, and despite all the experts you’ve consulted and all the money you’ve spent, the sickness remains or gets worse, and it just seems like there are certain facts that haven’t yet shown up on the radar? That aren’t yet being taken seriously? Ever been there?
As it happens, there are two facts that show up on Dr. Weil’s radar and not on the gastroenterologist’s. They are, number 1, the man’s stress, together with number 2, the fact of the man’s giving up smoking. Consider these two facts, which are related. Stress is about a person’s ability to manage change, and this depends a great deal upon emotional and spiritual skills like the ability to relax and let troubles go, or the ability to forgive, or the capacity to trust life in a very basic way. These are all emotional and spiritual skills, and there is a definite connection between them and an addiction like smoking: people can use smoking as a ritual bridge to relaxation. I know this first hand, how smoking can take you to a place in your spirit where it becomes easier to let worries go. It can be so soothing: the guaranteed mini-breaks during a hectic day that the smoking habit demands; the entire ritual surrounding the act, as in the way you share a smoke break with others; all this, in addition to the feeling of nicotine coursing through your body. As hurtful to one’s health as it is, smoking can nevertheless be a way into a meditative state of calm in the midst of the storm. That’s what smoking does. Relieves stress. All this shows up on Dr. Weil’s radar, and so his conclusion is quite different from the gastroenterologist’s: the real problem was that the man gave up his primary stress-management strategy without replacing it with anything else. Thus, his pent up stress had nowhere else to go but inward, and ulcerative colitis was the result.
Listen to what Dr. Weil says about the ulcer-stress connection, in his own words. He says, “The discovery of [the bacterium Helicobacter pylori] to cause chronic irritation of the lining of the stomach and the duodenum has led many doctors to conclude that ulcers are unrelated to stress and to rely entirely on antibiotics to treat the disease. I have no doubt that H. pylori is a factor in gastritis and ulcer … but that admission does not negate the the influence of mind. Most people infected with this germ do not get ulcers or other symptoms, and some people with ulcers do not have the infection.” That’s what Dr. Weil says, and then he follows up with this question, which is key: “Might not stress change the chemistry of the stomach in ways that allow the germ to follow an aggressive, invasive course?” In other words, the presence of the H. Pylori bacterium in one’s gut is not really the core issue; the core issue is, how well can one manage one’s stress? If one knows how to relax and let go and trust, then that can contribute to a strong immune system which will prevent a bacterial takover. “The mere presence of germs,” says Dr. Weil, “is not the whole story.”
This is why his advice to the man strugging with a smoking addiction coupled with ulcerative colitis was this: don’t quit smoking until you’ve learned an alternative form of stress management. So he sent him to consult with a biofeedback therapist, who could teach him how to recognize his stress and how to apply mind-based techniques for reducing it. He also sent him to a hypnotherapist, so that his innate healing resources might also be brought into the process. And Dr. Weil’s advice worked. This is what led to that man’s healing. Mind-body medicine. Because of it, the man was able to stop smoking, and his ulcerative colitis never came back. End of story.
But now, at this point, a good question might be this: here you have the gastroenterologist, and you have Dr. Weil. Both are no doubt competent doctors. But both possess a different medical radar, so to speak, to which different things appear, and which lead to different kinds of treatments. And so the question: why the difference in the two radars? Why does one turn a blind eye to what the other considers critical, and key?
Regarding the gastroenterologist, and people like him, one reason why they might turn a blind eye to mental factors in healing is this: they are simply unaware of the data. Just this. My source here is another mind-body medicine proponent, Dr. Harold G. Koenig from Duke University Medical Center. He’ll tell you the same story that Dr. Andrew Weil does about the growing evidence on how stress levels adversely affect the immune system as well as the hormonal system and cardiovascular system—but he also says this: his own words: “Among my colleagues, there isn’t much criticism. There’s more ignoring of the data. This is an area doctors are not traditionally trained in. They’re already overwhelmed doing physical care, and now you’re asking them to address spiritual issues.”
So there you go—simple lack of training and time is one reason why mind-body factors don’t appear on the radars of many doctors. Yet on the other hand, it can be hard to shake the feeling that there is an underlying bias against mind-body medicine that makes ignoring the data OK. Dr. Weil himself claims that “relatively few in the medical establishment take the field of mind-body medicine seriously; and the most prestigious researchers, those who set priorities and influence funding, are contemptuous of colleagues who work in it.” And perhaps that is so, for the conservative position in medicine today espouses a reductionist model of the mind that sees it as ultimately generated by the brain’s circuitry and biochemistry and nothing beyond that. Causation is one way; mind is effect and not cause. So don’t start encouraging mind-based interventions like biofeedback, self-hypnosis, or prayer, because that just muddies up the clarity that medical science has tried to achieve in the past 150 years! Just stick with physical interventions like meds or surgery.
This leads to yet a third reason why mental factors in healing might not show up on many doctors’ radars. It has to do with mind-over-matter thinking that verges on the excessive. I’m talking about the latest guru on TV espousing some version of the ultimate self-help idea of consciously creating one’s own reality, and now all of a sudden we are way beyond the solid measurable findings of mind-body medicine and into a realm of sheer theology that elevates the individual ego into a kind of omnipotent God. Very exciting! And people will throw lots of money at it, guaranteed. But when sickness and trouble come, as they inevitably will, what happens then? In a universe in which people are supposed to be directly in control of and therefore responsible for the things they attract into their lives, there is no escape from withering self-blame and guilt. If I have cancer, if I have lupus, if I have Alzheimer’s, I must have attracted that to myself. End of story. And all of a sudden, that exciting self-help theology that people throw lots of money at—it reveals itself to be nothing more than a trap and a snare and an endless wheel of effort which can allow for no grace.
Mostly what I’m saying is that you have medical doctors grounded in good science looking on in disgust at the excesses of unrestrained mind-over-matter talk, and unfortunately, this worst is taken as the best that the field has to offer. In the end, what gets lost in the shuffle and doesn’t show up on the radar are the real reliable mind-body connections that people like Dr. Weil see every day, and so many others.
And this is simply tragic. For already in genuine mind-body medicine, amazements abound. Mysteries that beg for understanding. A good example of his comes from Dr. Candace Pert, a neuroscientist pioneer. She talks about people with multiple personalities who “sometimes have extremely clear physical symptoms that vary with each personality. One personality can be allergic to cats while another is not. One personality can be diabetic and another not.” I mean, this is incredible. Somehow, the physical matter in the same person changes, depending upon which personality is dominant. Dr. Pert says, “You can measure it. You can show that one personality is making as much insulin as it needs, and the next one, who shows up half an hour later, can’t make insulin.”
Talk about a mind-body mystery! Or consider this amazement, of a different kind: Dr. Henry Beecher, M.D., caring for wounded soldiers during World War II on the beaches of Anzio: since morpheine for the wounded was in short supply, yet nevertheless expected, he tried to fulfill the soldiers’ expectations by injecting mere saline solution instead. And surprisingly enough, the soldiers’ bodies responded in line with their expectations. Their bodies responded as if it were morpheine, not the saline solution that it was. From this was born the idea of the “placebo effect.” The discovery that people’s mere conviction and belief in the power of something to heal brings about the healing. About the placebo, no less than Dr. Thomas Delbanco, a professor of medicine from Harvard Medical School, says: “It’s one of the most powerful medicines we have. It’s very hard to tell sometimes whether what we’re doing [as doctors] is more than the placebo effect.”
Simply amazing. And finally, consider this: the verified results of what’s known as the “relaxation response.” The research of Dr. Herbert Benson M.D. and others show the relaxation response to be effective in treating hypertension, cardiac arrhythmias, chronic pain, anxiety, insomnia, mild to moderate depression, infertilty, postoperative anxiety, premenstrual symptoms, migraine and cluster headaches, even symptoms of cancer and acquired immunideficiency syndrome. All this, because you have created and sustained a new habit in your life in which you ground yourself in the constant repetition of a word or sound or phrase or prayer that has positive life-affirming meaning for you. You say, “one”; you say “peace”; you say “Om”; you say “help me find my way “; you say “Sh’ma Yisroel”; you say “I’m giving it up to you, God”; you say “help me.” You say that, you pray it without ceasing, and your body responds. It does!
Already, in genuine mind-body medicine, amazements abound. Mysteries that beg for understanding. All that’s required is an openness from more doctors to examine the evidence and to consider ways in which mind-based strategies might complement or sometimes even replace more traditional care practices. It’s about effectiveness. It’s about preventing more rock-and-a-hard-place experiences like that of the man in his early fifties from earlier, struggling with a smoking addiction and ulcerative colitis, in a downward spiral—all because the essential mind-body connection was neglected and ignored.
More doctors open to mind-body medicine, and more of us as well: affirming the power of beliefs and attitudes and emotions on our own health and healing. Regularly practicing things like prayer and meditation as good medicine. Us too. Every day.
A last word. Remember something that Dr. Andrew Weil said earlier, about ulcers? How the presence of the H. Pylori bacterium in one’s gut doesn’t automatically cause ulcers, and that the core issue is more about how well we manage our stress? How, if we learn to relax and let go and trust, this will contribute to a strong immune system which will prevent a bacterial takover? “The mere presence of germs,” says Dr. Weil, “is not the whole story”—and I’m bringing all this up, at the last, to remind everyone that churches have guts, too. Now follow me here. Churches have guts too, and these guts are always already pervaded, metaphorically speaking, by germs. Germs that are growing pains, germs that are conflicts, germs that are changes (like staff transitions). The guts of this church will always have germs swimming around in it. But remember: this is not the whole story. You and I complete the story, by how we choose to trust the process, by all the ways in which we lighten up the atmosphere and prevent fear and anxiety from breeding. Here and now, I want to thank our DRE, Lisa Efthymiou, for her service these past many months. And because of her wonderful service, Pathways Church goes forward into a new day. It’s going to be OK. There need be no ulcer that develops in the gut of this church. Let’s trust in the process. It’s good mind-body medicine.
____, “Mind-Body Medicine: An Overview,” National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, available: http://nccam.nih.gov/health/backgrounds/mindbody.htm
Gowri Anandarajah, M.D., and Ellen Hight, M.D., “Spirituality and Medical Practice: Using the HOPE Questions as a Practical Tool for Spiritual Assessment,” in American Family Physician (Volume 63, Number 1), available: http://www.aafp.org/afp/20010101/81.html
Thomas Delbanco, M.D., interview in Bill Moyer’s Healing and the Mind (New York: Doubleday), 1993.
Harold G. Koenig, M.D., interview in The Dallas Morning News, Religion Section, Saturday, October 28, 2006.
Dr. Candace Pert, interview in Bill Moyer’s Healing and the Mind (New York: Doubleday), 1993.
Andrew Weil, M.D., Sponteneous Healing (New York: Fawcett Columbine), 1995.