How many of you avoid telling your doctor about the yoga, acupuncture or other holistic healing methods you occasionally use? Do you keep your secret because you think he’ll snicker or regard you as foolish? Worse yet, how many of you have never tried incorporating holistic healing methods into your therapeutic regimen because your doctor insists that stress, happiness and personal well-being have nothing to do with disease? If you’ve answered yes to any of these questions, it’s time for an enlightening history lesson.

More than 50 years ago, Dr. Hans Selye demonstrated how stress diminishes health. Specifically, he subjected rats to a type of stress from which they had no escape. Over time, this chronic stress contributed to their deaths. At autopsy, their endocrine glands were withered and spent. In autoimmune endocrine disease, the affected glands eventually suffer the same fate. They become atrophied, that is, the cells die, and the gland's functions are impaired.

Enthusiasm for Selye’s published reports led to a plethora of studies in the 1930’s and 1940’s. Studies conducted worldwide confirmed Selye’s findings. Keenly interested in this research, Dr. Normal Cousins used a combination of stress reduction (biofeedback was used) and humor to bring his autoimmune arthritic disorder of ankylosing spondylitis into remission.

While many scientists continued their research in this area, the elite faction of mainstream medicine grew skeptical. After all, proving the cause of disease has always been edged with doubt.

Continued in right column...

Role of Stress

Continued...

How could one prove that the stress, and not some genetic flaw or predisposition, was responsible for those withered glands Selye offered us? In the 30's and 40's, there were no means to study molecular biology. Thus, the skeptics prevailed.

Such skepticism is directly responsible for several generations of physicians who were taught that Selye’s work was insubstantial bunk and to be disregarded as nothing more than a curiosity. However, there are always some who follow the beat of their own drummer. Consequently, several Harvard researchers continued researching the link between stress, emotions, and disease. In the 1980’s they were rewarded for their efforts. Dr. Steven Lowe and other researchers discovered that the immune system, the nervous system and the endocrine system were not separate entities. The study of the interrelationship between these systems was titled psychoneuroimmunology or PNI.

What Lowe et al found was an amazing network system in which the endocrine, immune and nervous systems worked together. In this system, hormones transmit messages to cells in the immune system, and emotions unleash a flood of chemicals known as neurotransmitters that communicate with the endocrine and immune systems. Stress, in particular, wiped out one’s levels of Natural Killer lymphocytes, wounding our resistance. Many prominent scientists realized the implications this had on both disease development and treatment. ♦

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