The miracles of modern science
A health news headline announced another miracle of modern science in the form of a medication-coated metal stent—a tiny tube of mesh—that supposedly keeps blocked coronary arteries open longer than a regular stent. "We are probably witnessing a new era in the treatment of coronary disease," announced the study’s lead investigator.
High tech interventions for chronic disease routinely garner rave reviews, despite the fact that they attack the symptoms rather than the cause of the problem. While those medicated stents are propping open a blocked coronary artery or two, the processes that cause such blockages are continuing their work on other arteries throughout the body and brain.
Mind-body therapies address such problems where they start, but they lack the glamour and speed of a technical quick fix. Rather than just showing up for surgery, the patient must actively participate in the cure by taking responsibility for making changes in his or her life. With the mind-body approach, there’s no drama, no operating room heroics, no "presto, chango!" transformation. Almost anyone would agree that the mind-body approach seems unappealingly dowdy compared to the marvels of a medicated stent.
In his book Love & Survival: 8 Pathways to Intimacy and Health, Dr. Dean Ornish relates a revealing story about these biases:
Dr. Mimi Guarneri is an interventional cardiologist who directs a reversing-heart-disease program, based on my work, at the Scripps Clinic and Hospital in La Jolla, California. She spends part of her time performing angioplasties and part of her time teaching her patients how to change their lifestyle.
"I recently gave a lecture to a large group of cardiologists," she told me. "At first, I talked with them about radioactive stents, a wire mesh designed to keep angioplastied arteries open by exposing them to high doses of localized radiation. Although it's a new, totally unproven method with the possibility of highly toxic long-term side effects, the cardiologists just loved the idea of these radioactive stents. They couldn't wait to try them. In the second half of my presentation I talked about our lifestyle program. Even though we have twenty years of randomized controlled trial data supporting your program, the cardiologists got so skeptical and even hostile to the idea that patients could change their lifestyle and that emotions play a role in health and illness that many left the room."
Doctors aren’t the only ones captivated by high tech interventions. Patients tend to be equally skeptical about and unimpressed by mind-body therapies, while they are easily persuaded to present themselves to a surgeon for a high tech repair job.
Going under the knife for a technical intervention is not just quicker, but it seems surer, even though it isn’t addressing the source of the problem. Your doctor stands firmly behind the seeming solution, while he doesn’t necessarily endorse the mind-body approach. He knows why and how the technical intervention works, but he’s not sure about the "mechanics" of mind-body therapies. In fact, he seems downright excited about using this new high tech intervention—a contagious attitude.
In contrast, using the mind-body approach to health is as low tech and pedestrian as gardening. Like growing plants, mind-body health is an everyday process, not an exercise in instant gratification. Cultivating the attitudes that are the source of good health, like gardening, requires patience, personal involvement, and perseverance. The thrills don’t come from technical pioneering, but from the simple pleasures of watching your efforts take root, bloom, and, eventually, bear fruit.
In this technology-crazed world, the low-key aspect of mind-body
health gives it a definite image problem. With any luck, though, science
will eventually come up with a high-tech intervention engineered to
stimulate the brain in ways that manipulate the mind-body connection.
Perhaps this miracle of modern technology will be something that opens
clogged minds so people can recognize the power of low-tech mind-body
therapies that actually promote health rather than just fight disease.