Let Wisdom of the Body Promote Natural Health

We are becoming a nation of sissies and hypochondriacs, a self-medicating society easily intimidated by pain and prone to panic. We understand almost nothing about the essential robustness of the human body or its ability to meet the challenge of illness.

Our education about health has made people more conscious of their weaknesses than of their natural strengths. Doctors are the first to tell you that their offices are clogged with people who have no business being there. Awareness of symptoms is far more advanced than awareness of the things that promote health. Knowledge about pain-killing pills outraces knowledge of nutrition; little wonder that the national health bill has gone through the roof.

Consider the way most people generally react to pain. They tend to equate pain with disease. There is little understanding that pain is a communication system between the body and the brain, a way of conveying a warning that we may be doing something wrong, not necessarily that illness has taken hold.

Instead of connecting the warning to the fact that we may be eating too much, or smoking too much, or drinking too much, or worrying too much about things we can do nothing about, or racing through airports to catch planes that may already have left the gate, or taking on obligations far beyond our capacities--we reach for pain-killing pills, oblivious of the fact that much of the time they serve merely to mask the pain without dealing with the underlying problem.

When someone is stricken with a heart attack, hardly less important than the physical needs are the emotional needs. The greatest single danger confronting a heart attack victim is panic. Panic constricts the blood vessels, putting an extra burden on the heart. Panic also sends a hormonal surge to the heart, forcing it to speed up at a time when it should be at rest. What someone needs just after a heart attack is to be freed of panic. Instead what happens all too often is that danger is dramatized. If a man has a heart attack at home, sometimes his wife will start to scream. If a person has a heart attack on the street, the alarmed expression on the faces of the people crowding around adds to the patient’s already overworked sense of emergency.

Public education stresses the physical things to be done--how to prop up a patient, how to administer mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. All these procedures are important, obviously, but they make little sense unless they are carried out in an atmosphere of reassurance. Yet comparatively little is said about the need to reassure someone who has just had a heart attack.

Ambulance manners need changing. If the siren sounds fierce six blocks away, just imagine how it sounds to the patient inside the cab. Nor does the sign Emergency in big red letters at the entrance to the hospital contribute to a calming atmosphere. Instead of Emergency why not a sign as straightforward as “Patient Care Services?” Similarly, instead of “Intensive Care Unit,” “Special Hospital Services” might be less of a semantic liability.

The public is virtually illiterate about the nature and reality of the human healing system--what it is, how it works, the conditions that improve or impair its functioning. Some of the cells of the immune system act as sentries, others combat infections or viruses, still others carry the body’s own chemotherapy, prying open cancer cells and killing them off one by one.

The most frequently prescribed drug in the world is Valium. Beyond a certain point it can invite significant harm. Yet patients seem to feel they are not getting their money’s worth out of a visit to the doctor’s office unless they can come away clutching a prescription. Physicians have been forced to recognize that the prescription pad is an automatic part of health care and that patients who leave empty-handed sometimes go to another doctor.

The American people have yet to learn that at least one-third of all medications carry specific risks and that most of the time the human body writes its own prescriptions for most illnesses. Public health education should give us greater knowledge about our own resources and help to offset the hypochondria that is rapidly becoming an American characteristic. It should encourage people to know that the human body is beautifully equipped, given reasonable care, to meet most of its needs.

Confidence in oneself and in one’s physician is a powerful ally in combating even the most serious disease. Research at UCLA has demonstrated that once seriously ill patients are liberated from depression there is often an immediate boost in the capacity of the immune system. A positive attitude can become an essential feature of treatment.

Health education, whether in the classroom or the public press, should begin with an inventory of assets instead of liabilities. We need to replace uncertainty and timidity with a sense of what a great physiologist of the 20th Century once called the “wisdom of the body.”