Cure: A Journey into the Science of Mind Over Body Read online

  Copyright © 2016 by Jo Marchant

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a

  division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  CROWN is a registered trademark and the Crown colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Marchant, Jo, author.

  Title: Cure : a journey into the science of mind over body / by Jo Marchant.

  Description: New York : Crown Publishers, [2016]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015024707| ISBN 9780385348157 (hardback) | ISBN 9780385348171

  (paperback) | ISBN 9780385348164 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Mind and body therapies. | Mental healing. | Alternative medicine. | BISAC: MEDICAL / Alternative Medicine. | PSYCHOLOGY / Neuropsychology. | HEALTH & FITNESS / Diseases / General.

  Classification: LCC RC489.M53 M36 2016 | DDC 616.89/14—dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015024707

  ISBN 9780385348157

  eBook ISBN 9780385348164

  Cover design by Christopher Brand

  v4.1

  a

  To my parents, Jim and Diana Marchant.

  Thank you for teaching me to think, question and explore.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Many scientists and patients shared their knowledge and experiences with me for this book. They aren’t all directly mentioned in these pages, but I’m overwhelmingly grateful to each of them.

  Quotes that are not referenced in the notes are taken from my own interviews with patients and practitioners. All referenced quotes are from interviews with me or from other published sources, and these are flagged in the text with citations in the notes.

  I have changed some individuals’ names to protect their privacy—in these cases I refer to the person by a first name only. If a full name is given, that is the person’s true identity. (Exceptions are Davide in chapter one and Fhena in chapter ten—these are their actual first names.)

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  INTRODUCTION

  1. FAKING IT

  WHY NOTHING WORKS

  2. A DEVIANT IDEA

  WHEN MEANING IS EVERYTHING

  3. PAVLOV’S POWER

  HOW TO TRAIN YOUR IMMUNE SYSTEM

  4. FIGHTING FATIGUE

  THE ULTIMATE PRISON BREAK

  5. IN A TRANCE

  IMAGINE YOUR GUT AS A RIVER

  6. RETHINKING PAIN

  INTO THE ICE CANYON

  7. TALK TO ME

  WHY CARING MATTERS

  8. FIGHT OR FLIGHT

  THOUGHTS THAT KILL

  9. ENJOY THE MOMENT

  HOW TO CHANGE YOUR BRAIN

  10. FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH

  THE SECRET POWER OF FRIENDS

  11. GOING ELECTRIC

  NERVES THAT CURE

  12. LOOKING FOR GOD

  THE REAL MIRACLE OF LOURDES

  CONCLUSION

  NOTES

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  One weekday morning last summer, I was in the local park. It was a cheerful south London scene, with kids splashing in water fountains and playing soccer on the grass. I perched on the edge of the sandpit with two other mothers, clutching sunscreen and rice cakes as we watched our children build lopsided castles with brightly colored plastic spades.

  One of the women, a bright, articulate mom I had just met, was explaining how a homeopathic medicine had cured her of longstanding, debilitating eczema. “I love homeopathy!” she said. As a scientist, I had to protest. Homeopathy is effectively water (or sugar pills) in fancy bottles—any active substance in these treatments is diluted far beyond the point at which any single molecule of the original could possibly remain. “But there’s nothing in homeopathic remedies,” I said.

  My new friend looked at me scornfully. “Nothing measurable,” she replied, as if I were slightly dim for not grasping that its healing properties are due to an indefinable essence that’s beyond scientists’ reach. And in those two words, I felt that she summed up one of the major philosophical battles in medicine today.

  Stacked up on one side are the proponents of conventional, Western medicine. They are rational, reductionist and rooted in the material world. According to their paradigm, the body is like a machine. For the most part, thoughts, beliefs and emotions don’t feature in treatment for a medical condition. When a machine is broken, you don’t engage it in conversation. Doctors use physical methods—scans, tests, drugs, surgery—to diagnose the problem and fix the broken part.

  On the other side is, well, everyone else: followers of ancient, alternative and Eastern medicine. These holistic traditions prioritize the immaterial over the material; people over conditions; subjective experience and beliefs over objective trial results. Rather than prescribing physical drugs, therapists using acupuncture, spiritual healing and reiki claim to harness intangible energy fields. Advocates of homeopathy aren’t concerned that their remedies contain no physical trace of the active ingredient, because they believe that an undetectable “memory” of the drug somehow remains.

  Conventional medicine still has the upper hand in the West, but alternative medicine is embraced by millions of people. In the U.S., the wonders of spiritual healing and reiki are regularly discussed on television news. As many as 38% of adults use some form of complementary or alternative medicine (62% if you include prayer). Each year they spend around $34 billion a year on it,1 with 354 million visits to alternative medicine practitioners (compared with around 560 million visits to primary care physicians).2 In London, where I live, mothers commonly put amber necklaces on their babies in the belief that this gemstone has the power to ward off teething pain. Intelligent, educated women reject crucial vaccines for their children and, like my friend, embrace treatments that make no scientific sense.

  Not surprisingly, scientists are fighting back. Professional skeptics on both sides of the Atlantic—debunkers like James Randi and Michael Shermer; scientist bloggers like Steven Salzberg and David Gorski; the biologist and author Richard Dawkins—aggressively denounce religion, pseudoscience and especially alternative medicine. The 2009 book Bad Science, in which epidemiologist Ben Goldacre criticizes those who misuse science to make unjustified health claims, has sold more than half a million copies in 22 countries. Even comedians from Tim Minchin to Dara Ó Briain are joining the fight, using their jokes to champion rational thinking and point out the absurdity of treatments like homeopathy.

  Their followers are standing up against the tide of irrationality with meetings, articles, protests, and what science journalist Steve Silberman calls “anti-woo lines drawn in the sand,”3 such as a petition signed by hundreds of U.K. doctors demanding that the National Health Service stop spending money on homeopathic treatments. Clinical trials prove that most alternative remedies work no better than placebos (fake treatments), the skeptics point out—people who use them are being duped. Many argue that these bogus treatments need to be stamped out. There’s nothing we need in health care that we can’t get from conventional, evidence-based cures.

  I’m all for defending a rational worldview. I believe passionately in the scientific method: I have a PhD in genetics and medical microbiology, and I spent three years probing the inner workings of cells at a top London hospital. I believe that everything in nature can be studied scientifically if we
ask the right questions, and that the medical treatments we put our trust in should be tested in rigorous trials. The skeptics are right: if we abandon science for wishful thinking we might as well be back in the dark ages: drowning witches, bloodletting and praying that God will save us from the plague.

  But I’m not sure that simply dismissing alternative medicine is the answer. In my work as a science journalist, I encounter not just those who are cured by modern medicine but those who aren’t: patients whose lives are devastated by gut problems or fatigue yet are dismissed as not having a “real” condition; people suffering from chronic pain or depression, prescribed ever-higher doses of drugs that create addiction and side effects but don’t solve the underlying problem; cancer patients who receive rounds of aggressive treatment well past the point at which there’s any reasonable hope of extending their lives.

  And I regularly come across scientific findings—sometimes making headlines but often buried in specialist journals—suggesting that intangible, immaterial treatments can have real physical benefits. Patients hypnotized before surgery suffer fewer complications and recover faster. Meditation triggers molecular changes deep inside our cells. And as we’ll see in the first chapter of this book, if a treatment works no better than placebo that doesn’t mean it doesn’t work—simply believing you have received an effective remedy can have a dramatic biological effect. The mothers around me using amber bracelets and homeopathic pills aren’t ignorant, or stupid; they know from experience that these things genuinely help.

  So although I believe that the alternative medicine advocates are deluded with their talk of water memory and healing energy fields, I don’t think the skeptics have got it completely right either. I started to write this book because I wondered whether they, along with conventional doctors, are missing a vital ingredient in physical health; an omission that’s contributing to the rise of chronic disease and sending millions of sane, intelligent people to alternative practitioners. I’m talking, of course, about the mind.

  —

  HAVE YOU ever felt a surge of adrenaline after being narrowly missed by a car? Felt turned on just from hearing your lover’s voice? Retched at the sight of maggots in the trash? If so then you’ve experienced how dramatically the workings of your mind can affect your physical body. Information from our mental state constantly helps our bodies to adapt to our surroundings, even though we might not be aware of it. If we see a hungry predator—or an approaching truck—our body prepares itself to get out of the way, fast. If someone tells us food is coming, we get ready for a nice, relaxing spell of digestion.

  This much we know. Yet when it comes to health, conventional science and medicine tend to ignore or downplay the effect of the mind on the body. It’s accepted that negative mental states such as stress or anxiety can damage health long-term (though even this was highly contested until a few decades ago). But the idea that the opposite might happen, that our emotional state might be important in warding off disease, or that our minds might have “healing powers,” is seen as flaky in the extreme.

  The split between mind and body in Western medicine is commonly blamed on French philosopher René Descartes. Ancient medics, with little to work with beyond the placebo effect, knew full well that mind and body were entwined. The early Greek physician Hippocrates, often described as the father of medicine, apparently spoke of “the natural healing force within,” while the second-century doctor Galen held that “confidence and hope do more good than physic.”4

  But in the seventeenth century, Descartes distinguished between two fundamental types of matter: physical objects, such the body, which could be studied by the scientific method, and the immaterial, mental spirit, which he believed was a gift from God and could not be studied scientifically. Although these two forms of matter could communicate (Descartes thought this happened via the brain’s pineal gland), he concluded that they exist independently. When we die and no longer have a body, our self-contained spirit lives on.

  Most philosophers and neuroscientists now reject these ideas about mind–body dualism. Instead, they believe that every brain state—each physical configuration of neurons—is intrinsically associated with a particular thought or state of mind, and that the two can never be separated. Nonetheless, Descartes has had a huge impact on the science and philosophy that followed. Subjective thoughts and emotion are still seen as less scientific—less amenable to rigorous study, and even less “real”—than physical, measurable things.

  When it comes to medicine, practical advances may have banished the mind even more effectively than philosophical debate. Scholars developed diagnostic tools such as the microscope, stethoscope and blood pressure cuff, and in nineteenth-century Paris, the autopsy. Before that, doctors diagnosed illness based on a patient’s account of his or her symptoms; now they could base their conclusions on structural, visible changes. Disease was no longer defined by the subjective experience of the patient, but by the physical condition of the body. It has reached the point where if a patient feels ill but the doctor can’t see a problem, it’s treated as not being a real disease at all.

  Another leap away from subjective experience came in the 1950s with the introduction of randomized controlled trials. To avoid individual biases when testing new therapies, neither doctors nor patients know what treatment is being given, and the results are analyzed using rigorous statistical techniques. Unreliable human experience is replaced by hard numbers.

  This is arguably one of most important intellectual ideas of modern times. With an objective method of determining which treatments work, doctors are no longer hoodwinked by dodgy cures. Overall, the modern materialist approach to medicine has achieved results that are nothing short of miraculous. We now have antibiotics to banish infection, chemotherapy to fight cancer and vaccines to protect children against killer diseases from polio to measles. We can transplant diseased organs, diagnose Down syndrome in the womb, and scientists are working on stem cells to repair damaged eyes, hearts and brains.

  But this paradigm has been less successful in warding off complex problems such as pain and depression, or stemming the rise of chronic conditions such as heart disease, diabetes and dementia. And it has caused doctors and scientists to discount much about how the body works that to most normal people seems like common sense. The overwhelming focus on the physical—the measurable—has sidelined the more intangible effects of the mind.

  That blind spot has allowed the idea of healing thoughts or beliefs to be hijacked by everyone from wishful thinkers to cynical salesmen. Scientific evidence is ignored or grossly distorted. Self-help books, websites and blogs push vastly exaggerated claims: defusing emotional conflict can cure cancer (Ryke Hamer, founder of German New Medicine); our minds can control our DNA (cell biologist Bruce Lipton in his bestselling book The Biology of Belief); illness cannot exist in a body that has harmonious thoughts (Rhonda Byrne in the multimillion-selling phenomenon The Secret). The mind is marketed as a panacea that can cure our ills without any effort from us save adherence to a rose-tinted worldview.

  The healing power of the mind—or the lack thereof—has thus become a key battleground in the bigger fight against irrational thinking. The trouble is, the more that skeptics try to debunk wild claims by going on about logic, evidence and the scientific method, the more they isolate those they hope to convert. By denying what seems blatantly obvious to many people—that the mind does influence health; that alternative medicines in many cases do work—they contribute to a lack of trust in, if not a willful defiance of, science. If scientists say such remedies are worthless, it just proves how much scientists don’t know.

  What if we take a different approach? By acknowledging the role of the mind in health, can we rescue it from the clutches of pseudoscience?

  In writing this book, I traveled around the world to investigate some of the pioneering research that’s happening in this area right now. My aim was to track down those scientists swimming against mainstream opinion to st
udy the effects of the mind on the body, and using that knowledge to help patients. What can the mind really do? How does it work, and why? And how can we use these latest findings in our own lives?

  We start with perhaps the purest example of the mind’s influence on the body—the placebo effect—and the scientists looking at what really happens when we take fake pills. After that, we explore some astonishing ways to trick the mind into fighting disease, from using hypnosis to slow gut contractions, to training the immune system to respond to taste and smell. And we learn how simply hearing the right words from your caregiver can determine whether or not you need surgery—and even how long you will live.

  The second half of the book moves beyond the immediate effects of thoughts and beliefs to look at how our state of mind shapes disease risk throughout our lives. We visit scientists using brain scanning and DNA analysis to test whether mind–body therapies from meditation to biofeedback really make us healthier. And we look at how our perception of the world around us influences our physical makeup, right down to the activity of our genes.

  Along the way, we also come up against the limits of psychological tricks and treatments. What can the mind not do? When do the claims made by holistic healers go too far? And what happens when the mind makes things worse?

  Writing this book took me further than I ever imagined, from throwing snowballs in a virtual ice canyon to bathing pilgrims in the religious sanctuary of Lourdes. I was inspired by the science I discovered, and by the doctors and researchers fighting resistance at every level—practical, economic and philosophical—to bring the mind and body back together. But most of all I was touched by the patients and trial participants I met, and by their courage and dignity in the face of suffering.

  What I learned from them and many others, ultimately, is that the mind is not a panacea. Sometimes it has striking and immediate effects on our bodies. Sometimes it’s an important but subtle factor among many, shaping long-term health just as diet and exercise do. Sometimes it has no effect at all. We don’t have all the answers yet. But I hope this book will convince the skeptics to reconsider what they might be missing.