How many of you avoid telling your doctor about the yoga, meditation, acupuncture or other natural means of healing you occasionally use, never admitting how much better you feel when practicing holistic method regularly? Keeping these things to yourself, you suspect that your doctor might 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 either of these questions, it’s time for an enlightening history lesson.
More than 50 years ago, Dr. Hans Selye demonstrated how stress diminishes health and leads to glandular disturbances, including autoimmune endocrine disorders. Specifically, Selye 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 during the process in which tissue dies and the targeted gland becomes atrophied. Alternately, stress can cause the inflammation and lymphocyte (white blood cell) infiltration typically seen. For instance, in Graves' disease, the thyroid gland becomes studded with areas of white cell inflammation. Between the thyroid cells enlarging and enlongating as they churn out more and more thyroid hormone, and the crowding caused by the white blood cells, it's no wonder that goiter (thyroid enlargement) is a common finding.
Back to the past: Enthusiasm for Selye’s published reports led to a plethora of studies in the 1930’s and 1940’s that only served to confirm 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 natural health enthusiasts, as well as a number of rheumatologists, continued to research the role of stress, the elite faction of mainstream medicine, particularly the endocrinologists, grew skeptical. After all, proving the etiology or cause of most diseases is not generally cut and dry. How could one prove that the stress, and not some genetic flaw or predisposition, was responsible for those withered glands Selye offered us? Cause and effect have always been tinged with doubt in medicine. Unless one is hit by a car, how can one prove exactly what caused any medical disorder? This prevailing thought holds the key to a certain lack of progress surrounding the prevention and not just the treatment of autoimmune disease.
