"All diseases are from nerves": truth and myths about psychosomatics

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Is it true that illness is due to psychological reasons, what rationale is there for this idea, and what makes it so seductive.

In 1923, the writer Catherine Mansfield, suffering from advanced pulmonary tuberculosis, noted in her diary: “Bad day. terrible pain and so on. I couldn't do anything. The weakness was not only physical. To get well, I must heal my self. This is the root of my failure to recover. My mind does not obey me. " Three years earlier, Franz Kafka, suffering from the same disease, wrote to Milena Esenskaya: "My mind is sick, and lung disease is just an expression of my mental illness."

If all diseases arise from nerves, then it is not the lungs that need to be treated for tuberculosis, but the sick will. Thousands of quite prudent people reasoned something like this for decades - until doctors discovered the causes of tuberculosis and learned how to effectively treat it with streptomycin and other antimicrobial drugs. Now it is difficult to find a person who would seriously believe that tuberculosis comes from internal conflicts or excessive passions.

Beliefs change, but much remains the same. For example, the belief that the roots of diseases must be sought in the human psyche.

Psychosomatics is a word used to denote the unity of bodily and mental functions in mammals of the species Homo sapiens. Psychological factors affect the occurrence of diseases, and diseases have an opposite effect on the human psyche: even the most conservative representatives of official medicine will not argue with these simple statements.

But a person who is convinced that "all diseases are from the nerves" sometimes goes much further. He will associate stomach and duodenal ulcers with self-dislike, arthritis with indecision and refusal to act. Adherents of alternative medicine can explain any, even the most serious illness by psychological reasons. How, then, to separate truth from fiction, and real medical facts from empty statements?

Everyone creates his own disease

Louise Heyi Liz Burbo are one of the most famous apologists for the idea that our thoughts and beliefs are the main source of our psycho-emotional and physical ailments (in Russia, their work is continued, for example, by Valery Sinelnikov). They even developed tables in which specific illnesses are associated with specific psychological states. Parkinson's disease, according to Haye, arises from fear and the desire for control. Adenoids in children appear when they feel that their parents do not like them. "Anger, resentment and resentment, accumulated over time, literally begins to eat the body and becomes a disease called CANCER," she writes in her most famous book, Heal Your Life.

And this belief has very serious (and sad) consequences. A person who is convinced that his heart ailments are caused by the refusal of joy, would rather repeat to himself “I am happy to let the stream of joy through my mind, body, life” (as Hey advises), instead of going to a cardiologist in a timely manner. It is no coincidence that alternative medicine is the most attacked by many scientists and professional skeptics. Even if the treatment offered by alternative "healers" is harmless in itself, it could cost you your life by ignoring real medical problems.

Let's give just one example. Many people know that Steve Jobs refused surgery to remove pancreatic cancer nine months after diagnosis. Instead, he went on a diet, tried nutritional supplements, acupuncture, and other alternative therapies. When he did lay down on the operating table, it was already too late: metastases spread throughout the body, and the doctors could not save him. Arthur Levinson, a friend of Jobs and a colleague at Apple, later reasoned: “I think Steve wants so much for the world to be a certain way that it makes him be that way. Sometimes it doesn't work. Reality is cruel. Cancer does not obey our beliefs, no matter how positive and euphonious they may be. Any disease is capricious. It cannot be acted upon by conviction alone.

When Susan Sontag discovered that she had cancer, she decided to write an essay that would rid this disease of moral and psychological connotations. In the 1970s, many believed that cancer was caused by certain psychological characteristics of patients: suppression of emotions, dissatisfaction with intimate relationships, pain from recent separation. She compared this disease with tuberculosis, which also recently was associated with specific psychological complexes and "passions." Even earlier, such characteristics were endowed with the plague. In the 16th-17th centuries, in London, suffering from an epidemic, it was believed that "a happy person is invulnerable to infection." When real treatments were found, these fantasies quickly faded into the past. The same thing happened with tuberculosis, and over time, perhaps, it will also happen with cancer.

But no matter how far progress in medicine has gone, the mass conviction in the psychological nature of diseases does not go anywhere.

On the one hand, there are real reasons behind this conviction. The influence of chronic stress on the occurrence of many diseases has been proven by multiple studies. Stress weakens the responses of the immune system and makes the body more vulnerable to a wide variety of diseases. In this case, doctors resort to the “weak point theory”, according to which, against the background of stress, first of all, those organs and systems that are genetically weakened in a particular patient fail. But, as Sontag observes, "the hypothesis of an immunological response to emotional upheaval is hardly the same as - or supports - the idea that emotions cause disease, much less the notion that certain emotions cause certain diseases."

There is no direct link between illness and mental health conditions.

The belief that certain mental states are the source of disease goes deep into the past. Even in the days of Plato and Socrates, the Greek physician Hippocrates argued that the state of the body is closely related to the temperament of a person. Anger causes asthma, lethargy - gastrointestinal disorders, melancholy - heart and brain diseases. But Hippocrates still did not exaggerate the importance of psychology: he considered the imbalance of fluids (humors) inside the body to be the main source of disease. The humoral theory shaped Western medicine for centuries until more effective theories and appropriate treatments were found. In the days of Hippocrates, much was forgivable. But today, the claim that unspoken grievances cause cancer can only be explained by cynicism or stupidity.

What diseases can be explained by psychology

The word "psychosomatics" itself appeared only in the 19th century, and the classical theory of psychosomatic diseases emerged by the middle of the 20th century. One of the founders of this approach, psychoanalyst Franz Alexander, in 1950 cited a list of seven major psychosomatic diseases, which generally remains valid to this day. This is the so-called "Chicago Seven":

• essential hypertension;
• peptic ulcer of the stomach and duodenum;
• rheumatoid arthritis;
• hyperthyroidism (thyrotoxicosis);
• bronchial asthma;
• ulcerative colitis;
• neurodermatitis.

Modern medicine does not deny that these diseases often occur against a background of stress and negative psychological experiences. But psychology cannot be considered their only reason. So, for the occurrence of stomach ulcers, an equally important component in most cases is the bacterium Helicobacter pylori.

Another type of diseases that modern psychosomatic medicine deals with are disorders that lack a physiological substrate with the undoubted presence of negative symptoms. Symptoms can be very different: pain in different parts of the body; disorders of the gastrointestinal tract; skin rashes; uncontrolled cramps and headaches. It is believed that irritable bowel syndrome is of a psychosomatic nature - one of the most common gastrointestinal diseases in the world, which affects approximately 15-20% of the adult population of the planet. But in recent years, scientists have found evidence that certain types of IBS are an autoimmune disease that occurs in people who have had a bacterial intestinal infection.

Chronic fatigue syndrome, or myalgic encephalomyelitis, is a disease that is now undergoing a similar revision. Previously, this syndrome, whose victims lack energy even with minimal exertion and are often isolated from society, was considered one of the varieties of hysteria. Patients were advised to undergo psychoanalysis in order to work through repressed emotional trauma, which supposedly manifests itself in a loss of strength and other physiological symptoms. The causes of this disease are still unknown (although there is speculation about the viral nature of CFS). But it is very well known that neither psychotherapy, nor antidepressants, nor a "positive attitude" can help to get rid of the disease.

The state of consciousness and attitudes have great power over bodily functions. This proves the effectiveness of the placebo mechanism and its downside - nocebo. In 2007, a resident of the American city of Jackson, who participated in a clinical trial of an antidepressant, quarreled with a friend, swallowed the remaining pills and was taken to the hospital with tachycardia and dangerously low blood pressure. When the organizers of the trials reported that the patient was in the placebo group and took pacifiers, all symptoms resolved within 15 minutes.

Consciousness is bodily, and the body is perceived psychologically. Stress is not just a collection of sensations in our head. This is a specific physiological process that affects the work of internal organs. But, in addition to psychological causes, most diseases have many others - diet, lifestyle, environmental conditions, genetic predisposition and accidental infections. These reasons, as a rule, are the main ones.

The need to explain illnesses through negative emotions and psychological attitudes does not speak more about illnesses, but about the most explanatory and the level of knowledge of his era. When people knew nothing about bacteria and antibiotics, they had every reason to believe that the plague was God's punishment, and tuberculosis was the result of unrestrained passions. Any disease, by definition, has a psychological dimension. The way our body behaves affects the inner state and way of thinking, and the inner state affects the body.

What makes this path of explanation so tempting? First, its relative simplicity. "You have an ulcer because you can't digest someone" - say this, and life will become simple and understandable. It is much more difficult to talk about the interaction of bacteria with the internal environment of the body, diet, lifestyle, stress, and many other physiological mechanisms. Second, the psychological explanation gives the illusion of disease control. Accept your emotions, learn to control internal conflicts - and you won't get sick. Needless to say, happiness has never been a sufficient reason for immortality.

In most cases, it is better to get rid of psychological explanations in medicine and look at physiology first. Sometimes a disease is just a disease, without any hidden meanings and implications.