| |
- Alternative Systems of
Medical Practice
- Mind/Body Control
Overview
Most traditional medical systems make
use of the interconnectedness of mind and body and the power of each to affect
the other. During the past 30 years there has been a growing scientific
movement to explore the mind’s capacity to affect the body. The clinical
aspect of this enterprise is called mind-body medicine. Mind and body are so
integrally related that it makes little sense to refer to therapies as having
impact just on the mind or the body.
Mind-body interventions often help
patients experience and express their illness in new, clearer ways.
Distinctions between curing and healing have little place in contemporary
medical practice but are important to patients. Perceived meaning has direct
consequences to health. The placebo response is one of the most widely known
examples of mind-body interactions in contemporary, scientific medicine, yet
it is also one of the most undervalued, neglected assets in medical practice.
That the placebo response relies heavily on the relationship between doctor
and patient says a great deal about the importance of the doctor-patient
relationship and the need to provide further medical training on understanding
and using this relationship. The therapeutic potential of spirituality, as
well as religion, also has been neglected in the teaching and practice of
medicine.
Interest in the mind’s role in the
cause and course of cancer has been substantially stimulated by the discovery
of the complex interactions between the mind and the neurological and immune
systems, the subject of the rapidly expanding discipline of
psychoneuroimmunology. The profound differences in the psychological stances
taken by people who survive cancer suggest that there is extreme variation
both among cultures and within cultures.
Specific mind-body interventions include
psychotherapy, support groups,
meditation, imagery, hypnosis,
biofeedback, yoga, dance
therapy, music therapy, art therapy,
and prayer and mental healing.
Psychotherapy
Psychotherapy directly addresses a
person’s emotional and mental health, which is, in turn, closely interwoven
with his or her physical health. It encompasses a wide range of specific
treatments from combining medication with discussion, to simply listening to
the concerns of a patient, to using more active behavioral and emotive
approaches. It also should be understood more generally as the matrix of
interaction in which all the helping professions operate. Conventional
psychotherapy is conducted primarily by means of psychologic methods such as
suggestion, persuasion, psychoanalysis, and reeducation. It can be divided
into general categories. All of the therapies can be undertaken either
individually or in groups.
Research indicates that psychotherapeutic treatment can hasten a recovery from
a medical crisis and is in some cases the best treatment for it. Psychotherapy
also appears to be valuable in the treatment of somatic illnesses in which
physical symptoms appear to have no medical cause. These symptoms are often
improved markedly with psychotherapy. In addition, psychotherapy has been
shown to speed patients’ recovery time from illness. This, in turn, leads to
smaller medical bills and fewer return visits to medical practitioners.
Support Groups
Support groups, as the research
literature demonstrates, can have a powerful positive effect in a wide variety
of physical illnesses, from heart disease to cancer, from asthma to strokes.
Indeed, one study found that women with breast cancer who took part in a
support group lived an average of 18 months longer (a doubling of the
survival time following diagnosis) than those who did not participate. In
addition, all the long-term survivors belonged to the therapy group.
Support groups have two other major benefits:
they help members form bonds with
each other, an experience that may empower the rest of their lives; and
they are low cost or even
"no cost" (for example, Alcoholics Anonymous).
Meditation
Mediation is a self-directed practice
for relaxing the body and calming the mind. Most meditative techniques have
come to the West from Eastern religious practices, particularly India, China,
and Japan, but can be found in all cultures of the world. Until recently, the
primary purpose of meditation has been religious, although its health benefits
have long been recognized. During the past 15 years, it has been explored as a
way of reducing stress on both mind and body. It is often recommend it as a
way of reducing high blood pressure.
Some studies have found that regular
meditation can reduce healthcare use; increases longevity and quality of life;
reduces chronic pain; reduces anxiety; reduces high blood pressure; reduces
serum cholesterol level; reduces substance abuse; increases
intelligence-related measures; reduces post-traumatic stress syndrome in
Vietnam veterans; reduces blood pressure; and lowers blood cortisol levels
initially brought on by stress.
Imagery
Imagery is both a mental process (as in
imagining) and a wide variety of procedures used in therapy to encourage
changes in attitudes, behavior, or physiological reactions. As a mental
process, it is often defined as "any thought representing a sensory
quality." It includes, as well as the visual, all the senses — aural,
tactile, olfactory, proprioceptive, and kinesthetic.
Imagery has been successfully tested as a strategy for alleviating nausea and
vomiting associated with chemotherapy in cancer patients, to relieve stress,
and to facilitate weight gain in cancer patients. It has been successfully
used and tested for pain control in a variety of settings; as adjunctive
therapy for several diseases, including diabetes; and with geriatric patients
to enhance immunity.
Imagery is usually combined with other behavioral approaches. It is best known
in the treatment of cancer as a means to help patients mobilize their immune
systems, but it also is used as part of a multidisciplinary approach to
cardiac rehabilitation and in many settings that specialize in treating
chronic pain.
Hypnosis
Hypnosis and hypnotic suggestion have
been a part of healing from ancient times. The induction of trance states and
the use of therapeutic suggestion were a central feature of the early Greek
healing temples, and variations of these techniques were practiced throughout
the ancient world.
Modern hypnosis began in the eighteenth century with Franz Anton Mesmer, who
used what he called "magnetic healing" to treat a variety of
psychological and psychophysiological disorders, such as hysterical blindness,
paralysis, headaches, and joint pains. Since then, the fortunes of hypnosis
have ebbed and flowed. Freud, at first, found it extremely effective in
treating hysteria and then, troubled by the sudden emergence of powerful
emotions in his patients and his own difficulty with its use, abandoned it.
In the past 50 years, however, hypnosis has experienced a resurgence, first
with physicians and dentists and more recently with psychologists and other
mental health professionals. Today, it is widely used for addictions, such as
smoking and drug use, for pain controls, and for phobias, such as the fear of
flying.
One of the most dramatic uses of hypnosis is the treatment of congenital
ichthyosis (fish skin disease), a genetic skin disorder that covers the
surface of the skin with grotesque hard, wartlike, layered crust. Hypnosis is,
however, most frequently used in more common ailments, either independently or
in concert with other treatment, including the management of pain in a variety
of settings, reduction of bleeding in hemophiliacs, stabilization of blood
sugar in diabetics, reduction in severity of attacks of hay fever and asthma,
increased breast size, the cure of warts, the production of skin blisters and
bruises, and control of reaction to allergies such as poison ivy and certain
foods.
Biofeedback
Biofeedback is a treatment method that
uses monitoring instruments to feed back to patients physiological information
of which they are normally unaware. By watching the monitoring device,
patients can learn, by trial and error, to adjust their thinking and other
mental processes in order to control bodily processes heretofore thought to be
involuntary--such as blood pressure, temperature, gastrointestinal
functioning, and brain wave activity.
Biofeedback is used to treat a very wide variety of conditions and diseases,
ranging from stress, alcohol and other addictions, sleep disorders, epilepsy,
respiratory problems, and fecal and urinary incontinence to muscle spasms,
partial paralysis, or muscle dysfunction caused by injury, migraine headaches,
hypertension, and a variety of vascular disorders. More applications are being
developed yearly.
Yoga
Yoga is a way of life that includes
ethical precepts, dietary prescriptions, and physical exercise. Its
practitioners have long known that their discipline has the capacity to alter
mental and bodily responses normally thought to be far beyond a person’s
ability to modulate them. During the past 80 years, health professionals in
India and the West have begun to investigate the therapeutic potential of
yoga. To date, thousands of research studies have been undertaken and have
shown that with the practice of yoga a person can, indeed, learn to control
such physiologic parameters as blood pressure, heart rate, respiratory
function, metabolic rate, skin resistance, brain waves, body temperature, and
many other bodily functions.
Regular yogic meditation also has been shown to reduce anxiety levels; cause
the heart to work more efficiently and decrease respiratory rate; lower blood
pressure and alter brain waves; increase communication between the right and
left brain; reduce cholesterol levels (when used with diet and exercise); help
people stop smoking; and successfully treat arthritis.
Dance Therapy
Dance therapy began formally in the
United States in 1942, and in 1956 dance therapists from across the country
founded the American Dance Therapy Association, which has now grown to over
1,100 members. It publishes a journal, the American Journal of Dance
Therapy, fosters research, monitors standards for professional practice,
and develops guidelines for graduate education.
Dance/movement therapy has been demonstrated to be clinically effective in the
following: developing body image, improving self-concept and increasing
self-esteem; facilitating attention; ameliorating depression, decreasing fears
and anxieties, expressing anger; decreasing isolation, increasing
communication skills and fostering solidarity; decreasing bodily tension,
reducing chronic pain, and enhancing circulatory and respiratory functions;
reducing suicidal ideas, increasing feelings of well-being, and promoting
healing; and increasing verbalization.
Music Therapy
Music therapy is used in psychiatric
hospitals, rehabilitation facilities, general hospitals, outpatient clinics,
day-care treatment centers, residences for people with developmental
disabilities, community mental health centers, drug and alcohol programs,
senior centers, nursing homes, hospice programs, correctional facilities,
halfway houses, schools, and private practice.
Studies have found music therapy effective as an analgesic, as a relaxant and
anxiety reducer for infants and children, and as an adjunctive treatment with
burn patients, cancer patients, cerebral palsy patients, and stroke, brain
injury, or Parkinson’s disease patients.
Art Therapy
Art therapy is a means for the patient
to reconcile emotional conflicts, foster self-awareness, and express unspoken
and frequently unconscious concerns about his/her disease. In addition to its
use in treatment, it can be used to assess individuals, couples, families, and
groups. It is particularly valuable with children who often cannot talk about
their real concerns.
Research on art therapy has been conducted in clinical, educational,
physiological, forensic, and sociological arenas. Studies on art therapy have
been conducted in many areas including with burn recovery in adolescent and
young patients, with eating disorders; with emotional impairment in young
children, with reading performance, with chemical addiction, and with sexual
abuse in adolescents.
Prayer and Mental Healing
Prayer and mental healing techniques
fall into two main types. In Type I healing, the healer enters a prayerful,
altered state of consciousness in which he views himself and the patient as a
single entity. There need be no physical contact and there is no attempt to
"do anything" or "give something" to the person in need,
only the desire to unite and "become one" with him or her and with
the Universe, God, or Cosmos. Type II healers, on the other hand, do touch the
healee and describe some "flow of energy" through their hands to the
patient’s areas of pathology. Feelings of heat are common in both healer and
healee. These healing techniques are offered only as generalities. Some
healers use both methodologies, even in the same healing session, and other
healing methods could be described.
Many published reports exist, of experiments, in which persons apparently were
able to influence a variety of cellular and other biological systems through
mental means. The target systems for these investigations have included
bacteria, yeast, fungi, mobile algae, plants, protozoa, larvae, insects,
chicks, mice, rats, gerbils, cats, and dogs, as well as cellular preparations
(blood cells, neurons, cancer cells) and enzyme activities. In human
"target persons," eye movements, muscular movements, electrodermal
activity, plethysmographic activity, respiration, and brain rhythms have been
apparently affected through direct mental influence.
These studies assess the ability of humans to affect physiological functions
of a variety of living systems at a distance, including studies where the
"receiver" or "target" is unaware that such an effort is
being made. The fact that these studies commonly involve nonhuman targets is
important; lower organisms are presumably not subject to suggestion and
placebo effects, a frequent criticism when human subjects are involved.
Many of these studies do not describe the psychological strategy of the
influencer as actual "prayer," in which one directs entreaties to a
Supreme Being, a Universal Power, or God. But almost all of them involve a
state of prayerfulness — a feeling of genuine caring, compassion, love, or
empathy with the target system, or a feeling that the influencer is
"one" with the target.
Conclusion
In addition to preventing or curing
illnesses, these therapies by and large provide people the chance to be
involved in their own care, to make vital decisions about their own health, to
be touched emotionally, and to be changed psychologically in the process. Many
patients today believe their doctor or medical system is too technical,
impersonal, remote, and uncaring. The mind-body approach is potentially a
corrective to this tendency, a reminder of the importance of human connection
that opens up the power of patients acting on their own behalf.
More work needs to be done, but there is already a growing amount of evidence
that many of the mind-body therapies discussed in this report, if
appropriately selected and wisely applied, can be clinically as well as economically
cost-effective, that they work, and that they are safe.
National Institutes of Health
Disclaimer: The NIH cautions users
not to seek the therapies described on these pages without the consultation of a
licensed healthcare provider. Inclusion of a treatment or resource on the NCCAM
Web site does not imply endorsement by the NCCAM, the NIH, or the Department of
Health and Human Services (DHHS).
Path:
Home>Education>Health
Information>Mind/Body
Control
|
|
