Word: stressful
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Anywhere from 60% to 90% of visits to doctors are in the mind-body, stress-related realm," asserts Dr. Herbert Benson, president of the Mind/Body Medical Institute of Boston's Deaconess Hospital and Harvard Medical School. It is a triumph of medicine that so many of us live long enough to develop these chronic woes, but, notes Benson, "traditional modes of therapy--pharmaceutical and surgical--don't work well against them...
...religious faith has some direct influence on physiology and health? Harvard's Herbert Benson is probably the most persuasive proponent of this view. Benson won international fame in 1975 with his best-selling book, The Relaxation Response. In it he showed that patients can successfully battle a number of stress-related ills by practicing a simple form of meditation. The act of focusing the mind on a single sound or image brings about a set of physiological changes that are the opposite of the "fight-or-flight response." With meditation, heart rate, respiration and brain waves slow down, muscles relax...
...Benson's view, prayer operates along the same biochemical pathways as the relaxation response. In other words, praying affects epinephrine and other corticosteroid messengers or "stress hormones," leading to lower blood pressure, more relaxed heart rate and respiration and other benefits...
Recent research demonstrates that these stress hormones also have a direct impact on the body's immunological defenses against disease. "Anything involved with meditation and controlling the state of mind that alters hormone activity has the potential to have an impact on the immune system," says David Felten, chairman of the Department of Neurobiology at the University of Rochester...
...soberly scientific but eventually make their way to questions of medicine and the soul. Weil writes in his latest book, Spontaneous Healing, "The more you experience yourself as energy, the easier it is not to identify yourself with your physical body." Jon Kabat-Zinn has applied Zen concepts to stress reduction at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center, which he directs. Approaching the same point from another direction are California's Marianne Williamson and Louise Hay, whose concern with the spirit sometimes leads to thoughts on health. Williamson has advised some seekers to write letters to their illnesses, coming...