Story of Stress and Disease: Robert Ader Pioneering Psychologist

This is the story of Robert Ader who first coined the term "psychoneuroimmunology" or PNI. If you're interested in stress and disease, as I am, you probably would like to read the whole article. A few excerpts here.

Robert Ader, Who Linked Stress and Illness, Dies at 79
By PAUL VITELLO

Dr. Robert Ader, an experimental psychologist who was among the first scientists to show how mental processes influence the body’s immune system, a finding that changed modern medicine, died on Tuesday in Pittsford, N.Y. He was 79...

His initial research, in the 1970s, became a touchstone for studies that have since mapped the vast communications network among immune cells, hormones and neurotransmitters. It introduced a field of research that nailed down the science behind notions once considered magical thinking: that meditation helps reduce arterial plaque; that social bonds improve cancer survival; that people under stress catch more colds; and that placebos work not only on the human mind but also on supposedly insentient cells.

At the core of Dr. Ader’s breakthrough research was an insight already obvious to any grandmother who ever said, “Stop worrying or you’ll make yourself sick.” He demonstrated scientifically that stress worsens illness — sometimes even triggering it — and that reducing stress is essential to health care...
“My father used to say, ‘I just didn’t know any better,’ ” she said, recounting how he had described his pioneering research.

He told her, she recalled, “I didn’t know the immune system wasn’t supposed to be connected to the brain.”

Information on my practice here.

Follow up on patient with Severe Thoracic Spine Pain

This is the follow up on a patient I posted on earlier here.
When the patient came in for a follow up visit, his pain was at a 5 level (5 out of 10.) He had had another episode of severe spasm the day before requiring Dilaudid. But it had resolved on its own. He thinks that the acupuncture is helping to quell the severe spasms.
I tried doing cupping on his back since it can be helpful when muscle tightness is involved, but it ended up aggravating after about 10 minutes. So the cups came off.
His readings, again, showed a decrease in the stress response( values follow.) The whole idea is to be able to "balance" his system, reduce his stress there by increase his pain threshold. From there we can reduce his medications and get him moving again with a gentle stretching and exercise plan.
His reading for 60 to 360 seconds, and 360 to 660 seconds.
LFR/HFR- .76 and .24
SD1/SD2- .52 and .56 (not much change, granted)
Sample entropy 1.67 and 1.88

(Brief primer: LFR/HFR stands for Low Frequency/High Frequency HRV. If this decreases, it is interpreted to mean that the stress response in decreased. So decrease in LFR/HFR=decreased stress. The other measure SD1/Sd2, is a nonlinear method, if this ratio increases =decreased stress.)
(For more info on my practice, please click here, for information about stress and acupuncture please click here.)

Blackburn, a few more quotes from the Atlantic

A month ago, I posted some discussion from the Atlantic Magazine (here) about Alternative Medicine. I didn't excerpt this particular section at the time, but will now since it's pertinent to yesterday's post (here) about telomeres and Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn. She is quoted below. (I would only take slight issue with the claim that she has "no skin in the game," since she now has a for profit company offering telomere testing, but that's small potatoes compared to Big Pharma and the Medical Device industry.) (For more information about my practice please click here.)

You might think the weight of the clinical evidence would close the case on alternative medicine, at least in the eyes of mainstream physicians and scientists who aren’t in a position to make a buck on it. Yet many extremely well-credentialed scientists and physicians with no skin in the game take issue with the black-and-white view espoused by Salzberg and other critics. And on balance, the medical community seems to be growing more open to alternative medicine’s possibilities, not less.

That’s in large part because mainstream medicine itself is failing. “Modern medicine was formed around successes in fighting infectious disease,” says Elizabeth Blackburn, a biologist at the University of California at San Francisco and a Nobel laureate. “Infectious agents were the big sources of disease and mortality, up until the last century. We could find out what the agent was in a sick patient and attack the agent medically.” To a large degree, the medical infrastructure we have today was designed with infectious agents in mind. Physician training and practices, hospitals, the pharmaceutical industry, and health insurance all were built around the model of running tests on sick patients to determine which drug or surgical procedure would best deal with some discrete offending agent. The system works very well for that original purpose, against even the most challenging of these agents—as the taming of the AIDS virus attests.

But medicine’s triumph over infectious disease brought to the fore the so-called chronic, complex diseases—heart disease, cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and other illnesses without a clear causal agent. Now that we live longer, these typically late-developing diseases have become by far our biggest killers. Heart disease, prostate cancer, breast cancer, diabetes, obesity, and other chronic diseases now account for three-quarters of our health-care spending. “We face an entirely different set of big medical challenges today,” says Blackburn. “But we haven’t rethought the way we fight illness.” That is, the medical establishment still waits for us to develop some sign of one of these illnesses, then seeks to treat us with drugs and surgery. ...
The medical community knows perfectly well what sort of patient-care model would work better against complex diseases than the infectious-disease-inspired approach we’ve inherited. That would be one that doesn’t wait for diseases to take firm hold and then vainly try to manage them with drugs, but that rather focuses on lowering the risk that these diseases will take hold in the first place. “We need to prevent and slow the onset of these diseases,” says Blackburn. “And we know there are ways to do that.” Aside from getting people to stop smoking, the three most effective ways, according to almost any doctor you’d care to speak with, are the promotion of a healthy diet, encouragement of more exercise, and measures to reduce stress.

Acupuncture has been shown in countless studies to reduce stress. So beyond the principle "First Do No Harm," I would add, "Get your acupuncture!" And, yes, in full disclosure, I also have "skin in the game."