The Instinct to Heal: Curing Depression, Anxiety and Stress Without Drugs and Without Talk Therapy by David Servan-Schreiber

Author:David Servan-Schreiber [Servan-Schreiber, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rodale Books
Published: 2004-12-23T00:00:00+00:00

The Judgment of History

On the day historians begin to analyze the history of medicine in the 20th century, I believe they will point out two major events. The first one, without any doubt, was the discovery of antibiotics, which practically eradicated bacterial pneumonia—the leading cause of death in the West until World War II. The second is a revolution that is still in the making: the scientific demonstration that nutrition has a profound impact on practically all the leading causes of disease in Western societies.

Cardiologists and internists have been the first to integrate this fundamental idea into their practices (even if, to this day, they rarely recommend omega-3 diets or supplements, despite the large number of studies published in respected journals that have documented their effects, as well as the explicit recommendations of the American Heart Association44). Most psychiatrists lag far behind. Yet the brain is almost certainly as sensitive to the contents of our daily diets as the heart may be. When we regularly intoxicate our brain with alcohol or street drugs, it suffers. When we fail to nourish it with the nutrients it needs, it suffers, too. What’s truly astonishing is that it’s taken so long for modern Western science to come back to this very basic realization. All traditional medicines, whether Tibetan, Chinese, Ayurvedic, or Greco-Roman, have emphasized the importance of nutrition since their earliest texts. Hippocrates wrote: “Let your food be your treatment, and your treatment your food.” That was 2,400 years ago.

But there is still another door to the emotional brain that relies entirely on the body. Hippocrates knew about it as well, and it has been ignored in the West, just as nutrition has. Curiously, this method is disparaged even more by people who suffer from stress or depression, with the pretext that they do not have enough time or enough energy. Yet, it is one of the most abundant sources of energy, and it has been well-substantiated by controlled studies. That door is physical exercise—even, as we will see, at low doses.

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