How to Feel Better by Nick Hall

Author:Nick Hall [HALL NICK]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gildan Media Corporation
Published: 2016-09-13T00:00:00+00:00

How Your Mind Affects Your Immune System

I’m going to switch gears and emphasize the brain, but not in the way that cytokines are acting upon the nervous system. We are going to focus on the way your thoughts, your emotions are capable of influencing the ability of white cells to fight viruses. The mind is capable of influencing the immune system in many ways.

That includes the characteristics that comprise what we refer to as personality. During the 1960s, psychiatrist Doctor George Solomon, one of the pioneers in the field of psychoneuroimmunology, conducted a very interesting study. He observed among identical twins that one would develop rheumatoid arthritis, whereas the other would not.

He was curious about this. After all, they were identical. They had the exact same immune response genes. They grew up in identical environments. They ate from the same supply of food, drank from the same supply of water. Indeed, they had the same parental upbringing.

It turned out that the distinguishing feature of the person who developed the arthritis is what he referred to as the rheumatoid arthritic personality: a person who is very accommodating, someone who will put their own emotional needs on a back burner to care for the needs of others, person who essentially says, “Yes” when they want to say, “No.” They are also people who have a very difficult time dealing with anger, expressing it in themselves as well as in other people. The first time that another person is about to get angry, they will do whatever they need to do to keep that person on an even keel.

Dr. Lydia Temoshok had just received her PhD in clinical psychology at Yale University and was very interested in this work. She began a postdoctoral fellowship with Dr. Solomon, further characterizing this correlation between the rheumatoid arthritic individual and the one who was free of those symptoms and then wrote the bestselling book THE TYPE C OR CANCER CONNECTION.

She discovered that not only are these individuals prone to inflammatory based disease, but they are also more likely to develop cancer, especially malignant melanoma. I’m not talking about the kind of malignant melanoma that occurs when you spend too much time basking in the sun or utilizing tanning beds.

I’m referring to the type of person who is darker complexioned whose melanoma shows up on the inside of their gum, the sole of their foot, their armpit, places that seldom see intense sunlight. When those individuals develop melanoma, invariably they have the type C personality. The type C individual has also been found to have elevated levels of interleukin-6. Interleukin-6, if you will recall, is one of the pro-inflammatory cytokines and that is exactly what you would predict in a person who is going to be prone to inflammatory based disease, such as rheumatoid arthritis.

Dr. Temoshok went on to work in the laboratory of Dr. Robert Gallo, the co-discoverer of HIV. He was running one of the most powerful immunology labs in the country. Normally a virologist such as Dr.

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