Rowing is a sport for dreamers.
As long as you put in the work, you can own the dream.
When the work stops, the dream disappears.
—Jim Dietz, American Olympic rower (1972, 1976, 1980) and Olympic team coach
There were a lot of great things about my brief stint rowing for Canada in the 1990s. After spending the fall, winter, and spring pushing my mental and physical limits, summer was racing season. I traveled to races with amazing teammates all over Canada and the United States, as well as to the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Spain, Poland, Chile, and Zambia. When things went well, we ended up standing on the podium for national or international championship medals. Then occasionally a less fun thing would happen: some of us were escorted off the podium to test for drugs. I liked the idea of drug testing as I didn’t want to race against cheats. But being taken away from the podium put a damper on the celebration. And the test was embarrassing, because it involved someone watching you pee in a bottle.
The testing also made you paranoid when you got ill and had to take medicine, because some athletes said that taking a routine medication made them test positive for banned drugs. I was pretty sure they were telling the truth sometimes, but I couldn’t be sure. So when I developed an allergy to a cat that my mother bought when I was living at home one winter, I was worried at the prospect of having to take medication. Yet I had to do something, because my nose was running, I was sneezing, and I couldn’t sleep well. The lack of sleep made it impossible to train properly. My performance began to suffer.
I visited the allergy doctor, who pricked my skin about thirty times with different allergens to see which one made my skin turn red. He found that I was allergic to cats, dogs, and dust, and prescribed a nasal spray. I looked carefully at its ingredients, and stopped at the word corticosteroid. Were corticosteroids the same thing as steroids that are banned substances, I wondered? I decided not to use the spray until I found out.
I wrote to Sport Canada in Ottawa to ask whether the nasal spray was banned; however, weeks went by and I still had not received a reply. Part of the reason that officials at Sport Canada may take their time in replying to such requests could be that they suspect many people who contact them with such questions are trying to figure out ways to game the system. So I was stuck: I couldn’t sleep or train properly, but I couldn’t take the meds that would make me better. As a last resort, I accepted my mother’s suggestion to meet her friend who was an herbal doctor. I was skeptical, but I had nothing to lose, so I made an appointment.
I visited the herbal doctor in her office not far from where I lived. She offered me a seat on her sofa, which I accepted. I had expected rows of shelves laden with jars of herbal remedies and crystals, but there were none. On the contrary, it seemed like a regular doctor’s office, only calmer and cleaner. She was very professional. She took an interest in my allergies as well as other things going on in my life. We talked about my symptoms, the stress of being ill, and the hypercompetitiveness of top-level rowing. After an hour of talking, I felt very calm and she gave me her prescription. She told me to keep my head and neck warm, and to drink ginger tea twice per day.
I didn’t believe her treatment would work, but figured wearing a scarf and woolly hat was generally a good thing during winter in Canada, and ginger tea wouldn’t kill me. I gave it a try. After one day of drinking the ginger tea, I was surprised that I felt a bit better. After three days, I stopped sneezing almost completely, I slept well, and my nose stopped running.
The fact that the tea seemed to work got my inherently inquisitive mind racing. (I was that annoying kid who asks their teachers and parents “Why?” all the time.) Could my allergies have disappeared spontaneously? Or did ginger tea work because I believed it might—in other words, had it acted as a placebo? If it was “just” a placebo effect (basically: the effect of my belief—more about that in Chapter 4), did that matter if it helped? How did my body heal itself? Had the calming effect of the herbal doctor taking time to listen to me talk made the difference? On top of all that, were there any financial barriers to selling ginger tea as an allergy cure? After all, you can’t patent ginger tea, so no company can afford to spend money researching or marketing it. Searching for answers to these questions ignited a fascination that has shaped my life ever since.
Looking back, I can see that my visit to the herbal doctor was one of those pivotal moments in life that seem unimportant at the time, but in fact lead to important changes in direction. My undergraduate degree was in engineering and I had planned to become an investment banker. I dropped that idea and moved to the United Kingdom to do a PhD with leading philosophers of medicine at the London School of Economics. The philosophy provided me with a theoretical understanding of placebos and the complex ethical questions around them. I then got a job at Oxford, where I trained as a clinical epidemiologist (which is a geek word for someone who uses statistical techniques to find out whether treatments work).
I’ve now done ten years of research in this area, during which time I have published almost one hundred scholarly articles and a textbook. I’ve found answers to many of my questions. I’ve always been inspired by teaching and coaching others, so naturally I wanted to share what I learned. Unfortunately, the science I present in this book—a lot of which I have been involved with—has generally until now been restricted to academic journals that are written in a way that nobody outside a small field reads or understands. When it is picked up outside academia, it is often by journalists who are great communicators but who can exaggerate. The headline “New drug to cure all forms of cancer” is much sexier than “New drug might reduce the risk of cancer in some mice.” Most medical advances, including the ones I describe in this book, are real and important yet are more modest than headlines frequently mislead you to believe.
Because the hard science of self-healing has rarely been reported in an understandable and accurate way, I felt compelled to write this book. I’ve tried to communicate the methods and results of the scientific studies in a way that is at once accurate, entertaining, and memorable. This was not easy, since as anyone who has done it knows, real science is messy, and all studies have flaws (I explain many of these in Chapter 2). Translating this complex science into a language most people can understand was like walking a tightrope in a storm. As with any writing, a serious skeptic could criticize the way I have interpreted and explained things. In spite of this, I’m confident that the main conclusions I draw in the book are correct. To anyone interested in checking the facts, I’ve included hundreds of references to support all the claims I make. I kept the references out of the body of the book and placed them at the end to improve readability.
Beyond doing and writing about the research, I’ve lived by it. Inspired by ancient philosophers and scientists who used what they learned to lead better lives, I’ve used my research to guide me. For example, I’ve refused knee and back surgery even when doctors have strongly recommended it; I avoid medicine unless it is absolutely necessary; and I’ve done all the exercises that are at the end of the chapters. I’ve also won two professional Muay Thai fights in Thailand as a (crazy?) experiment to overcome fear; I got a black belt in tae kwon do to see how flexible I could be; I have done long fasts and silent meditation retreats to see how much I could calm my mind; and I became a highly qualified yoga teacher. None of this means that I’ve achieved perfect mental or physical health. I haven’t. In fact, and as you’ll see in the book, one of my motivations for becoming interested in health is that I was—and still can be—too anxious. So using the research to inform how I live just means that I can explain the geeky science by drawing on my own experience, and that I’m only recommending to others things that I’m doing or have done myself. Basically, I’m swallowing my own medicine, and I like it.
This brings us to you. By the time you reach the end of the book, I hope you will have gained the things from reading it that I gained from researching and writing it. I hope you embody what you learn to actually experience better health and to help others achieve better health (as you’ll see in Chapters 11 and 12, your health is connected to the health of those around you). I help you achieve this by providing takeaway exercises at the end of each chapter. But don’t be misled: this is not a self-help book. I have not given you a quick-fix formula to help you lose seven pounds in seven days, an app that will enlighten you in a minute, or a miracle cure for late-stage cancer. I don’t tell you about a trick that will make you a billion dollars or get a Hollywood star body.
It’s much more than a self-help book, because it aims to change how we think about medicine and our bodies. The exercises prompt you to experience that your body is an extraordinary entity whose different parts are capable of compensating, healing, and regenerating themselves much more often than you may believe. The exercises are a way for you to become the protagonist of Doctor You, the subject of your own experiment. The new way of thinking that the book encourages will guide you in many more ways than I can list in a single book and that are personal to you.
Here are just a few examples. If you knew that your body produced its own morphine, would you take as much aspirin—which can make your stomach bleed—for mild headaches? If you knew getting together with a friend had the same biological effect on depression as a pill, would you be less likely to try Prozac—which can have side effects ranging from sexual dysfunction to suicidal tendencies? If you knew that placebo knee surgery was as good as the real thing, would you choose the surgeon’s knife before trying physiotherapy? Your answers to these questions will evolve as you read the book—either by changing your mind or by making you more confident that you made the correct choice in the first place. You will learn enough about medical evidence to arrive at good answers to your health questions alongside health-care professionals. You will no longer be at the constant mercy of (admittedly sometimes wonderful) drugs, devices, and surgery that have become overused.
Most important, I hope you enjoy reading this book as much as I enjoyed writing it.