Healing
Nearly every physical problem is accompanied by a disturbance of breathing.
But which comes first?
—Hans Weller, M.D.
Although breathing is by no means a cure-all, it does have remarkable powers when it comes to aiding the body’s ability to heal. It is worth reiterating that breathing derives its unique power from the fact that it is the common denominator across the mind, body, emotions and spirit—the four dimensions of health—and healing. When we are in need of healing the breath is the first place we should look, not the last. Dr. Andrew Weil states, “Improper breathing is a common cause of ill health,” but proper breathing is also the fundamental source of healing.
In the following pages we will explore our connection to our healing powers and see once again just how much control we really have.
Healing in All Dimensions
“Wellness occurs in four dimensions,” says Dr. Michael LeFevre, professor of family medicine at the University of Missouri at Columbia, “biologically, psychologically, socially and spiritually. In order to feel a state of good health, you have to feel well in all of those dimensions. It’s actually uncommon for an illness to be experienced in only one of those dimensions.”
Physical ailments and pain can cause emotional conditions such as depression. Depression in turn can slow down the healing process, interrupt eating and sleep cycles, and make the patient more susceptible to additional complications. Conversely, emotions can also initiate physical ailments. The upset stomachs and nervous diarrhea brought on by fear and anxiety are examples to which many people can relate. To effectively improve the health of the patient and break the cycle, the patient must be treated holistically.
Ryan Niemiec, a psychologist and behavioral consultant with the Primary Care and Prevention Center at SLUCare in St. Louis, observes that, “It’s artificial to say there’s a separation. Anything that happens in the body happens in the mind, and anything that happens in the mind happens in the body. Emotions and health are critically connected on every level.”
Niemiec adds, “Emotions can cause physical illness, make it worse, or they can maintain an illness—keep it from (improving) because the person is stuck in some emotion. Or they can aid in recovery.”
Medical science is finally taking notice and beginning to assess the mental, emotional, and spiritual health of patients, and as science digs deeper and deeper into the connection between these four dimensions of our health, there is again that consistent thread of which we’ve spoken so often and emphatically—the breath.
Conscious breathing practice has been shown to accelerate the healing process. Some surgeons have begun to teach it to their patients before surgery to reduce complications. Psychologists are being enlisted to treat the mental and emotional health of patients who previously would have been treated with purely allopathic methods. They routinely enlist breathing exercises as a tool that patients can use to gain more control over and improve their emotional and mental state, which in turn promotes healing at the physical level.
For millennia spiritual traditions have been using conscious breathing techniques to pursue higher states of consciousness and studies have shown that patients who are able to relate their illness to a higher purpose or reason heal faster than those who don’t. This speaks directly to a unique property of the breath: whether the focus is on improving mental or physical performance (see part four), dealing with emotional trauma, or seeking a state of grace, it is simultaneously lifting us higher in each of those dimensions.
Heal Thyself: It’s All in Your Mind
The picture of the human body that researchers previously looked at was—for the most part—a mindless machine. As we continue to fill in the blanks in our understanding, we are finding that the brain has far more control over our organs than we previously believed. According to Dr. Michael Jones, director of Northwestern Memorial Hospital’s Center for Functional Gastrointestinal and Motility Disorders (or NMCFGMD, as we affectionately call it), “Your gut’s fundamentally a dumb beast. Your heart’s fundamentally a dumb beast. They take their direction from the central nervous system.”
There is a constant conversation going on between our brain and our organs. The brain controls the organs through a variety of hormones that it releases into the circulatory system. The organs in turn communicate with the brain by sending chemical messages that report their status. The brain is also directly in contact with the organs via an intricate system of nerves (such as the vagus nerve), and the two systems together allow the brain to regulate the complex functions of the body, such as heart rate, breathing, digestion, immune response, and temperature.
The regulation of our bodies and its many functions do not take place in a vacuum. We react to our environment and it is our brain that tells the body how it should respond. It is our thoughts and emotions that provide the brain with the information it needs to know how to react.
Consider this imaginary scenario: You and a friend are walking in the park and are approached by a dog. You, having grown up owning several dogs as pets, may thoroughly enjoy the encounter and greet the dog with a smile. The experience causes your brain to release a profusion of beneficial hormones and chemicals into your system that boost your immune system, help protect you from cancer, and generally make you feel good.
Your friend, who’s only experience with dogs was being bitten as a child, may be terrified and find that his heart is pounding, his palms are sweating, and his stomach is in a knot. His brain releases a host of fight-or-flight hormones into his system. As we saw in the previous chapter, these chemicals are essential if we have to protect ourselves, but they can create a world of problems if we are constantly and unnecessarily subjected to them.
It is our thoughts and emotions that provide the context for the brain to interpret the world around us, so that it knows whether to pet the dog, or retreat to the safety of the car. And to the degree that we can control that context, control our thinking, and control our feelings (or at least understand them), we can control what were previously automatic physical reactions. When we control those reactions and their effects on our body, we also impact our health and well-being.
But can we really expect to control our thoughts and emotions? At times controlling the streams of thought and waves of emotion can seem like an impossible task—one that could take a lifetime to master. But by simply developing an awareness of our thoughts and emotions we can acquire a considerable measure of control. With practice it is possible for us to learn to observe our feelings along with the endless internal conversations and nip the unproductive thoughts and negative emotions in the bud. Even if that order seems too tall, just the act of noticing our thoughts and their context turns out to be beneficial as we will see when we tackle this topic in depth in part five.
But this is why there is now so much interest in applying the tools used by health psychologists to compliment the use of standard medical procedures such as surgery and drug therapies. By enlisting techniques such as conscious breathing, hypnosis, yoga, acupuncture, meditation, and other mind-body techniques, as well as traditional psychological therapies, health-care professionals are able to activate our natural ability to heal in all four dimensions, which directly affects the health of our physical body.
The Placebo Effect
There is no more compelling example of the mind’s power over the body than the placebo effect. The term was coined in 1920 by T. C. Graves in reference to the ability of harmless substances masquerading as active drugs to produce identical effects as the active drugs. For example, if a patient in pain is administered a sugar pill and told it is morphine, their pain may be reduced, just as if they had been administered morphine.
Although the placebo effect has oft been disputed, recent findings show, incredibly, that placebos can generate nearly identical neurochemical changes in the brain as the active substances they are intended to mimic. In a recent study conducted by Raúl de la Fuente-Fernández and colleagues at the University of British Columbia, researchers found that Parkinson’s patients administered a placebo course of injections increased production of the intended muscle-controlling chemicals, as did the patients receiving the actual pharmaceuticals. The authors concluded that their findings suggest that, for at least some patients, “Most of the benefit obtained from an active drug might derive from a placebo effect.” It is also interesting to note that patients may also develop side effects of the actual drugs when they are aware of them.
The Three-Legged Stool
To maintain our health and optimize the body’s natural healing abilities, we must take full advantage of each aspect of medicine and healing and recognize their strengths.
“We view health and well-being as akin to a three-legged stool,” says Dr. Herbert Benson, of the Mind Body Medical Institute and associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. “One leg is drugs and the second leg is surgery and medical procedures. But there has to be a third leg and that’s self-care, which involves such things as the relaxation response, nutrition and exercise.”
But as we’ve seen, these three legs of treatment are intimately connected. Our thoughts and emotions affect the outcome of surgery, and the mind turns out to be a very capable pharmacist. By deciding to take control over our health and healing, we can have a major impact on the efficacy of treatments in the other two legs—drugs as well as surgery and medical procedures. We’ve seen in the previous two chapters how dramatically stress impacts us physiologically. The degree to which stress can worsen the symptoms of any number of mental and physical conditions and afflictions, and the degree to which we can activate and augment our healing abilities, continue to amaze as the research results continue to grow.
Adds Benson, “Any disorder that is caused or made worse by stress, to that extent the relaxation response is an effective therapy.” He continues, “We found it useful in hypertension, anxiety, mild and moderate depression, excessive anger and hostility, and insomnia, among other things.” And each of these afflictions directly impacts our ability to heal.
Ohio State University researcher Ronald Glaser, who serves as director of OSU’s Institute for Behavioral Medicine Research, was skeptical about the connection between stress, disease and healing back in 1995 when he and his wife, Janice Kiecolt-Glaser, began researching the subject. “When Jan and I started working with each other, quite frankly I didn’t believe this,” said Glaser. “I said, ‘OK, we’ll do a study and if it doesn’t work that’ll be the end of it.’ So here we are 20 years later still doing this research, because obviously it worked.”
What the Glasers found was that Alzheimer’s caregivers took 24 percent longer to heal from small, clinically induced flesh wounds than non-caregivers of the same age and economic bracket. A follow-up study found that students facing midterm exams took 40 percent longer to heal from superficial wounds than students who were on their way to summer vacations.
Most work in this arena has been focused on the effects of long-term stress, but another study done by the OSU team and reported in the Archives of General Psychiatry found that stress episodes as short as thirty minutes impaired the body’s healing response. The short-term research again looked at the healing rate of wounds to the skin (blisters caused by suction cups) of married couples who experienced friction in their relationship. Couples who experienced a high level of hostility on average took two days longer for the blisters to heal compared with those who experienced a low level of hostility. In addition, they discovered that even the stress of a thirty-minute disagreement between the couples could set their healing back by a day.
“The fact that even this can bump the healing back an entire day for minor wounds says that wound-healing is a really sensitive process,” said Kiecolt-Glaser.
By taking responsibility for “our” leg of the stool—self-care—we open the door to natural untapped healing resources that can improve our resiliency and augment treatment programs such as drug therapies and the medical procedures that make up the other two legs of treatment.
Changing Course
Glaser maintains that these revelations are changing the course of medicine. “Physicians will start asking patients what’s going on in their lives when they come in with infectious diseases or cancer or metabolic diseases or diabetes or obesity. Because now we know that what’s going on in their lives is affecting those diseases.”
We have thus far focused on how our ability to heal is impeded by stress, as well negative thoughts, and emotions, but there is equal evidence that stress-reduction techniques and conscious breathing in particular accelerate the healing process. For starters, there are thousands of years of supporting anecdotal evidence, and common sense tells us that efficiently providing energy to every cell and system in our body, especially the ones involved in protection and healing, should boost our body’s ability to heal. In addition, several recent studies have made a compelling case for the healing properties of intentional breathing.
In chapter 4 we detailed the study conducted at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center that showed patients with severe psoriasis healed four times faster when they practiced meditation and deep breathing while they were being treated. Other studies have shown that the ability of individual cells to heal is directly tied to the amount of oxygen available, which is something that we can control!
Improving our powers of self-care, the third leg of the stool, can have major implications for our quality of life. Doctors are critical partners in our well-being, but we have to do our part and take control and responsibility for those things that make up the third leg of the stool—stress management, diet, exercise, and sleep. Each is vitally important, but it is the breath, flowing in and out of our body every few seconds, that directly connects to all four dimensions of our health and provides a critical measure of control over each.
The Immune Response
There is one thing that stands between us and a world full of germs, bacteria, viruses, and even attacks by our own body, and that is our immune system. It is an amazingly adaptive fighting force that is far stranger and more unbelievable than any science fiction story, with its wide array of weapons that can be used to counter incursions by all manner of microscopic threats.
The immune system divides the world up into two camps: Us and Them. When the immune system is functioning properly, invading pathogens (Them) are identified and destroyed by two main weapons: natural immunity and acquired immunity.
Natural immunity is the body’s first line of defense and consists of the skin, mucous membranes, tears, sweat, saliva, and white blood cells, which can manifest in a number of different ways to create specialized killer cells with quite a collection of tricks. Fever and inflammation are also used to protect against attack.
Acquired immunity uses specific antibodies that are created in response to specific antigen invaders—that is, illness. It may take as long as several days for the body to create the necessary antibody, but once it recognizes that specific antigen, it can very quickly respond in the future.
The immune system can unfortunately become confused, and actually attack the body, mistaking Us for Them. This is the source of autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis and lupus. In addition, inflammation can become a chronic condition in stressful environments and is a major cause of heart disease and other cardiac problems.
The robustness of our immune system is directly dependent on a number of variables. Nutrition, age, exercise, stress level, and once again, available oxygen are key factors. Imbalance in any of these areas (excepting age, of course) can render the immune system incapable of defending our body and creating a condition where bacteria, viruses, and other pathogens can establish themselves. Ongoing emotional conditions such as grief, fear, depression, stress, and anxiety also suppress the immune system, leaving it less effective.
Fortunately there are a number of ways that we can ensure that our immune system is operating at its best. In addition to eating well, exercising, and taking time to regenerate, mind-body pursuits such as breathwork, meditation, qi gong, and yoga have been shown to boost the immune system, reduce stress-related inflammation, and accelerate the healing process. These activities are especially important because they provide plenty of oxygen used by the body to create chemicals like chlorine and hydrogen-peroxide that are used as ammunition against pathogens.
A Body Built on Oxygen
The body’s ability to repair and regenerate itself is nothing short of miraculous, and its complex cycle of cleansing, reconstruction, and remodeling leaves even the most gifted engineers and scientists in awe. Even a limited understanding of how the body’s self-healing process and oxygen’s fundamental role suggests we have much more control over the process than we might have previously believed.
Our skin is the body’s first line of defense against environmental hazards such bacteria and other invaders, but should the skin become breached, by a cut for example, the body marshals its homeland defense forces to quickly cleanse, disinfect, repair, and restore the skin to a healthy condition. The healing process requires considerable extra energy, and that additional energy is provided to a large degree by oxygen (as is more than 90 percent of all metabolic function). At each step of the way, and for each of the elaborate, mind-bending mechanisms responsible for healing, oxygen plays the most important role and, in many cases, is the limiting factor in the healing process!
The moment the skin barrier is disrupted, the immune system sends specialized cells into the wound that locate, identify, kill, and essentially ingest the invading microorganisms. These specialized cells—called polymorphonuclear cells or PMNs (that will certainly come in handy at your next cocktail party or Scrabble game)—use oxygen to create other chemical compounds that are used as weapons against the intruders. Many studies have shown that the ability of the PMNs to destroy microorganisms is directly dependent on the amount of oxygen available to them.
Once the wound has been disinfected, the repair process begins. The first step in the reconstruction process is to create the framework or scaffolding, which is made of another specialized cell called collagen. Collagen is considered to be the most important building block in our bodies (and for that matter in the entire animal world). Seventy-five percent of our skin and more than 30 percent of the protein in our body is collagen. Once again, oxygen must be present in sufficient quantities in order for collagen production to take place.
When the collagen framework is in place, the body begins to reconstruct supporting tissues and the blood supply which is, of course, the source of oxygen for the overall healing process—and in particular the PMN cells, the continuing creation of collagen, and blood supply reconstruction. The oxygen needed by each stage of the healing process must be supplied by our respiratory and circulatory system. Oxygen is not absorbed efficiently enough through the tissues of our skin to provide a sufficient supply of oxygen, so ultimately it is our breath that is the limiting factor in the healing process.
This entire, delicate healing process can be impaired by cardiovascular diseases, arteriosclerosis, stress, and other factors that impede circulation, blood flow, and ultimately the supply of fresh oxygen to the healing processes. In cases where the oxygen demands of the healing process cannot be met by the body’s oxygen supply, for whatever reason, the healing process stalls and chronic wounds may develop. But can we, by manipulating our breath, actually affect the healing process? Does breathing better actually provide more oxygen for PMN cells, collagen production, and the reconstruction of the blood supply and new tissue? The answer is yes.
Research conducted at the University of Pavia in Italy, with patients experiencing chronic heart failure (CHF), showed that controlled breathing increased the level of oxygen in the bloodstream. The amount of oxygen in the bloodstream was measured in both CHF patients and a healthy control group breathing spontaneously and at fifteen, six and three breaths per minute. The investigators found that the CHF patients increased the amount of oxygen in their bloodstream at every controlled breathing rate. Just by consciously focusing on their breath, more oxygen was delivered to the body. In addition, CHF patients that were given one month of training to help bring their breathing rate down to six breaths per minute increased their oxygen intake by more than 15 percent and their blood oxygen saturation levels by 7 percent.
Our ability to directly affect the level of oxygen in our blood is further substantiated in a paper published by swim coach John Hendy of Grants Pass, Oregon. Hendy used a portable device called a pulse oximeter which can instantly measure the level of oxygen in the blood when briefly attached to an individual’s finger. Hendy noticed that blood oxygen saturation varied between 97 and 92 percent depending on the breathing pattern employed by his swimmers while training. He was able to design optimum breathing strategies for each individual. Keep in mind that normal oxygen saturation varied between 90 and 100 percent. A blood saturation level below 90 percent is considered a serious clinical event and likely requires supplemental oxygen.
Whether we realize it or not, the body is constantly renewing, regenerating, and healing. Our doctors, healers, and health practitioners constantly strive to aid and augment the body’s remarkable recuperative abilities, but you are the only one who can choose to administer this most amazing prescription.
In the next chapter, we’ll present some excellent breathing exercises that can help with some of the most common health issues.
(Also refer back to “Intentional Healing” and “Accelerated Healing” in chapter 4.)