Healing Through Exercise: Scientifically Proven Ways to Prevent and Overcome Illness and Lengthen Your Life

   

Our nature consists in motion; complete rest is death

BLAISE PASCAL

Many diseases can be cured with abstinence and rest, the famous physician Hippocrates decreed more than 2000 years ago. Lately, however, his pronouncement has been called into question. In study after study, physicians now prescribe physical exercise for a whole range of different illnesses—and they see much better results than doctors using conventional medicine.

These results are novel, and exercise hasn’t yet been granted the attention it deserves. The marvelous therapeutic effects achieved with exercise are described only in scientific papers scattered throughout the medical literature—and have thus been hidden from many doctors and most laypeople.

This lack of awareness results in poor and often downright bad treatment because patients and physicians alike far too often try to fix medical problems with drugs, high-technology procedures, and simply resting in bed.

This book aims to change that. It’s my goal to present the new science of
healing through exercise
for a wide audience. I’ve researched and written this account in the United States, but have added material from European researchers whenever it was insightful and important.

The new research presented in the following chapters applies to healthy readers as well as to people who have already fallen sick. It turns out that we profit from physical exercise to a much greater degree than doctors have previously believed. In particular, individuals who are middle-aged or elderly are able to stave off illnesses and ailments with dramatic results as soon as they get in motion.

My first research on this subject dates back to the summer of 2005 when I began to work as the science correspondent in the United States for Europe’s largest weekly news magazine,
Der Spiegel
. The more I learned about the benefits of exercise, the more I felt the urge to get off my chair, go out—get moving. It became clear to me that it was time to change my life. I started to commute to work using my own muscles. Whether I ride my bicycle or simply walk, I cover eight miles on the local bike path every day. It would be great if the facts and stories I present here moved you in a similar way.

The Healing Power of Exercise

A
T FIRST GLANCE, THE OFFICE OF THE CALIFORNIAN PSYCHIATRIST Wayne Sandler looks just as one might expect: pictures of Sigmund Freud on the wall, tomes on brain anatomy in a glass cabinet, and of course the requisite couch.

But there is one thing that seems rather out of place: two treadmills.

“Patients were always telling me how well they felt when they took proper exercise,” says Sandler from his practice on the ninth floor of a building in the affluent Century City district in Los Angeles. But they complained that they never found time or just felt too unwell to practice sports. That’s why Wayne Sandler decided to combine his standard therapy sessions with physical exercise.

Around half of Doctor Sandler’s depressive or phobic patients bring their sneakers along to appointments. The wiry psychiatrist, who lifts weights or pedals away on a cycling machine every day himself, changes into his black tracksuit. Sandler has set the treadmills up facing each other so that he can look his patients in the eye. All he has to do is switch them on, and the therapy in motion can begin.

Sandler still prescribes medications, such as the fashionable Prozac antidepressant, for some of his patients. But he is convinced that in many cases exercise can deal with chemical imbalances in the brain better than drugs. His clients-cum-jogging partners are very enthusiastic, he reports, and he now prescribes exercise just like a drug: “Movement will be your medicine now—and you need at least 30 minutes of it every day.”
¹

Carolyn Kaelin is another believer in the healing power of exercise. A mother of two children, she lives in Boston. In the summer of 2003 she fell ill from breast cancer, at the age of just 42. A course of chemotherapy and five operations including a dual mastectomy couldn’t stop Kaelin from going to the gym as often as possible and walking to work every day: “It’s the one thing I can do for myself that I know is useful.”

Kaelin knows what she’s talking about. She is one of America’s best-known breast cancer surgeons and runs the Comprehensive Breast Health Center at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, part of Harvard Medical School. Seeing her bright smile and sensing her vitality, it’s hard to believe the suffering she’s been through. But that’s what nourishes hope now in the audience of women attending her lectures, with headscarves or a new crop of very short hair.

A growing number of studies, Kaelin tells her fascinated audience, shows that physical exercise can prolong the lives of breast cancer patients and reduce the likelihood of relapses. If diagnosed with breast cancer, the professor recommends women should start a fitness program as soon as possible: “I know it may be the last thing you feel like doing, but I believe it can honestly save your life.”
²

EXERCISE AS MEDICINE

Until now, doctors have usually recommended physical activity and sport as a preventive measure to avoid the outbreak of disease and disorders. But recently, exercise has found its way into the heart of medicine. Psychiatrists and oncologists, orthopedics specialists, dementia researchers, and cardiologists are realizing that physical activity can help people even after they fall ill. In many cases, carefully administered exercise accompanies standard therapies. According to a growing body of evidence, exercise often works better than these therapies. It can make health-promoting cells grow in diseased tissue—and literally turn a disease around.

It is the mind itself, according to the poet Friedrich Schiller, that builds the body. For many years, the medical community thought the opposite was not possible. Neurology textbooks stated that muscle activity could not influence the brain in any way: A mysterious organ, called automatism center, kept the brain’s circulation and metabolism at a constant level, the books said, regardless of whether the body was climbing a mountain or dozing in a shady orchard.
³
Compounding this error was the belief that an adult brain could never rejuvenate itself; no new nerve cells were thought to grow after birth. The medical profession held that the brain could only stand still or decline.