When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress (35 page)

The main effect of recent trends on the family under the prevailing socio-economic system, accelerated by the current drive to “globalization,” has been to undermine the family structure and to tear asunder the connections that used to provide human beings with a sense of meaning and belonging. Children spend less time around nurturing adults than ever before during the course of human evolution. The nexus previously based in extended family, village, community and neighbourhood has been replaced by institutions such as daycare and school, where children are more oriented to their peers than to reliable parents or parent substitutes. Even the nuclear family, supposedly the basic unit of the social structure, is under intolerable pressure. In many families now, both parents are having to work to assure the basic necessities one salary could secure a few decades ago. “[The] separation of infants from their mothers and all other types of relocation which leave few possibilities
for interpersonal contact are very common forms of sensory deprivation; they may become major factors in disease,” wrote the prescient Hans Selye.

In
Tuesdays with Morrie
, Mitch Albom reports that Morrie Schwartz, his former professor terminally ill with ALS, “was intent on proving that the word ‘dying’ was not synonymous with ‘useless.’” The immediate question is why one would have a need to prove this. No human being is “useless,” whether the helpless infant or the helpless ill or dying adult. The point is not to prove that dying people can be useful but to reject the spurious concept that people need to be useful in order to be valued. Morrie learned at a young age that his “value” depended on his ability to serve the needs of others. That same message, taken to heart by many people early in life, is heavily reinforced by the prevailing ethic in our society. All too frequently, people are given the sense that they are valued only for their utilitarian contribution and are expendable if they lose their economic worth.

The separation of mind and body that informs medical practice is also the dominant ideology in our culture. We do not often think of socio-economic structures and practices as determinants of illness or well-being. They are not usually “part of the equation.” Yet the scientific data is beyond dispute: socio-economic relationships have a profound influence on health. For example, although the media and the medical profession—inspired by pharmaceutical research—tirelessly promote the idea that next to hypertension and smoking, high cholesterol poses the greatest risk for heart disease, the evidence is that job strain is more important than all the other risk factors combined. Further, stress in general and job strain in particular are significant contributors both to high blood pressure and to elevated cholesterol levels.

Economic relationships influence health because, most obviously, people with higher incomes are better able to afford healthier diets, living and working conditions and stress-reducing pursuits. Dennis Raphael, associate professor at the School of Health Policy and Management at York University in Toronto has recently published a study of the societal influences on heart disease in Canada and elsewhere. His conclusion: “One of the most important life conditions that determine whether individuals stay healthy or become ill is their income. In addition, the overall health of North American society may be
more determined by the distribution of income among its members rather than the overall wealth of the society…. Many studies find that socioeconomic circumstances, rather than medical and lifestyle risk factors, are the main causes of cardiovascular disease, and that conditions during early life are especially important.”
¹²

The element of control is the less obvious but equally important aspect of social and job status as a health factor. Since stress escalates as the sense of control diminishes, people who exercise greater control over their work and lives enjoy better health. This principle was demonstrated in the British Whitehall study showing that second-tier civil servants were at greater risk for heart disease than their superiors, despite nearly comparable incomes.
¹³

Recognizing the multigenerational template for behaviour and for illness, and recognizing, too, the social influences that shape families and human lives, we dispense with the unhelpful and unscientific attitude of blame. Discarding blame leaves us free to move toward the necessary adoption of responsibility, a matter to be taken up when we come in the final chapters to consider healing.

  T
HE SCIENTIFIC INSIGHTS OF
Bruce Lipton, a molecular biologist formerly at Stanford University in California, have profound implications for the understanding of illness, health and healing. In his public talks, as in personal interviews, he likes to throw his audience a scientific curve ball in the form of a question: “What is the brain of the individual cell?” The typical answer he receives, as he did from this interviewer, is: “The nucleus, of course.”

Of course, the nucleus is
not
the
brain
of the cell. The brain is our organ of decision making, and it is the brain that acts as our interface with the environment. In the life of the individual cell, not the nucleus but the
cell membrane
fulfills the functions analogous to the activities of the brain.

In human embryological development, both the nervous system and the skin stem from the same tissue, the
ectoderm
. Individual cells use their membrane as both skin and nervous system. Like the skin, the membrane surrounds and protects the internal milieu of the cell. At the same time, it has on its surface the millions of molecular receptors that act as the cell’s sensory organs: they “see” and “hear” and “feel” and—like the brain—interpret the messages arriving from the cell’s external milieu. It also facilitates the exchange of substances and messages with the environment. The cell’s “decision making” also takes place in the membrane and not in the nucleus, where the cell’s genetic material is located.

As soon as we understand this fundamental biological reality, we are able to see past the popular assumption that genes are all-decisive in
human behaviour and health. People may be forgiven for that misbelief. Expressions of near-religious awe from some scientists and politicians and prophecies of dramatic medical advances greeted announcements in 2000 that researchers were close to deciphering the human genome, the genetic blueprint for the human body. “Today we are learning the language in which God created life,” then president Bill Clinton said at the White House ceremony marking the truce between two groups of scientists racing to complete the genome. “I truly feel this is going to revolutionize medicine because we are going to understand not only what causes disease but what prevents disease,” enthused Dr. Stephen Warren, a U.S. medical geneticist and editor of
The American Journal of Human Genetics
.

The actual results of the genome project are bound to be disappointing. Although the scientific information uncovered is important for its own sake, very little can be expected from the genome program that will lead to broad health benefits in the near future, if ever.

First, there are many technical problems still to be solved. Our current state of knowledge about the genetic makeup of human beings may be likened to using a copy of
The Concise Oxford English Dictionary
as “the model” from which the plays of William Shakespeare or the novels of Charles Dickens were created. “All” that remains to duplicate their work now is to find the prepositions, grammatical rules and phonetic indications, then to figure out how the two authors arrived at their storylines, dialogues and sublime literary devices. “The genome is the biological programming,” one of the more thoughtful science reporters wrote, “but evolution has neglected to provide even the punctuation to show where genes stop and start, let alone any helpful notes as to what each gene is meant to do.”

Second, contrary to the genetic fundamentalism that currently informs medical thinking and public awareness, genes alone cannot possibly account for the complex psychological characteristics, the behaviours, health or illness of human beings. Genes are merely codes. They act as a set of rules and as a biological template for the synthesis of the proteins that give each particular cell its characteristic structure and functions. They are, as it were, alive and dynamic architectural and mechanical plans. Whether the plan becomes realized depends on far more than the gene itself. Genes exist and function in the context of
living organisms. The activities of cells are defined not simply by the genes in their nuclei but by the requirements of the entire organism—and by the interaction of that organism with the environment in which it must survive.
Genes are turned on or off by the environment
. For this reason, the greatest influences on human development, health and behaviour are those of the nurturing environment.

Hardly anyone who raises plants or animals would ever dispute the primary role of early care in shaping how genetic endowment and potential will unfold. For reasons that have little to do with science, many people have difficulty grasping the same concept when it comes to the development of human beings. This paralysis of thought is all the more ironic, since of all animal species it is the human whose long-term functioning is most profoundly regulated by the early environment.

Given the paucity of evidence for any decisive role of genetic factors in most questions of illness and health, why all the hoopla about the genome project? Why the pervasive genetic fundamentalism?

We are social beings, and science, like all disciplines, has its ideological and political dimensions. As Hans Selye pointed out, the unacknowledged assumptions of the scientist will often limit and define what will be discovered. Settling for the view that illnesses, mental or physical, are primarily genetic allows us to avoid disturbing questions about the nature of the society in which we live. If “science” enables us to ignore poverty or man-made toxins or a frenetic and stressful social culture as contributors to disease, we can look only to simple answers: pharmacological and biological. Such an approach helps to justify and preserve prevailing social values and structures. It may also be profitable. The value of shares in Celera, the private company participating in the genome project, went up 1,400 per cent between 1999 and 2000.

The genome hype is not only poor science, it is also suspect as theology. In the Book of Genesis creation story, God fashions the universe first, then nature, and only afterwards does He shape humankind from the substance of the earth. He knew, even if Bill Clinton did not, that from their very earliest beginnings humans could never be understood apart from their environment.

The milieu of the human organism is the physical and psychoemotional environment that shapes our development and affects our interactions with the world throughout the lifetime. The milieu of the
individual cell is the cell’s immediate surroundings, from which it receives messenger substances that originate in nearby cells, in nerve endings controlled from afar and in distant organs that secrete chemicals into the circulatory system. The information substances attach to receptors on the cell surface. Then, in the cell membrane—depending on how receptive the cell is at that moment
—effector
substances are produced that go to the nucleus, instructing the genes to synthesize particular proteins to carry out specific functions. These receptor-effector protein complexes—called
perception proteins
—Bruce Lipton explains, act as the “switches” that integrate the function of the cell with its environment:

A key point in Dr. Lipton’s astute explanation of biological activity is that at any one time, cells—like the entire human organism—can be either in defensive mode or growth mode but not both. Our perceptions of the environment are stored in cellular memory. When early environmental influences are chronically stressful, the developing nervous system and the other organs of the PNI super-system repeatedly receive the electric, hormonal and chemical message that the world is unsafe or even hostile.
Those perceptions are programmed in our cells on the molecular level
. Early experiences condition the body’s stance toward the world and determine the person’s unconscious beliefs about herself in relationship to the world. Dr. Lipton calls that proces
s the biology of belief
.
Fortunately, human experience and the ever-unfolding potential of human beings ensure that the biology of belief, though deeply physiologically ingrained, is not irreversible.

We have seen that stress is the result of an interaction between a
stressor
and a
processing system
. That processing apparatus is the human nervous system, operating under the influence of the brain’s emotional centres. The biology of belief inculcated in that processing apparatus early in life crucially influences our stress responses throughout our lives. Do we recognize stressors? Do we magnify or minimize potential threats to our well-being? Do we perceive ourselves as alone? As helpless? As never needing help? As never deserving help? As being loved? As having to work to deserve love? As hopelessly unlovable? These are unconscious beliefs, embedded at the cellular level. They “control” our behaviours no matter what we may think on the conscious level. They keep us in shut-down defensive modes or allow us to open to growth and to health. We look now at some of these viscerally held perceptions more closely.