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Alternative health professionals have said for decades that the mind and the immune system are linked and that some disease symptoms manifest from our emotions. For instance, there have been cases where a perfectly healthy person who is not elderly, dies suddenly after the death of their spouse and there is an absence of any medical indication as to why. Some might say that that person literally died of a broken heart.
Another example is that of author Louise Hay, who wrote the book “You Can Heal Your Life.” She developed vaginal cancer after being raped as a teenager, a condition she thought was brought on by her feelings of revulsion at what had happened to her. Her doctors informed her that surgery was the only option, but after weeks of positive thinking and meditations, she cured herself of all traces of vaginal cancer.
This mind/body connection is dismissed out of hand by many in the medical professional and most doctors struggle with a holistic approach to medicine, treating only the specific symptoms of each condition rather than seeing the whole person and all of her ailments as being connected.
Now, scientists at Yale University have discovered that stress induces signals that tell cells in the body to turn into tumors and we have a scientific explanation for the mind/body phenomenon.
Two genes named RAS and scribble are thought to be responsible for up to 30 percent of cancers when the scribble gene is mutated. Previously, researchers assumed that both genes would have to be present in the same cells for cancer to occur. Now they have found that this isn't the case. A cell with only RAS present can develop into cancer if helped by the scribble gene of a nearby defective cell.
"The bad news is that it is much easier for a tissue to accumulate mutations in different cells than in the same cell," said Tian, who is a researcher with the Yale Cancer Center and the Fudan-Yale Center for Biomedical Research at Fudan University in China.
They also found that a signaling process called JNK was responsible for triggering cancer. This signaling process was activated by stress, either environmentally, emotionally or physically.
"A lot of different conditions can trigger stress signaling: physical stress, emotional stress, infections, inflammation – all these things. Another bad news for cancer" Xu said.
The study demonstrated that JNK signals travel from one cell to another but that the propagation can be blocked, so his team are exploring possible drug therapies which would do this.
However, changing your mindset and your lifestyle and learning to relax and de-stress might be just as effective without the cost of expensive drug therapy.
Source: EurekAlert.org press release, Stress triggers tumor formation, Yale researchers find, 13th January 2010, Nature Journal.
Joanna is a freelance health writer for The Mother magazine and Suite 101 with a column on infertility, http://infertility.suite101.com/. She is author of the book, 'Breast Milk: A Natural Immunisation,' and co-author of an educational resource on disabled parenting, in addition to running a charity for people damaged by vaccines or medical mistakes.
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Thanks for the article!
Sadly, stress is the culprit of a lot of diseases. It is amazing how our state of mind can certainly disrupt our body system; That's how in-sync the human body functions.
My mother always jokes around with me and tells me that I'll never die because I don't let anything stress me out. It's not that I don't get stressed out-- it's just that it does more harm than good.
Thanks again for your informative article!
January 16, 2010 - 7:54amThis Comment