NEWS
HAPPINESS AND HEALING STUDIES
Dr. TIM JOHNSON, CHARLES GIBSON
10/01/1999
ABC News: Good Morning America
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HOW HAPPINESS AND OPTIMISM FIGURES INTO MEDICINE
CHARLES GIBSON, Host: The question is, how does happiness and optimism,
which is a key component of that, figure into medicine? Being optimistic may help
your body heal, even from a major procedure like heart surgery.
We turn now to our medical editor, Dr. Tim Johnson, for more about this
fascinating connection.
But this isn't new, really, is it, Tim?
Dr. TIM JOHNSON, ABC News Medical Editor: You know, the wisdom that
King Solomon says, "A merry heart doeth good like a medicine," I think we've
always believed that. But it's only in recent years that we've had the scientific tools
to start to study at a more precise level the connection between our mood,
optimism, and our health.
CHARLES GIBSON: How has it been studied, and what have the studies
shown?
Dr. TIM JOHNSON: Well, the original studies looked at so-called
epidemiological connections. But more recently, we have the science of so-called
psychoneuroimmunology, the connection between our mind and emotions , our
nervous system, and our independent immune systems. And I could give you a lot
of examples.
Some of the original studies were done with AIDS patients to show that those
who were more optimistic had higher T-cell counts, longer life outcomes.
A more recent study that everybody talks about is kind of intriguing. Researchers
at the University of Kentucky took a group of law students, tested them for the
T-cell count and the so-called killer cell count in their immune systems, before
they started the first semester of law school, which is obviously very stressful.
They then did tests on them to see which ones were more or less optimistic. And
then they retested them and found that the more optimistic ones in the middle of all
the stress actually had elevations in their T-cell counts, where the more pessimistic
ones had a decrease in their count.
So there are these kinds of studies that now can more precisely correlate at the
cellular level how mood really does affect our immune system .
CHARLES GIBSON: And you and I have talked a lot about the fact that faith is
also very much a part of this.
Dr. TIM JOHNSON: An enormous amount of studies done on the role of religion
and church attendance and similar kinds of indices to show that they also correlate
with health.
CHARLES GIBSON: Michael Scheir is with us also. He's a psychologist at
Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh. And I want to ask you, you, I gather, have
followed heart bypass patients and checked them on the sort of optimism scale as
well, right?
MICHAEL SCHEIR, PhD, Carnegie Mellon University: Yes, we've done a
couple of studies now with bypass patients, numbering probably close to 400
people in both groups, and we found that optimism has a very pervasive effect on
recovery and reactions to surgery.
What we do in these studies is measure optimism prior to surgery, get a variety of
medical and health status data at the same time, and then track recovery at
various points in time.
CHARLES GIBSON: Can you teach optimism? Can you -- are there ways to
make patients more optimistic about themselves and their situations, so that they
may recover or be in better health?
Dr. MICHAEL SCHEIR: Well, I guess we're optimistic about being able to do
that. Right now what we're trying to do is establish relationships between
optimism and physical health. We want to make sure that, in fact, optimism does
provide benefits in physical health, and we are now understanding that it does.
And the next step would be to do interventions, I think. People -- looking to try
to make people more optimistic and try to counteract (inaudible).
CHARLES GIBSON: Some of the people behind you are medical students. One
of them is Arlen Apollo. She's a medical student at Mount Sinai, has what I think
is a very good question. Go ahead, Arlen.
ARLEN APOLLO, Medical Student: Oh, my fellow students and I are -- will
soon be working with people with life-threatening illnesses, and I'm wondering
how health care providers can convey a positive attitude without giving patients
false hope.
Dr. MICHAEL SCHEIR: I think it's important to be realistic with patients and not
to create false hopes. I guess one thing that comes to mind is that no matter how
bad things get, there's usually always something that can be done, I think, to
benefit the person's situation. They don't have to give up trying to counteract the
effects of an illness or any kind of problem in life.
So I think the point is to try to be realistic with people, but also then give them
strategies that they can use in order to try to confront the situation that they're
facing.
Dr. TIM JOHNSON: I'd just add at a practical level, rule number one, you never
lie to patients. But rule number two, you can always honesty say to patients, We
never know what's going to happen in an individual case. And therefore, you can
always have hope.
CHARLES GIBSON: Can you say that with conviction?
Dr. TIM JOHNSON: I can, because I've seen it happen. I've seen it happen time
and time again, where what you think is going to happen doesn't happen. And so
there is always room for that kind of hope. But you never lie.
CHARLES GIBSON: And a direct correlation between the optimism and the
way patients recover and feel.
Dr. MICHAEL SCHEIR: Yes, in our bypass studies, we looked at things like
reactions to the surgery itself. It turns out that about 3 to 5 percent of patients
when they go bypass surgery suffer a heart attack in the course of the procedure.
We looked at littles (?) optimism, how that impacted on complications, and we
found that our optimists in the patient groups were less likely to suffer a heart
attack in the course of the surgery, as reflected in changes in the EKG and
certainly in some changes.
CHARLES GIBSON: All right, Michael Scheir, thanks very much. Tim Johnson,
as always, thank you. Appreciate it.
(Commercial Break)
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