If you forget you have cancer, will you live longer?
“Did you hear? Vitamins are bad for you now.” This pronouncement, delivered by one of my officemates at lunch today, was greeted by nods of understanding. “Everything’s bad for you,” said one. “Life. A sexually transmitted terminal disease,” said another.
“The problem isn’t that things are bad for you,” Maria pointed out. “The problem is how much you worry. The people taking heaps of vitamins are the ones who are really worried about their health, so no wonder it’s coming up that they’re unhealthy.”
“Yeah,” added Brian. “Like that study, where Alzheimer’s patients who had cancer lived way longer than they were supposed to because they kept forgetting they had cancer.”
What a great story! Alzheimer’s as the cure to terminal cancer. I’ve Googled it, of course, with a variety of terms (whoever’s monitoring my online activities is surely wondering about my ‘cancer alzheimer’s life expectancy forget live longer’ Long Tail queries); I did a reasonably detailed search on the Journal of the American Medical Association; nothing.
Have you heard about this study? Can you help me find it?
Aside from being a generally interesting story, this topic is along the lines of some thoughts I’ve been having lately about the mind-body connection, or lack thereof. More specifically, I’ve been wondering why some beliefs are so easy to swallow, while others that would seem to fit in the same category are tantamount to heresy.
Take for example the concept that your thoughts affect your physical body:
ACCEPTABLE: Fear causes your body to produce adrenalin.
NOT ACCEPTABLE: Emotion affects health.
ACCEPTABLE: Vibrations in the form of radio waves or microwaves can transport music and heat food.
NOT ACCEPTABLE: Vibrations in the form of our thoughts have an effect on the world around us.
These are gross generalizations, of course, and I’m not trying to argue science here; what I’m really interested in is what we find palatable. When we hear about some studies, we say, “Oh, how interesting!” while when we hear about others, we say, “Well, surely it can’t be true.” Why the difference?
On another note, I’m going to be cutting back on my blogging frequency, from a post every business day to 2-3 posts per week. Will you let me know what you think about that? Do you want more, less, different?
