Herbert Benson with the Dalai Lama in 1991. Twelve years earlier, the Dalai Lama arranged for Benson to study the medditation powers of the Tibetan monks.
For centuries, Western physicians followed this approach, replacing negative thoughts and emotions-such as worry, doubt and fear-with a nourishing elixir of hope, faith and confidence. But the umbilical link between mind and body began to weaken with the advent of modern science.
In 1864, Louis Pasteur discovered that microscopic organisms-bacteria-caused a host of diseases. Then, in 1928, Alexander Fleming fortuitously discovered bread mold that killed bacteria. Within a short time, he had isolated penicillin.
"It was a miracle. Penicillin revolutionized medicine," says Herbert Benson, Harvard Medical School associate professor of medicine. "It didn't matter whether you were treated by a warm, sympathetic, charming practitioner. Belief had nothing to do with healing."
During the past 30 years, Benson has conducted research that has countered the prevailing scientific wisdom treating disease as a bodily affair alone. His studies of how mental processes affect physical well-being are providing scientific documentation of the healing powers of the mind.
In a new book to be published in April, "Timeless Healing: The Power and Biology of Belief," Benson argues that the "faith factor" is so powerful-and so pervasive in the healing practices of culture after culture-that it may be a part of our biological makeup.
"We seem to be hard-wired to believe in something 'beyond' as a species because it has survival value," says Benson, a cardiologist who was director of the division of behavioral medicine at Beth Israel Hospital for nine years, and now heads the Mind/Body Medical Institute at Deaconess Hospital.
Benson's three-decade quest to understand mind-body links may be taking him to the boundaries of theology and medicine, but it began squarely within the scientific tradition. As a cardiology fellow in the mid-1960s, Benson was steeped in teachings that relegated the mind and body to separate realms.
"The term mind-body medicine was beyond the pale," he says. Indeed, so strict was the perceived division between body and mind that stress, which was seen as a mental phenomenon, was disregarded as a cause of physical illness.
In the late 1960s, as a consequence of a curious clinical phenomenon, Benson began to question the separation. Patients would come to their physicians with high blood pressure and be put on anti-hypertensive drugs. But after awhile, they would start complaining of side effects associated with low blood pressure-suggesting their medication was too strong. It appeared that the patients' blood pressures had been raised to abnormally high levels during their exams, perhaps due to the stress of the visit.
"We now call it white-coat hypertension, but it wasn't known at the time," Benson says.
Fascinated by this effect, Benson began a series of animal experiments in the lab of A. Clifford Barger, Robert Henry Pfeiffer professor of physiology, emeritus. He trained squirrel monkeys to control their own blood pressure through feedback techniques. The monkeys that were "rewarded" for increases in blood pressure went on to develop severe hypertension with kidney changes-in other words, the monkeys suffered from cardiovascular disease brought on by their own behaviors.
But the meditators persisted in their desire to be studied. Benson began taking measurements on the meditators in the evening in his lab. He found that meditation led to decreases in heart rate, oxygen consumption, rate of breathing and blood flow.
In essence, meditation appeared to elicit the opposite of the well-known fight-or-flight response. In this response-which is triggered by a real or perceived danger-the sympathetic nervous system releases hormones that increase heart rate, oxygen consumption, and flow of blood to muscles.
As Benson continued his research, he found that this "relaxation response" was the consequence of two crucial steps practiced in meditation: repeating a sound, word, phrase or muscular activity and simply returning to the repetition when other thoughts intruded.
Sensing that the two steps were unleashing a basic physiological response, one that protected the body from too much stress, Benson began delving into the history of cultural and religious practices. He found that all cultures and religions-from Judaism and Christianity to Shintoism, Buddhism and Islam-incorporated the two steps into their practices.
Herbert Benson with the Dalai Lama in 1991. Twelve years earlier, the Dalai Lama arranged for Benson to study the medditation powers of the Tibetan monks.
"They built in ways to evoke the relaxation response.
Prayers, morning vespers, evening vespers, just staring at
the horizon," says Benson.
He then began instructing non-meditators in the two steps and found the same dramatic physiological response. "This then was a mind-body effect that met the properties of science. There were predictable, reproducible, measurable changes that occurred in the body when you thought a certain way-a mind-body effect," says Benson.
Still, Benson knew that the results were pushing the envelope of accepted medical beliefs. "Back in '68-'69 when I saw the data with transcendental meditation, I really became concerned. Because I knew what kind of struggle would be involved to continue working on this. This was so far beyond what was acceptable science at the time. But I couldn't walk away."
In fact, when Benson was offered a grant by a private foundation and was told by the HMS administration that he couldn't take it because it was unacceptable for an HMS scientist to be doing research on meditation, he almost left. The matter came to the attention of the late Robert H. Ebert, who was HMS dean at the time. "He said, 'If Harvard can't take an occasional chance on something new, who can? Let Benson take the money,'" says Benson.
With the support of the foundation and HMS, Benson embarked on a series of experiments to determine if the relaxation response could be used to treat hypertension and other conditions (an enterprise that continues to this day). Benson and his colleagues have shown that a mind-body approach-one that couples the relaxation response with nutrition, exercise and cognitive therapies-is a useful tool for helping to treat such conditions as chronic pain, infertility, premenstrual syndrome, and insomnia. They also have found that it can alleviate symptoms associated with cancer and AIDS.
But as this supporting data came in, so did doubts from other scientists. To answer the critics, Benson and his colleagues began looking for specific long-term physiological actions triggered by the relaxation response.
They found that subjects who regularly elicited the relaxation response had decreased sensitivity to plasma norepinephrine, one of the main hormones released by the sympathetic nervous system to trigger the fight-or-flight response. In addition, they found that the relaxation response brought about changes in the sympathetic nervous system regardless of whether a subject believed in its efficacy.
"It'll work whether you believe it or not. Just carry out the steps. Like penicillin," Benson says.
Benson had earlier witnessed the dramatic effects of coupling the relaxation response with spiritual beliefs while studying Tibetan monks who practice an advanced form of meditation called gTum-mo Yoga. During this meditation, monks are able to raise their skin temperatures 17 degrees while maintaining normal core body temperature.
"What they did was to go into the relaxation response and then visualize heat going up and down the center of the body. So they took the basic quiet state and added visualization to create heat," Benson says.
"The relaxation response is not a technique. It's a physiological state brought about by many techniques." -- Herbert Benson
"You are wired in your brain to know what it is to experience feeling well. You can reconstitute that image," says Benson, who has labeled this process "remembered wellness."
After years of struggling against prevailing scientific wisdom, Benson's research is finally being embraced by many in the medical establishment. In the fall, a National Institutes of Health Technology Assessment conference encouraged the acceptance of behavioral and relaxation therapies for treating chronic pain and insomnia.
In his most recent research, Benson has continued to explore the connection between the relaxation response, spiritual beliefs and health. He and his colleagues at the Deaconess Mind/Body Medical Institute have found that people who report feeling "spiritual" also report fewer medical problems.
Benson speculates that humans may be genetically predisposed to believe in something beyond because it provides a survival benefit.
"We are the most intelligent species that has evolved in terms of what our brain can do. And all the power that comes from that has brought us a knowledge that no other species has-that is, of our own death. That knowledge can be so fundamentally disturbing and depressing that it is counter to survival. A way around that is to believe," Benson says.
If history is any guide, a belief in something beyond has been an essential component of human experience, long before the ancient Greeks. He believes that this yearning for "God" is a reflection of a basic biological need. "Seemingly embedded within each of us is a hard-wiring to believe in something beyond. Therefore, one can argue we're wired for God."
Adds Benson: "It doesn't matter from a health point of view whether God exists or not. It's still win-win, because there are clear health benefits to believing. And if God does exist, all the better."
--Misia Landau