| VICTORIA
TIMES COLONIST
April
13, 2003
by
May Brown
"I never get angry," a Woody Allen character
says in one of his movies. "I grow a tumour instead."
Vancouver author and physician Dr. Gabor Maté uses
this quote in his book When the Body Says No: The
Cost of Hidden Stress as an encapsulation of his
message that stress plays a role in illness.
"There is no mind-body separation," says Maté.
"Anything that happens in any aspect of our being,
whether it's body or mind, will affect all the other parts.
"Therefore it's not surprising that we have now found
scientifically that all these connections exist. What
is more amazing is that we ever thought that they didn't.
Now that we know, there is less excuse for western medicine's
practice of this militant separation of the two."
Maté buzzes with energy during an interview about
his new book. His words spill out as he leaps in with
answers before questions are completed. Speaking over
a breakfast of vegetarian omelette and chamomile tea at
a hotel restaurant, he eagerly launches into a spirited
explanation of how and why emotions play into disease.
That evening, he will say it all again as more than 140
people pack the shopping centre hallway next to Bolen
Books, most of them seated in folding chairs but many
more standing or resigned to the floor. The overflow crowd
is indicative of the success of When the Body Says
No, which, after only three weeks, is already on
Maclean's non-fiction bestseller list.
What is the message that has drawn so many to pay $36.95
for a 300-page book about psychoneuroimmunology, and to
pack a small room for a talk by its author? It's more
than curiosity. For many, it's a search for answers. Patients,
caregivers and family want to know why lupus, multiple
sclerosis, scleroderma, ALS or other diseases have entered
their lives. And maybe by the end of the book, they hope,
there might be something about healing.
Facing the crowd, Maté is a skilled presenter.
He moves from podium to stage, from formal lecturer to
personal messenger, reeling off anecdotes, reading references,
pulling out newspaper obituaries he collects so he can
read out loud the traits so admired in the selfless, but
apparently so toxic to their bodies.
"Here's one," he says. "There was one guy
who died of cancer. Such a nice guy, after he got married,
he knew how much his mother loved to feed him, so he continued
to go to his mother's place for dinner but, not wanting
to disappoint his wife, he had a second dinner with her.
And this is seen as a great thing. Unbelievable."
An inability to say no and a tendency to repress emotion
(particularly anger) can affect the way a body fights
disease, says Maté.
In the case of cancer, T-cells should attack it with noxious
chemicals, antibodies should be formed against it, and
specialized blood cells should chew it up. But under conditions
of chronic stress, he writes, the immune system may become
either too confused to recognize the mutated cell clones
that form the cancer or too debilitated to mount an effective
attack against them.
Mate's book cites patients' stories and pages of clinical
references to back his claims. One of those patients is
Mary, who had been abused as a child, abandoned and shuttled
from one foster home to another and who told Mate, "...as
a seven-year-old, I had to protect my sister. And no one
protected me."
Mary continued a life of caring for others, putting their
feelings before her own. As an adult, she developed the
autoimmune disorder scleroderma, which eventually took
her life.
"Was the scleroderma her body's way of finally rejecting
this all-encompassing dutifulness?" Maté asks.
"When we have been prevented from learning how to
say no, our bodies may end up saying it for us."
Patients profiled in this book have conditions ranging
from asthma and irritable bowel syndrome to cancer and
ALS. Some tell stories of servitude, neglect and abuse,
but others with seemingly benign backgrounds seem unaware
that their emotions are suppressed or that their perfectionism,
stoicism or reluctance to ask for help could be doing
them harm.
Could Maté's theories lead to feelings of guilt
among patients and their families? Maté denies
he blames anyone.
"All I point out is that people have unconscious
patterns that they adopted early in life, before they
had any choice in the matter. In what sense would I possibly
blame them for that?" he says. I don't even blame
their parents, because I think it's multi-generational.
So if people feel guilt, it's not because of anything
I say."
There are many reasons, he adds, why people would "cling
to theories of genetics and random bad luck."
"We
are all afraid of responsibility. But there's a difference
between guilt and responsibility. Guilt is that you did
something bad that you should not have done. Well, that
does not make any sense from a scientific point of view."
While acknowledging the role of genetics in disease, Maté
downplays the significance of the "genome project,"
which seeks a genetic blueprint for the human body. The
results, he says, are "bound to be disappointing."
"To think that by isolating the genes, we can get
the clue to disease is to totally ignore what actually
activates genes."
He compares current knowledge on human genetic makeup
to using a copy of The Concise Oxford English Dictionary
as "the model" from which the plays of Shakespeare
or the novels of Charles Dickens were created.
"Words have to be used by somebody. They don't themselves
amount to the plays of Shakespeare. Someone has to assemble
them and give them that particular shape and particular
tone," he says.
"Genes are triggered straight into action or turned
off by the environment.... So people with exactly the
same genetic background can have very different types
of health outcomes because of environmental input."
Surprisingly, he is not a big fan of "positive thinking"
in its current popular sense. His book contains a chapter
on the power of negative thinking, which he says "allows
us to gaze unflinchingly on our own behalf at what does
not work."
He quotes molecular researcher Candace Pert, who writes,
"Health is not just a matter of thinking happy thoughts.
Sometimes the biggest impetus to healing can come from
jump-starting the immune system with a burst of long-suppressed
anger."
Despite its numerous scientific and anecdotal references,
When the Body Says No already has met with contrarians,
one of whom wrote in a Globe and Mail review that "Maté
implies a lot but clarifies little. "
"My detractors mostly don't understand what I'm talking
about," Maté contends.
"People say, for example, that I say that personality
causes cancer. I clearly say that personality does not
cause cancer. What I do say is that certain personality
types are more likely to create stress in a person's life
and it is the physiological stress that is a major risk
factor for cancer. But it's not the personality per se
that causes cancer."
Maté offers this advice on how to stay healthy
or how to heal: "Look at everything, not just physical,
not just psychological, not just spiritual, but all three,"
he says. "All three have to be in balance."
His book closes with a chapter on The Seven As of Healing:
Acceptance, Awareness, Anger, Autonomy, Attachment, Assertion
and Affirmation.
Maté's background is in palliative care and general
practice, and for the past four years he has been staff
physician at a facility for street people in Vancouver's
Downtown Eastside.
He was a long-time columnist for The Vancouver Sun and
The Globe and Mail, and is the author of Scattered
Minds, a bestseller on attention deficit disorder.
He is currently working on a book about addiction.
BACK |
