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In the final minutes of a lunchtime talk sponsored by the Harvard Medical School, someone in the audience had a question for the two guest speakers, both of whom were there to talk about the placebo effect and its opposite, the nocebo effect. The question to Associate Professor Ted Kaptchuck and Senior Faculty Arthur Barsky went something like this:
“What effect do you think the wide advertisement of drugs on television and media ... and sometimes I listen to the side-effects that they cite in the ads, which can include death ... what kind of problem is it for physicians when a patient comes in with prior knowledge of side effects?”
It’s the kind of question that takes on greater significance the more you think about it. On a micro level it’s about the side-effects of side-effects, which Dr. Barsky said was a problem for which he didn’t have an answer.
On the macro level it points to the fuller scope of the mental nature of health, and the extent to which our health actions and outcomes are influenced by our beliefs.
That’s not a new concept. But because of the volume of conventional viewpoints about health that we encounter every day, we might unwttiningly overlook the actual potential and responsibility we have for improving our well-being.
Where to begin? Zero in on having higher ideals. What’s really possible?
If our ideal for healthy living is business-as-usual, we can pretty much count on experiencing business-as-usual health. If we let ordinary health care beliefs and practices be determinant of what’s possible, we end-up settling for ordinary outcomes (or worse). We become complacent. We come to expect scarce or no improvement.
Placebos and noceboes have for years been indicating that the expectation of health outcomes plays a prominent role in those outcomes, as attendees at that Harvard lunchtime talk acknowledged. Harmful thinking translates to harmful health experiences.
Now reverse that. Higher ideals translate to a change for the better. By their very nature they go above and beyond ordinary (sometimes harmful) practices and expectations. They should set our sights as high as possible. As in any worthy endeavor, the model should be excellence—consistently good health—and that includes spiritual values and practices.
As ideals go, spiritual values set an unmatched standard. Unselfishness, compassion, meekness, charitableness, goodness and honesty may not occupy every moment of our time and thought, but by taking them seriously we’re reminded what to strive for, what to care about, what to embrace, what to expect—and what to resist: complacency.
Imagine the hard core Pony Express riders who delivered messages from the far reaches of point A to point B in around nine days. Back in the day, that model delivery system was horse-powered, not digital. We can see the need for a higher ideal to break through conventional and complacent thinking in order to improve the system a step at a time.
It’s easy to sit back and imagine that things will eventually get better over time. But don’t bank on passing time to lift standards and promote success. The correlation isn’t there. When we seek and embrace higher thought models and they take the lead within us, they’re a powerful agent for change, and that includes improving health care practices and our own health.
Just down the road from Harvard Medical School, and about a century after it opened, a powerful advocate for spiritual values, Mary Baker Eddy, commented to an audience about a cornerstone of her health care practice—that healthy living is underpinned by healthy thinking, thinking that is spiritually grounded. She told an audience who gathered to hear a sermon about the effect of spirituality on health:
“We are all sculptors, working out our own ideals, and leaving the impress of mind on the body as well as on history and marble, chiseling to higher excellence, or leaving to rot and ruin the mind’s ideals. Recognizing this as we ought, we shall turn often from marble to model, from matter to Mind, to beautify and exalt our lives.”
It might seem an astounding departure from the norm to shift our deeply entrenched cause-and-effect views on health to something we can’t see through a microscope or on a television screen. The old materialistic patterns of thinking might feel hard as granite to change. But what if those patterns have held us back rather than lifted us up? Can we afford to endlessly cling to them?
Change is needed. But it’s not just a different pattern of thinking that’s called for. It’s larger than that. It’s our need for a better foundation for health than the matter-based one we’ve spent centuries exploring, investing in, and trusting—as well as fearing and doubting.
Each of us has felt a tug to change directions. Sometimes that’s because the way we’re going isn’t getting us where we want or need to be. Sometimes that tug is a little harder to explain. It’s a sense we feel that there must be a higher, better means for meeting our need.
Society at large is feeling the tug for change in health care. The old foundation feels less like rock and more like shifting sand beneath our feet. The significance of the tug we're feeling is less about what isn’t delivering on its promise and more about what can and does. We're drawn to an unwavering, spiritual foundation from which comes compassion, order, confidence, wisdom, calm—and better health.
