Esther M. Sternberg, MD
Rheumatologist, researcher, and author of The Balance Within
Excerpted from The New Medicine Interviews

Health is really a balance. I think most people think about health as simply the absence of disease, but it’s a lot more than that when you really think about what it is to be healthy. Disease occurs when the body has to deal with all sorts of insults: bacteria, viruses, stress, psychological stress. We’re walking through a very dirty soup every day of our lives.

We’re exposed to all sorts of things that can turn on the body’s disease response systems. And that’s normal. You need to have that. The whole body is set up to respond to these insults and then get back to normal, get back to some balance. So, health lies not only in the body’s response to these insults, to disease, but in setting itself back to a state of balance.

For thousands of years, people have believed that stress can make you sick, that believing can make you well, that the social world affects your health. All of these things are so ingrained in our psyche. There are things your grandmother told you – get lots of sleep, relax, rest.

For thousands of years, the scientific and medical community, until very recently, didn’t believe these concepts. Because, how could something as ephemeral as a thought, something that’s out there in the ether, how could that effect something as concrete as your body? And we couldn’t understand how something like a thought, we don’t even know what a thought is, how could that affect something as concrete as health?

And until recently we didn’t have the tools to understand that. Now we do and we can understand those concepts through the language of science.

If you go back to the ancient Greeks, they built temples to the Greek god of healing, Asclepius. And these temples were beautiful temples set on the mountaintops in Greece, overlooking the Aegean, the Mediterranean, this beautiful blue sea. There were marble temples, and they had these long, sloping ramps that allowed sick people who could not walk very well to walk up the slopes. They had music, sleep, dreams, a healthy diet. They were always at a fresh water source. They were surrounded by friends and people who, who helped the sick.

It sounds like a spa, right? All these things we know now. We understand how healthy nutrition, exercise, music, sleep, prayer, dreams, and social support can actually help heal. But between the time of the ancient Greeks… and now, there was this huge hiatus where science took over and didn’t yet have the tools to understand these connections in scientific terms. So, that which we could not understand was thrown into the garbage heap of myth, of something your grandmother told you, therefore it can’t possibly be real.

Well, it turns out grandmother was right and we now understand why and how things as ephemeral as a thought, as stress, as belief can actually on the one hand make you sick or can help you heal.