Lynne Malcolm: Hello, you're with All in the Mind on RN, I'm Lynne Malcolm. And today the powerful connection between the mind, the body and our health.

Excerpt from The Connection:

It was always obvious in the ancient wisdom traditions that mind and body were interconnected, but somewhere along the line we created a dichotomy as if they were separate.

We came to believe that everything could be cured by drugs and surgeries, whereas to this day they can't.

When we talk about much of mind body phenomena we are talking about the nonphysical mind affecting the physical body. That's not allowed for in the Western scientific paradigm.

Modern science has shown us that the mind has the power to heal. We should use that capacity.

George Jelinek: I think this is a notion and a paradigm whose time has come. It makes much more sense for us to look at how people can be empowered to take control of their own health, to use their own initiative, their own healing resources to change their lifestyles rather than rely on a pharmaceutical maker to provide us with a drug that might ameliorate the symptoms for some time but do nothing much about the underlying disease.

Lynne Malcolm: That's George Jelinek, professor of emergency medicine at St Vincent's Hospital in Melbourne.

Before him, an excerpt from The Connection. It's a documentary produced by a young woman whose chronic illness led her to investigate the compelling field of mind body medicine. Shannon Harvey:

Shannon Harvey: Mind body medicine is the application of some of the remarkable research that is coming out proving that our mind, our brain and all our other systems in our body all interact to have an impact on our health. Scientists are calling the field psycho neuro immunology, and what they are talking about there is the way that the brain interacts with the immune system interacting with the endocrine system. And it has only really been in the last 5 to 10 years that scientists have been actually able to look at the mind and how it directly impacts our body, because of the development of wonderful scientific technologies like MRIs that enable us to actually look at what's going on in the brain and then be able to extend from that to look at what's going on in things like the immune system.

Lynne Malcolm: Filmmaker Shannon Harvey wanted to explore mind body medicine after she was told she had an autoimmune disease.

Shannon Harvey: I was 24 years old when I was told by a specialist doctor that I had lupus. And what that doctor told me was that it was a very serious illness, that if the disease progressed that I could end up in a wheelchair or with organ failure before I turned 30. And it was a bit of a shock to me. I had just landed my first job as a journalist, and I thought I had the world at my feet, and here was a doctor telling me that, no, that is in jeopardy.

And the thing about being diagnosed with an autoimmune disease is that the doctors can't actually offer a cause and they can't offer a cure. They can offer drugs that suppress the immune system and they can say vague statements like 'we think it's genetic', but they can't actually tell you why and they can't tell you that you'll get better. And so it was really scary and for a number of years I took all my medication. And then I went down the path of looking at alternative medicine and I ended up spending $30,000 on both the specialist doctors and the traditional medicine and alternative medicine, and I didn't get better.

And of course being a journalist I kept asking questions, I kept looking for answers. And one day I came across a really obscure PDF document that had been written for medical students and it was written by a Monash academic named Dr Craig Hassed who has ended up being in the film. And it was a summary, a PDF document which summarised the latest science showing that there is a direct connection between the state of somebody's mind and their health outcomes. And I read that document cover to cover and a light bulb went off and I realised that actually I could play a role in my own recovery.

So I started getting really well. As I started implementing some of the things that the experts that I was following were saying, I started becoming more and more well. And interestingly I started becoming so well that I decided to make this film because I felt that other people needed to know about it. I say to people now that this is the film I wish I had have been able to see when I first got sick. And I really mean that.

And so my husband and I decided to invest a small amount of money from my production company into the film. And right when we had decided to press the green light we discovered that I had become pregnant. And that was a wonderful thing because people with autoimmune diseases can often have trouble conceiving, and so our son was a wonderful, happy, joyous surprise, and he is really part of my own wellness journey now because I became so well that it all happened on its own.

Lynne Malcolm: Dr Craig Hassad is a senior lecturer in medicine, and co-ordinator of mindfulness programs at Monash University. His interest in mind body medicine began as a student when he was learning about the placebo effect.

Craig Hassad: Well, it's been known for decades and decades that when you are doing things like drug trials, that somebody takes a particular pill and there will be a significant effect therapeutically but also as far as side-effects are concerned, that aren't attributable to the chemical action of the drug. So a person takes a pill that they think is going to relieve their pain, even though it's a sugar pill they will tend to get a significant effect in terms of pain relief. If the person actually gets an active drug but doesn't know they've received it they'll get a far lesser therapeutic effect than if they know they've actually just received the drug, even though it's an active compound like, say, morphine for pain relief.

And in a lot of trials, particularly for those things where there is a strong subjective component, like pain and mood and sleep, the placebo effect is actually the major part of the clinical effect. For example, a lot of drug trials in antidepressants, the majority of effect is actually placebo, until you get to severe depression, then you get a chemical effect over and above the placebo you can attribute to the chemical action of the drug.

But the research has gone further than that now. So now if you give somebody, say, a drug or a placebo that they think is going to improve their mood and you are scanning their brain at the same time, the mood regulation centres in the brain start to change quite significantly, based on what the person believes the pill is going to do, not the chemical action of the drug. You give the same sugar pill, tell them it's a painkiller, and the pain regulation centres in the brain will activate very significantly. So there's like a neurological basis to what the person is subjectively experiencing.

Lynne Malcolm: And it sort of highlights the strength of belief as well. What are the things that we know about how influential just belief and perhaps spirituality can be in determining our mind and our body health?

Craig Hassad: Well, belief and…I almost hesitate to use the word in a scientific setting, but faith, a person's faith in what the pill will do, not just the faith in the treatment but it's also the faith in the practitioner who is administering it, and all of the show, the stethoscope and the white coat and all the ritual that goes around that, actually has a significant effect as well. So it's sort of like this faith or trust that the mind produces changes in the brain which cascade right down through the body, it can influence things, the gut, the way the immune system activates, as well as the subjective experience of various things like pain and mood and the like.

Lynne Malcolm: It's becoming more and more widely accepted that stress can significantly influence our physical health. Craig Hassad explains the mechanism at work:

Craig Hassad: Well, we use the word 'stress', but if we broaden it to 'unhelpful mental and emotional states' we could include in that anger and hostility, depression, so poor mental health in various ways, they are all pretty much associated with activation of the sympathetic nervous system, which is really the system that mediates the fight or flight response.

The fight or flight response has got a really useful role to play because if you are walking through the park on your morning walk and a tiger has gotten out of the local zoo and is looking for breakfast, then you will activate the fight or flight. And it's a lot more than just the heart starting to race; heart rate, blood pressure, cardiac contractility goes up, that means the heartbeats are bigger than normal. So all of this extra blood flow is being directed to the muscles because the muscles are going to be doing a lot of work over the next few minutes while we try and get out of danger. Sugars and fats pump into the bloodstream, your metabolic rate goes up, so you are starting to feel hot and you're sweating to keep yourself cool while you are exerting yourself.

More blood going to the muscles means it's got to come from somewhere else so you go pale, the blood is diverted away from the skin and away from the gut, so your whole gastrointestinal system shuts down. Your blood gets thick and sticky and will clot faster than normal, which could be the difference between life and death if the tiger gets a hold of you. Your immune system is activated by pumping out inflammatory chemicals, so a short-term burst in immunity. And from an attention point of view it's very mindful; your brain is relatively quiet but very focused.

Now, this response has got a very important role to play because it is designed to save our life once in a pink fit when we actually need it. But when we activate that response all the time when we don't actually need it, by anticipating future events or replaying past events, getting overly angry and reactive to events even if they are happening in day-to-day life, what we do is we over-activate this fight or flight, and it has a long-term cumulative effect that's called allostatic load. So really if we wanted to accelerate ageing and the illnesses associated with ageing, this is what we'd do.

But those effects are measurable not just in terms of physiological and metabolic effects and immune effects but right down to the very DNA of the cell, so it actually accelerates the rate of ageing of the DNA which is measured by the telomeres, which are the little caps on the end of your chromosomes. So these effects are really how we accelerate the progression of chronic illness, and those effects are also observable in the brain as well, so we damage brain cells as well, which is not what we want to do when we get older.

Lynne Malcolm: So there is that stress response but there's also a relaxation response.

Craig Hassad: Yes, the relaxation response is pretty much the opposite of the activation of the fight or flight. So if we really did need that activation response, great, situation over, switch it off, just come back to rest. So it's pretty much the opposite. And that term was coined by Herbert Benson who works at Harvard in the Mind Body Medicine Institute there, and he was doing research in the late '70s, early '80s, the first research on meditation. And he noticed that there were these consistent changes physiologically and metabolically and in the brain as well that he was measuring, and he coined the term 'the relaxation response' and wrote a book of the same name.

In a lot of ways he was very prophetic because the research has gone a lot further than those initial early studies, but it really just documents the importance of that relaxation response, that we need to learn how to recognise the inappropriate activation of the stress response and switch it off.

Lynne Malcolm: Craig Hassad is a strong proponent of meditation and mindfulness practice, and you'll find links on the All in the Mind website to books he's written about how to learn and use these techniques. He explains the effect that meditation has on our brains.

Craig Hassad: What we know is that when we are not attentive, when where not present, distracted, worried, anxious, apprehensive, the brain slips into what's called default mode, and you can actually map areas of the brain that are active in default mode, but pretty much the executive functioning areas don't work very well, so hence we find it difficult to remember things when we are not paying attention, we often get worried and anxious. There's a lot of default mental activity in things like anxiety and depression and in other things too like schizophrenia and autism, the default circuits are very active. But it means that the executive functioning areas, information processing, decision-making, emotional regulation areas are not working well.

And when there is a lot of default mental activity the brain gets gummed up with what's called amyloid, and that's the protein that later leads on to Alzheimer's disease. But the research, interestingly, on things like mindfulness meditation, and I suspect it would be the same if similar studies were done with other forms of meditation as well, is that the more a person has been doing it, the thicker the grey matter is, and it actually seems to stimulate new neuronal growth, especially in these executive functioning areas, emotional regulation areas. And it quietens down the amygdala, the brain's stress centre, quite significantly.

So this seems to have a cumulative effect the more a person has done and the longer in their life they've been doing it for. So it may actually…and I use the word 'may' because it is yet to be absolutely proved, but the signposts of recent research are suggesting that it may actually be very important for preventing cognitive decline that is associated with ageing and actually maintaining a healthy brain.

Lynne Malcolm: Dr Craig Hassad.

You're with All in the Mind on RN, Radio Australia and online, I'm Lynne Malcolm, today exploring the latest scientific evidence for the role our mind plays in our physical health.

Shannon Harvey: So one of the really interesting studies that I came across was done by a woman named Sarah Lazar, who is a Harvard professor, and she looks at the brains of people who meditate. And what she is showing is that people who have never meditated before, when they do an eight-week meditation program, the structure of their brain actually changes. Things like their grey matter, things like their stress centres, they all start shifting in just eight weeks.

She discovered that people who had done an eight-week program, the part of their brain called the amygdala actually became smaller. What was interesting about that is that those people who had done the program also reported greater feelings of peace and less stress in their lives. When we compare that to a study that was done in India by some scientists looking at mice where they took mice and they stressed them out for 10 days and they observed that the mice amygdala got bigger. What was interesting about that was when they removed the stressors and they measured their brains again, their amygdalas remained large. And yet with the mice on the other hand the stressors in their life had been removed but their amygdalas had remained enlarged.

Lynne Malcolm: Because they hadn't meditated?

Shannon Harvey: Well, if somebody can teach mice to meditate that would be a very interesting thing! And so what we can extrapolate a little bit out of this is that it's not about changing our lives but it's about changing our relationship to our lives.

Lynne Malcolm: Whilst researching for her documentary The Connection, filmmaker Shannon Harvey came across more compelling evidence supporting the power of meditation for healing.

Shannon Harvey: Perhaps one of the most remarkable scientists that I interviewed on this whole journey of making the film was Dr Herbert Benson, and he is famous in the mind body medical circle, some people call him the father of modern mind body medicine. He has sort of started the whole field of psycho neuro immunology, and I interviewed him because I wanted to talk to him about the relaxation response and how he has found that it can change people's health.

But what was amazing and what blew me away is that he is now in his 80s and his cutting-edge science continues to this day, to the point that recently they've just discovered that meditation can flip the switch on genes that affect disease. And what was even more remarkable about that is that it's not just in an eight-week meditation course that they observed this happening, they observed it happening the moment people started eliciting the relaxation response. And that for me was just so exciting, because here I was being told by specialist doctors that autoimmune diseases obviously run in your family, it's just in your genes, there's not much we can do. And now I was being told by a world leading expert from Harvard University that actually you can flip the switch on genes affecting disease.

Lynne Malcolm: So this is the area of epigenetics…

Shannon Harvey: It's epigenetics.

Lynne Malcolm: …where your genes can be affected or change their expression because of external factors.

Shannon Harvey: Exactly, or internal factors, depending on how you want to phrase it, that's right. And then that got extended even further when I met Dr Dean Ornish who is quite famous, particularly in America. He is known for his program called the Ornish Spectrum which is looking at diet and lifestyle and introducing things like love and intimacy, and he is actually getting some incredible results where people doing his programs are in some circumstances reversing early-stage prostate cancer. His program has been accepted by Medicare in the US, particularly in response to treating people with heart disease. So he is quite renowned. He was the consultant to President Clinton after he had his heart attack. He is quite well renowned.

But the thing that really excited to me about meeting him and interviewing him is that his research is actually looking at this idea of telomeres, which…Elizabeth Blackburn is actually an Australian scientist from Tasmania who won the Nobel Prize for discovering telomeres. And Dr Ornish and Dr Blackburn teamed up, and they looked at what happened to people's telomeres when they went through the Ornish lifestyle program.

Telomeres are related to cellular ageing, so the best way to describe what they are is that they are little caps that sit on the ends of our chromosomes like the ends of our shoelaces, and as we get older the ends of those shoelaces get smaller and smaller and smaller. And what Dr Blackburn and Dr Ornish found is that when they went through that Ornish program which involved lifestyle changes, things like meditation, yoga, family support, community support, as well as diet, they discovered that people's telomeres actually got longer.

Lynne Malcolm: Shannon Harvey.

George Jelinek: The sort of utter devastation in those moments is something I won't forget, and it has been described as one of the most life altering diagnoses you can receive, but I can do very much attest to that first hand. It really felt like an enormous hand it just reached into my life and plucked to my future away in front of my eyes. I could immediately see that descent into paralysis and catheters and walking frames and wheelchairs, and all the things I've seen with my mother suddenly became my future. And I just felt that it was all gone.

Lynne Malcolm: That's George Jelinek recalling his diagnosis of MS. The disease has a strong genetic component, and 18 years earlier George Jelinek's mother had taken her own life because her MS symptoms had become unbearable.

As George Jelinek was coming to terms with his own diagnosis he met up with an old friend and mentor Dr Ian Hislop.

George Jelinek: We started talking about the effect of my emotional state and my mind and stress and so on in my life and the relationship that might have had to MS. But also he asked me a couple of key questions, which I think were really important. He asked me where I put myself in the hierarchy of my life. He said, 'At this stage you really have to put yourself first.' He then asked me if I'd ever meditated, and I had and I'd stopped for a couple of years after I took this new job, and I was so busy I found I just didn't have time to do it.

And the third question, which I think was actually the most important, was he asked me about my spiritual life, and that one completely stumped me in that I realised that I'd so compartmentalised my life around work and my obligations that I hadn't really given time to some of the more critical things that I needed to think about and needed to explore in my life. And so it was that meeting that I'd arranged with Ian that led me to start looking into my own response to the illness, and that led me to all sorts of other avenues of tracking down through the medical literature things that I might do around this illness that might help me get better. And of course I came up with a lot of things and I've applied them to my life and I'm now well. And that was 15 years ago.

Lynne Malcolm: So can you give me a summary of the things…the changes that you've made that you think have contributed to your recovery?

George Jelinek: The changes are twofold. One is a very practical mechanical thing which is what I turned up in my looking through the literature looking at the various things that might modulate the immune response. So I found things like diet, and there's not much questions that a plant-based wholefood diet is about as healthy as you get, supplemented with fish probably gives you some extra advantages in terms of immune modulation, plus omega three supplementation when I didn't eat fish.

I looked at the benefits of sun exposure in autoimmune illness, and there was a very strong literature around getting adequate sun exposure, so I now get at least 10 to 15 minutes of as close to all-over sun as possible. And when I can't do that I take vitamin D supplements, so I keep my vitamin D level at the high end of the normal range. I exercise regularly, so I do about a kilometre and a half in the pool most days of the week and I run six or seven kilometres on the other day. I now have started meditating again regularly. So there's a number of mechanical things like that around lifestyle that I needed to change, and I did.

But there was also the other issue that Ian raised with me which was the spiritual side of my life, and I started exploring that in detail. And I started keeping a diary where I recorded the important things that were happening to me along the path of my life. I started reading a lot more around spirituality, I started reading some of the key works around spirituality, a whole range of different authors. And I started reading a lot more about healing.

And I started meeting people who…I went out of my way to meet people who I knew had recovered from illness or who I found to be uplifting in a spiritual sense. I gravitated towards Ian Gawler, who many people will know lives and works in Victoria running cancer retreats after his own recovery from terminal cancer some 30-plus years ago. And really within a couple of years I was running retreats for people with MS at the Gawler Foundation, and subsequently I've run them all over Australia and in different parts of the world. And that combination of things really has all interacted and contributed to keeping me well.

Lynne Malcolm: Dr George Jelinek, who has gone for 15 years without a relapse. His latest book is called Overcoming Multiple Sclerosis.

Shannon Harvey's documentary The Connection contends that there's a very strong mind factor playing a part in many chronic illnesses. Does she have a concern that this idea may lead people to feel somehow inadequate or guilty that they are not able to get themselves better with their minds?

Shannon Harvey: That's a really good question and that's something that has been very important for me in making the film, is that this film is not about wishing yourself well, this isn't a film about making yourself sick because you've worried too much, it's not about saying mantras over and over again and therefore miraculously making your cancer disappear. This is a film that looks at a really important component of medicine, and that is the role that the mind plays in the outcome of an illness. And it's really important that the messaging in the film is about adding mind body medicine to an overall healing approach rather than discarding all the wonderful things that Western medicine offers.

Lynne Malcolm: Shannon Harvey, who has now fully recovered from the autoimmune disease lupus which she was diagnosed with nine years ago.

Shannon Harvey: A lot of people ask me what's the magic bullet. You know; I've been diagnosed with something, what's the one thing that I can do in order to get better? And I'm really very firm in saying there is nothing simple about it, and it's also not easy, it's hard work. When I think back on my life previously when I was first diagnosed and I compare it to my life now, it's almost unrecognisable. I'm a completely different person.

So the more obvious things that I do in order to stay well, I meditate regularly, I practice yoga regularly, I treasure my relationships and the people that I love above everything else, including work, which can be very, very hard. I also make sure that if things get overwhelming and I become emotionally upset I write in a diary. And there's some really interesting science around the act of writing in a diary and what that can actually do to your immune system. I'm absolutely not afraid of seeking the help of a professional to balance my mind, and that was actually a big part of my own journey, was to see a psychologist for a number of years in order to understand some of the subconscious things going on that I hadn't even realised.

Lynne Malcolm: Shannon Harvey.

So to what extent is this mind body approach being incorporated into conventional medicine? Craig Hassad:

Craig Hassad: The uptake has been far too slow. One of the reasons is that it's not a patentable product, so you don't get the marketing push that you do for other interventions and treatments that are patentable and much more marketable. The other part I think has to do with education. Unfortunately I think most of our medical schools are decades behind the research in this area. So it doesn't get integrated into medical practice. I think the research agenda needs to catch up as well. There's an absolute goldmine down there if we could just plumb the depths with just a few more resources in that area.

Lynne Malcolm: Dr Craig Hassad.

Go to the All in the Mind website to find out more about Shannon Harvey's documentary The Connection, and there you'll find other information related to today's program. While you're there leave a comment on your experience of the link between the mind, the body and your health. We always love to hear from you.

Thanks to producer Diane Dean and sound engineer Judy Rapley.

I'm Lynne Malcolm, do join me again next week. Bye for now.