Mind over Matter

Latest findings by psychosomatic medicine men on the interaction of body and soul in causing disease:

Monday Morning Virus? Emotional factors may be as potent as a virus in causing the common cold, said Virologist Robert J. Huebner of the U.S. Public Health Service. Volunteers, wrote Dr. Huebner in Public Health Reports, got equally severe cold symptoms regardless of whether they received nose drops containing viruses, or drops of harmless, virus-free material.

"Psychological tests showed a rather significant association of high gullibility scores with complaints of upper respiratory illness," said Dr. Huebner. "Our findings indicate that susceptibility to suggestion represents a more powerful inciter to 'runny' noses than any virus which we have as yet discovered." Dr. Huebner noted that a smaller ratio of workers pile up most of the absenteeism laid to colds. Also, colds are commonest on Monday mornings. "Perhaps there is a 'Monday morning' virus." said Dr. Huebner, "but I wonder whether it could be grown even with modern tissue cultures or that miracle drugs could cure it."

Choice of Illness. A mother's anxieties about various aspects of her child's bodily functions may play an important part in the youngster's unconscious "choice" of psychosomatic illness, said Dr. George J. Mohr of Los Angeles' Mount Sinai Hospital. Some mothers nag about feeding or bowel movements; in such a setting the child may develop ulcerative colitis. If mother worries every time baby wheezes, he may "choose" asthma.

Dr. Mohr cited the case history of a nine-year-old boy who complained of bellyaches after meals. His mother said that his pains were similar to hers--and she had a duodenal ulcer. Dr. Mohr found that the woman had not wanted the child; motherhood had made her give up a promising art career. He decided that her pains and her child's were both reactions to frustration and stress.

Personality & TB. Of the countless individuals who harbor tubercle bacilli, some stay healthy while others fall ready victims to tuberculosis. Why the difference? Housing and hygiene, it has become clear, are only partial answers at best. Reporting on a seven-year study of 1,500 TB patients, Seattle Psychiatrist Thomas H. Holmes gave the American College of Chest Physicians in Manhattan new evidence that TB is triggered by emotional causes. Paralleling a similar British study (TIME, Feb. 11), the findings showed that more than 50% of the TB victims came from homes broken by death, divorce or separation before the patients were 18; the divorce rate among tuberculars was four times the U.S. average. Most TB patients had cut short their education, had a penchant for moving from city to city and changing jobs often--long before they knew that they had the disease. The TB patients also had more than their share of emotional illness: 20-25% had psychoses, and 36% had neuroses.

The TB group included large numbers of first-and second-generation citizens, and the rates were higher for non-whites than for whites. Bad living conditions and overcrowding were not a satisfactory answer; e.g., among non-white males who moved into the best residential areas the rates soared far above the slum rates. Dr. Holmes and his colleagues concluded: the TB patients were not at home in their environment, and their attempts at adjustment led to "unrealistic striving, cumulative conflict, anxiety and depression." The stresses to which the patients succumbed were far from unusual; breakup of a marriage, loss of job, a spell of drunkenness. In normal comparison groups, such difficulties were spaced over he years while among TB victims the experiences were piled up in the two years preceding onset of the disease. It was when their "limited capacities were no longer adequate for resolving problems or achieving satisfaction that tuberculosis developed."

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