Dr. Esther Sternberg, is a leading biomedical researcher in the field of neural-immune connections and the author of the 2001 book, The Balance within: the Science Connecting Health and Emotions.
https://onbeing.org/programs/esther-sternberg-stress-and-the-balance-within/
I resonated with this radio interview, in which Dr. Sternberg was talking about the molecular level of the mind-body connection. In her book, The Balance Within, she explored the history of medicine to understand why, until very recently, modern science failed to treat human emotions, such as stress. She also talked about how science is coming to a new understanding of the interaction between the brain and the body during emotional stress and how we all might use this knowledge.
“The stress can make people sick” – as Dr. Sternberg says. It has been more than common sense in the Asian countries, including my native country – Japan, for many centuries. In Japanese Kanji-character, “Sickness” is written as “Sickness of Qi (病気),” and we commonly use the phrase such as “Illness arises from sickness of the Qi spirit.” This idea was influenced by ancient Chinese philosophy such as Taoism, which was imported to Japan nearly two thousand years ago.
I personally experimented to see how stress damaged my body throughout my life, especially last two years in acupuncture school.
I have been suffering from a duodenal ulcer and UTI for years. It was originally diagnosed in 2001 while I was working as a web designer at a fast-paced design firm. At that time, I started having tingling pains in my right lower abdomen at night. I went to the hospital and had an endoscopy exam, which revealed the small duodenal ulcer in my intestine. Around that time, I started having UTI too.
Since then, I have had the ulcer and UTI attacks occasionally, but not severely since I quit working in a corporate environment. Then they started bothering me again, ever since I enrolled in school. Each time I got stressed out with exams or assignments, I started feeling a dull tingling pain on my right lower abdomen, especially at night. My UTI also returned more frequently. Normally the dull pain from the duodenal ulcer eased while I was resting, touching small animals or walking in the park. However, when I started thinking of school and studying, the pain came back.
There is a definite connection in between the mind and body, as Dr. Stenberg says;
“…you can have positive memories that trigger positive emotional responses and a flood of positive nerve chemicals, endorphins, those dopamine reward chemicals, and you can have negative memories that trigger the stress response”.
She says that it’s not the stress that makes you sick, but the stress response. Those hormones and nerve chemicals go to the immune system through the blood stream, through the nerve endings, and then hit the immune cells and change how the immune cells work, which causes stress.
She says that Arthritis, Crohn’s disease, inflammatory bowel disease, and Lupus are all overactive immune responses. We activate the immune cells to create inflammation to fight bacteria and bugs and to get rid of them. But then the immune system has to turn off. It has to have an exit strategy. So there has to be an on/off switch.
Dr. Stenberg also talked about stress are triggered by memories. I resonated with her through my other experience with the ESR (Emotional Stress Release) therapy for my long-term backache. With this technique, I was sitting on a chair and touching my forehead with both my hands and focusing on the memory of the incident that was the root cause of my back pain 20 years ago.
That happened so long ago, but I could still recall the day and my emotional state at that time. I could recall my frustration, anger, and sadness during that time and the people who were associated with me at the time, while touching the front of my head. My ESR therapist rang the tuning forks around my head and body at the end.
The result was very powerful. This one simple exercise eased the dullness of my backache. I felt like I was back to my body of 20 years ago before the incident happened. I think what the therapy did was to reach out to my hidden trauma in my brain which kept causing me physical distress. By recognizing the traumatic experience and bringing it up to the surface to focus on, I could ease myself emotionally as well back to the state before that happened.
As Dr. Sternberg says, the hippocampus controls memory, and the amygdala controls anxiety and is also known as the fear center. Both of these have connections to the brain’s stress center.
The DLPFC points and the fear point in Kiiko Matsumoto style acupuncture seem to have a similar function to ease fear. The Somato Emotional Release (SER) in CranioSacral therapy also has a similar method which we call the ‘energy cyst’ which often contains the traumatic memory that needs to be released. When this happens, the patient often trembles and shakes while breathing heavily on the massage table, until she/he releases the residual emotion.
