The Science of Healing with Dr. Esther Sternberg

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This is where they came,

traveling for days,

over mountains and across the Mediterranean.

In pain, weak,

sometimes unable to walk.

They came for relief, for quiet,

to sleep, dream and heal.

Could the Ancients, followers of Asclepius,

the Greek god of healing, have known something about the body

that we are just beginning to understand today?

What is healing,

and what roles do our emotions and brains play in the process?

Have we lost our balance?

Can we get it back with "The Science of Healing"?

I'm Dr. Esther Sternberg.

As a neuroimmunologist, I was working extremely long hours,

almost never seeing the sun,

fighting to convince my colleagues

that stress could affect the immune system.

And my mother was dying of breast cancer.

I became a child of science

because my father was one of a small group of scientists

who developed the field of nuclear medicine.

My sister and I used to play in my father's lab,

and there was a spiral staircase connecting my father's lab

to the labs of Hans Selye, who coined the word "stress".

The idea that stress could cause illness

was really ahead of its time.

Can our emotions make us sick?

Stress has become an unrelenting factor in our lives.

The American Psychological Association estimates that

one-third of Americans are living with extreme stress.

Ancient civilizations from China, India and Greece

embrace the premise that emotions and health were one.

Worry could make you sick and belief could make you well.

But centuries later, that link began

to unravel when visible proof

became the foundation of the scientific method.

The connection between emotions

and health could not be seen and was abandoned.

Today, innovative scientists, using the latest technologies,

are reconnecting us to the wisdom of the ages

and the brain's ability to help us heal.

I was under extreme stress.

I had moved into a new house.

In fact, the day I moved, I got the phone call

to fly up to Montreal immediately,

and that ended up being the last three weeks of my mother's life.

I was on the flight

back to Washington, and one of my knees

swelled up on the plane, and I thought that,

"well, maybe I bumped my knee, maybe I tripped."

I couldn't really remember having done anything, but --

but I just dismissed it as having injured myself.

And then, after a few days and a few weeks,

my other knee swelled up.

And then my elbows and my shoulders started to ache.

And here I was, a rheumatologist,

an arthritis specialist,

and I realized that I had inflammatory arthritis.

My mother had just died

and I had come back to Washington,

and I felt at that point that

the last thing that I could deal with was hospital.

And I was writing the beginning of my first book,

and the doorbell rang, and it was my new neighbors,

Dean and Taria Papavassiliou.

When I first met Esther, she actually had moved

next to our house here in downtown D.C.,

and we decided, my wife and I, to go there to welcome her

and bring her some Greek food.

Tzatziki, moussaka, dolmades.

They saw me writing on the computer and they said,

"Oh, are you a writer?"

And I didn't really think of myself as a writer at that time.

So I said, "Well, I don't know, why do you ask?"

And they said, "Well, because we've always wanted a writer

to stay at our cottage in Crete."

So I said, "I'm a writer."

(traditional Cretan music playing)

The island of Crete lies about 60 miles south

of the Greek mainland.

The Papavassilious picked me up

in the main city of Heraklion and we began our two-hour trek.

We drove over two mountain ranges and through the valley

from the north to the south coast of Crete.

The roads were hairpin turns, they were narrow,

some of them were dirt roads,

and we finally got to the second mountain range,

and they said, "There it is."

And I looked over this beautiful, blue

Mediterranean Sea and a mountain jutting out into the sea,

and far, far below was this little village in the bay

up against the mountain, and that was Lentas.

The Papavassilious' cottage was the tiniest little cottage.

Two rooms with a courtyard in between,

with a wonderful orange tree.

The village was not more than about ten streets,

and the stucco houses marching up the hill,

so in order to get to the sea, you had to walk down

a fairly steep path.

I was still wobbly on my feet.

I was afraid to fall because I had fallen

when my knees were particularly bad.

As I started to adjust to the rhythm of the village,

I could feel the sensitivity in my joints

gradually beginning to ease.

And all I'd done was take in the light and colors around me.

As a scientist, I began to wonder,

could looking at a pleasing view actually reduce pain?

This is a living brain.

In fact, it's my brain.

And here at the University of Southern California's

Brain Imaging Center...

You'll see sequences

that will only have faces.

...Dr. Irving Biederman's

ground-breaking work on vision is opening new doors.

My main area of study

is trying to understand a visual experience --

a scene, a face or an object

that we've never experienced before.

Subjects lie in the magnet and look at scenes.

What do I do?

All you have to do is just stand still.

You have four buttons.

You'll be pressing the right-most button

for the scenes you like the best,

the left-most button

for the scenes you like looking at least.

Using powerful electromagnets,

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, or fMRI,

reveals 3-D images of the living brain.

As the subjects view images of nature,

junk cars, faces, and city streets,

the magnets scan the brain for activity.

What we find is that

when people are looking at scenes

that they rate as being pleasurable,

we see a high density

of the opioid receptors -- neurotransmitters

that are popularly referred to as endorphins --

that are associated with pain relief

and in general, pleasurable experience --

listening to music, viewing a great scene.

The more we have of it, the more pleasure that we experience.

Dr. Biederman's team is using

the most advanced imaging technology,

but the first serious study investigating the impact

of visual stimuli on pain

began in 1984 at Paoli Hospital in Pennsylvania.

Environmental psychologist Dr. Roger Ulrich compared

two groups of patients receiving identical care.

The only difference --

one group's hospital rooms looked out on a brick wall

and the other at a natural wooded scene.

The results showed the natural-scene group

needed half the pain medication and were discharged a day early.

This was the first scientific proof

that a visually stimulating view was good for you.

So, Esther, this is your brain on MRI.

That's amazing.

What we can do is take a voyage,

a fantastic voyage, from --

we can go, let's say, in this case here,

from the top of your brain all the way down into your neck.

So, here we go, take it slowly, we can get into people's heads,

and see not only the structure

but, more important, the functioning of the brain.

Can you see my hypothalamus?

The hypothalamus is going to be right around there.

So that's my stress center.

Now we're going down into my neck.

That is so cool.

You can see your teeth.

I think you have a cavity.

We much prefer looking at

an interesting vista than a blank wall.

The blank wall will give us almost no neural activity.

Something that's richly interpreted will give us

a lot of activity.

When Esther had that experience in Crete

where she was surrounded by beauty

and captivated by what vision could afford her

and she noticed a reduction in arthritic symptoms,

how might that come about?

One of the things is pleasurable opioid activity

on perhaps the immune system that may lead to wellness.

So this is what would be lighting up

when I was looking at a beautiful view in Greece?

Yes. In the same way?

In the same way. That's amazing.

And if you looked at some boring scene

or something else, you'd see less activity.

So this could really explain why

I enjoyed looking at that view

and why it made me feel peaceful.

Is that right?