Dean Ornish says good health springs from love and intimacy

0 Comments | Insight on the News, March 30, 1998 | by Stephen Goode, | Rick Kozak

Listen to your heart, says this prominent physician and best-selling author. `When we learn the difference love and intimacy make ... then we can have the courage to take these issues more seriously.'

Dean Ornish's new book is Love and Survival, and he means just what the title says: Our survival and our health depend very much on the extent to which we are able to love. A medical doctor, Ornish has treated innumerable heart-disease patients, and he's author of best-selling books on the kinds of diets that men and women should pursue to stay healthy or regain health that has been lost.

But the ability to love is fundamental to good health, according to Ornish, who tells Insight: "When we learn the powerful difference love and intimacy make in our quality and quantity of life, then we can have the courage to take these issues more seriously." The love he's talking about is the kind of love that knocks down the barriers separating people and is central to the world's great religions.

What amazed Ornish was the extent to which love and intimacy helped his patients. "Spiritual heart disease is the real epidemic," he says. "Loneliness, isolation, social fragmentation, separation" -- the very conditions physicians aren't trained to handle -- are forgotten in our health-care system that demands that doctors see as many patients as possible, as quickly as possible.

Insight: You call your book a "what if" book rather than a "how to" book. What's a "what if" book?

Dean Ornish: What if I incorporate more love and intimacy into my life -- what difference will it make? The point is that love and intimacy can make a profound difference in the quality of our lives and even in the quantity of our lives in terms of how long we live. If we understand that something matters in a meaningful and a powerful way, as these do, then we find our own pathways toward them.

It takes a certain amount of courage to be willing to do that, even more than changing one's diet, because you can only be intimate to the degree that you can dare to be vulnerable. If you make yourself vulnerable, you might get hurt. We've all been hurt at one time in our lives, so we all have these emotional defenses that we've developed to protect ourselves from emotional pain.

It's not that you'd want to be without psychological defenses. They normally protect you, but they can further isolate you. Many people in our culture have nowhere they feel safe enough to let those defenses down, no one with whom they feel trusting enough to open up in that way.

Insight: How did medicine become so divorced from understanding the roles love and intimacy play in our lives?

DO: In science we tend to believe what we can measure -- and we can measure cholesterol, blood pressure, heart rate. But it's hard to measure or quantify love and intimacy, and so we have tended to split off emotional factors in medicine. The same is true of the spiritual aspects of our lives. Instead we focus on that which can be quantified.

I have spent my whole career in science, but I've become increasingly aware of the limitations of science to measure what is often the most meaningful. As a great scientist once told me, "Not everything that counts can be counted." Some in research science behave like the old joke about the man who loses his wallet over in the dark alley but looks for it under the street lamp because the light is better there. So we tend to focus on cholesterol and blood pressure, even though they may not be the most meaningful aspects of our health.

Insight: In your latest book, you cite many examples of scientific studies showing the importance of love and intimacy for good health.

DO: What we now are realizing, even in cases of infectious disease, is that love and intimacy can make a difference. In a study at Carnegie Mellon [University in Pittsburgh], scientists paid volunteers to drip cold virus in their noses and virtually everybody became infected -- but not everybody who was infected got a cold.

When they looked into it further, they found that the more social contacts the volunteers had, the fewer colds they developed. The idea is that even when you're infected with a virus, you don't necessarily develop an illness, and those who had six or more social contacts every two weeks had a substantially lower rate of developing the symptoms and signs of a cold than those who had fewer than two every two weeks.

That was a pretty crude measure. We're not talking about the quality of their relationships, just the number. A study from the University of Texas Medical School was particularly interesting. In it, people were asked two questions before they had open-heart surgery: Do you draw strength from your religious faith, whatever faith that might be'? And are you a member of some group that meets regularly? It could be a church, a synagogue, a civic group, a bingo game.

Those who answered no to both questions had a sevenfold-higher risk of death within six months after open-heart surgery than those who answered yes to both questions. Twenty-one percent vs. 3 percent. Those who answered yes to one or the other were in an intermediate range.