2 - The Mind Matters for Seeing Our Blind Spot

Summary

An important step in narrowing the gap between approaches to the mind and approaches to the body came with the recognition in the early 2000s that the common factor associated with many of our major public health conditions such as heart disease, diabetes, and obesity was a pattern of autonomic imbalance (too much sympathetic nervous system and too little parasympathetic nervous system activity). This is one example of how persistent psychological stressors can lead a physical illness with a life of its own. While most of modern medicine continued to ignore the contributions of toxic stress to our common public health targets, Dean Ornish, MS, risked his career to find out if behavior changes could reverse heart disease.