In this post, I want to review two books with a common theme: Bruce Lipton’s 2005 The Biology of Belief and Lissa Rankin’s more recent Mind over Medicine.
Lipton, in his book, sets about demolishing what he himself admits is a straw man: the notion that genes determine disease and its progression. In his view, genes only provide a blueprint for building proteins, and it is the cellular receptor proteins on the membrane which drive gene expression in response to their environment. Few genes are self-expressing.
This hardly seems controversial. Nevertheless, the book is, even if it is not its main intent, a good and very readable laymen’s introduction to the molecular biology of the cell, and worth reading for that reason alone.
The “belief” in the title refers essentially to the ability of the brain to command, whether consciously or unconsciously, the production of neurotransmitters and other signalling proteins which then tell cells what to do. This view, as Lipton acknowledges, is based on the ideas of Candace Pert, whose work Molecules of Emotion I reviewed earlier. Interestingly, Lipton reports that this signalling intelligence was first developed in unicellular amoeba communities, where the signalling compounds are released into the environment and operate between distinct individuals. Multicellular organisms came only later, and took over this system of signalling to regulate the behavior of the community of cells which had now come to be permanently associated in a single individual. Thus cellular intelligence underpins the intelligence of more complex organisms.
Despite its expositional merits, however, Lipton’s book does not get us much closer to an understanding of the actual mechanisms behind the control of cell behavior. For the most part, he relies on somewhat forced analogies from quantum physics, the pertinence of which is far from established. Whilst he seems authoritative in matters of cell biology, what he says about quantum physics is frequently wrong and sometimes breathtakingly so. Essentially his main argument is the same one picked up on by Rankin, which may well be valid but is nevertheless lacking in detail, namely that the body’s self-healing mechanisms are activated by relaxation and disactivated by stress, i.e. by the activation of the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis.
These self-healing mechanisms may be astonishing, and may depend to a significant degree on the variables the authors cite, but they remain quite mysterious in their details. One possibility one might have hoped Lipton would explore, but which he does not, is that there is a macro equivalent of the cellular apoptosis mechanism which leads entire organisms to self-destruct when signals in their environment communicate to them that they no longer play a role in the community. This may be a gross simplification but it would fit with Lipton’s overarching metaphor whereby the human body is, in many ways, merely the cell writ large.
Lipton also prefigures Rankin by taking to task the medical community for overuse of prescription medicines without a proper understanding of their systemic functioning. However he does not, and cannot, establish any principles to determine whether or not the use of pharmaceuticals is appropriate in individual instances and whether the other healing resources of the body have been sufficiently activated and explored. As such, the criticism, even if one may have sympathy for it, seems superficial.
If Lipton’s book is written from the perspective of a medical researcher, Rankin comes at the subject as a practising doctor disillusioned at the lack of holistic attention to health which characterizes the Western medical community. Failure to grasp the holistic nature of the body’s self-healing mechanisms means that many people get poor medical advice and care. Rankin is at her best campaigning for a much greater awareness on the part of medical caregivers of how healing actually takes place (though in this respect she seems to draw heavily on the admirable precedent of Bernie Siegel).
Much of Rankin’s argument centers on the unnoticed efficacy of placebos, a notion she draws from Lipton without, it seems to me, adequate attribution; indeed even some of the examples she cites already appear in The Biology of Belief. Rankin claims to have researched the placebo effect extensively, but at least sometimes she appears to permit misconception of the originality of her research. (A recent article in Scientific American is worth a look for anyone who doubts the strength of the placebo effect).
There are a number of important principles stressed in Rankin’s book which are often absent from other self-help guides directed towards recovering and maintaining health and which are welcome. Her insistence on finding meaning in life as a key contributing factor to wellness rings true, as does her defense of the power of affirmations given the need to override the negative messages which we are usually passing on to our bodies. She is also right in pointing to the value of community, although she passes lightly over important shortcomings of institutions like family and church the drawbacks of which may very well, in many instances, outweigh the benefits, and which are certainly some way short of the ideal. These institutions have quite likely been at the root of many of the health problems people experience. Moreover, even if community may be as important as diet and lifestyle, the recommendation to seek it out is difficult to operationalize if one does not have a healthy form of it to begin with. Rankin probably should also be commended for pointing to the importance of sexual life, but again, there is no clue in the pages of the book as to what might constitute a healthy configuration or even that this is a legitimate and important question to ask.
Unfortunately, for all its admirable qualities, Rankin’s book appears to take far too lightly the difficulty of modifying ones beliefs and actions in order to obtain better health outcomes, a mistake that Lipton avoids, since he is well aware that most of the body’s beliefs are encoded in subconscious scripts. The “diagnosis and prescription” part of the book is the least satisfying one, often asking the reader to answer in a few sentences what many seekers have needed decades to unearth and understand. In this sense, Rankin’s book looks like a typical US cultural artefact which uncritically endorses the errors of the positive thinking fraternity, discussed by me here.
This is disappointing, because Rankin is a much better self-publicist than Lipton and has acquired a significant new media voice which could have been used to promote deeper healing modalities than those she herself is able to offer. This unfortunately means she gives the impression of overextending herself where greater humility might have been in order, and accordingly coming across as superficial. Parts of her own “prescription” for herself read like an awkward list of endorsements of particular personalities, and there is no indication why they should be of value to someone else; they appear to be simply plucked from the air. Making a diagnosis of the factors in ones life which promote illness and writing a prescription to deal with them – even if one accepts this way of speaking – remains a major task and a daunting endeavor.
These criticisms aside, it is clear from both books that a major shift in social consciousness around health and healing is underway and increasingly forcing its way into the mainstream. For those who continue to place undue faith in the mechanistic and simplistic ideas which have hitherto underpinned Western allopathic medicine, either or both books will be very helpful antidotes. We may be still a long way off adequately describing how the body’s self-healing mechanisms work, but there seems no doubt at all that they make a key contribution to health outcomes and, if only for this reason, should be nurtured. In reality, of course, the quest for optimal health only dictates what the spiritual path anyway demands on other counts: a conscious uncovering of reality, and the courage to listen to what we already know.