Are Negative Emotions Causing You To Get Sick?

[needimprovement]

I challenge this assertion:

 

Studies show that 85% of all disease is rooted in our emotions.

Source: http://bosanchez.ph/are-negative-emotions-causing-you-to-get-sick/

 

 

While it is well known that one's emotional state has a profound effect on health, I am skeptical that 85% of all disease is caused by negative emotional states.

 

I will appreciate if somebody can provide me with adequate, peer-reviewed proof to convince me that the vast majority of diseases are psychosomatic in origin. I do not challenge the existence of psychosomatic illnesses - their existence is well documented. While I'm not a medical doctor and I have no counter proof, my experience and reason tell me that this assertion is false.

 

Otherwise "psychological" , "emotional" one and the same.

 

I've read the following article, but did not see where the authors cited that most diseases are rooted in the emotions. At the beginning of the article, the authors stated that "somataform" disorders are "common," but do not say how common. "Common" could be 20% of disorders, or 90% of disorders.

 

http://www.uwo.ca/fammed/ian/somatizationmain.htm

 

I think the important parts of this article is that Western science needs to integrate the psychological aspects of care with the physical aspects of care. In other words, I don't think the authors believe that emotions are the cause of most diseases, but rather the most effective care integrates caring for biological as well as psychological aspects of patient care.

 

If somebody can find adequate proof, then I will accept the premise.

Edited August 10, 2010 by needimprovement

[insane_alien]

its hardly a reputable source on health matters.

 

the primary causes of disease are microbes.

 

yes, your emotions do play a role as they can affect the performance of your immune system, but this requires studies of hundreds of people to extract a signal.

[PhDwannabe]

Needimprovement, I'm not a medical doctor either. Luckily, I don't think we totally need to be here. I am a student of psychology at the graduate level, with a fair amount of experience understanding, arguing about, and combating pseudoscience. You are absolutely right to be skeptical of a claim like: "85% of all disease is rooted in our emotions." Your wariness is very well-placed here, and you've got a good head on your shoulders with regard to this particular issue. As a psychological researcher, I can tell you about some questions a person could and should immediately ask when they see something like that is:

 

1) First and foremost: What studies? Show them to me!

2) Through what statistical procedure was it possible to arrive at a number of both such drama and such apparent precision as 85%? Certainly, elaborate processes of population estimation were used. I'd love somebody to walk me through them.

3) How have these studies operationalized and measured "emotion," and defined "rooted in emotions?" Are we talking about emotion's immediate effects? Are we including emotions' effects which are mediated through other processes? (For instance, say a depressed person drinks themselves into cirrhosis. Should we include that? Say an individual with poor body image has a bunch of casual sex in a crude effort to improve it, and they get chlamydia. Should we include that one too?)

4) What are we counting as "disease?" Just physical stuff? Are we including mental disorders? It seems a bit tautological to say that depression--serious public health problem that it is, of course--is "rooted in our emotions." If those are counted as part of that 85%, we might be, uhh... cheating a little.

5) Are we talking about mere individual incidences of diseases, or some sort of total amount of morbidity? For instance, does stress cause 85% of cold cases, or is it responsible for that proportion of their severity or duration?

6) How does this claimed effect play out in different areas? Is it across the board, or does emotion account for, say, 95% of colds but only 40% of cancer, and 65% of heart disease?

7) Is this claim actually based on causal data? Maybe it's only based on correlational data, and a third variable accounts for an apparent connection between negative emotion and illness. Or indeed, maybe it runs in the other direction--I was pretty down the last time I had the flu! Without being able to examine the methodology of the studies, we just can't know. People make improper causal inferences based on correlational findings constantly. (This is being pretty charitable: assuming that there even is such a finding of this magnitude. More likely that the point is moot, because the finding doesn't exist.)

 

 

Can Bo Sanchez answer these? I'm going to put my money on "no" (rather than into one of his get-rich-quick schemes, eh?). Gee, I guess that means he shouldn't be making the claims. Funny notion. If you actually read the stuff linked, it's the usual postmodern spirituality dreck: scientists/doctors/academics are a bunch of evil materialists who want to hook you on medication/take your money/suck your soul out into a tube and make it into soylent green. Purchase my book/DVD/conference tickets and learn how to reconnect with your inner spiritual being/past lives/god-given right to do whatever. Variations on these claims are the bread and butter of an industry which makes separates millions of fools from billions of their dollars annually. See this excellent book, not to mention this one.

 

 

Enough of that. So, on the other side of it, you're absolutely right:

 

it is well known that one's emotional state has a profound effect on health

 

The area of psychoneuroimmunology has been doing good science in this area for more than a generation. As you might gather from the name of the discipline, much study focuses on the effects of stress or negative emotion as mediated in vivo by immune functionality. We find all sorts of interesting things about how stress hormones, at excessively high dosages and durations, depress levels of various kinds of immune cells necessary to fight infection, cancer, you name it. And this is not to speak of other, perhaps simpler and more well-known connections between stress, hypertension, and cardiovascular disease. For a decent review of psychoneuroimmunology, check out a (fairly) recent meta-analysis like the one at bottom--hopefully, you've got database access of some kind. You likely won't find the authors making insane claims about what proportion of human disease is attributable to anything.

 

In sum, your hunches are correct: it's important. In fact, it's really important. But it ain't 85% important.* Almost nothing is.

 

 

Peace,

DJ

 

 

 

Zorrilla, E. P., Luborsky, L., McKay, J. R., Rosenthal, R., Houldin, A., Tax, A., McCorkle, R., Seligman, D. A., & Schmidt, K. (2001). The relationship of depression and stressors to immunological assays: a meta-analytic review. Brain Behavior and Immunity, 15(3), 199-226

 

 

 

 

 

* As a postscript, this is also an example of one of the myriad situations in which people insanely divide up a chain of causal factors, all perhaps of varying levels of necessity and sufficiency for some goal, into fractions of 100%. Look--stress may have caused the cold to get unnecessarily worse. But the virus causes the cold. But the poor handwashing habit caused the contraction of the virus. And the guy who should've called in sick today caused it to sit there on the door handle. We can't meaningfully divvy up "blame" here like that. Now, we could create some kind of experimental study where we altered each step individually and observed what the different effects were within a big sample, but that's a bit different--it doesn't allow us to make baldfaced claims about what is whatever percent whatever. What's responsible for your car moving: gas pedal, fuel injector, spark plugs, drive train, or the air in the tires? Sheesh! All of them!

[Dan6541]

I'm not sure about the 85% thing, but studies have shown people with a more positive attitude live longer.