The Myth of Normal 72

life, and working hard, and trying to please people,” she told me. “With MS, I finally had a reason to relax and focus on myself.” Why the Rise of Autoimmune Diseases? Genetic explanations missing the mark, the hunt for elusive “environmental factors” continues; in the modern world, there are bound to be many.[23] I believe, however, that one such factor is salient, ubiquitous, and, for the most part, woefully overlooked. Here the very treatment of inflammatory conditions offers an essential, even obvious clue about their origins, a hint that may help resolve the mystery of where in the world these illnesses come from. We physicians frequently dole out large doses of synthesized stress hormones for inflammations of the skin, joints, brain, intestines, lungs, kidneys, and so on. We do so for a good reason: hormones often alleviate or ameliorate symptoms, albeit with many potentially hazardous side effects. Yet we rarely think to ask ourselves—or our patients—whether stress itself may, just may, have something to do with the condition we are treating. There is plenty of evidence for such a view. A recent Swedish study in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed that people with stressrelated disorders had significantly greater risk of autoimmune disease.[24] Tellingly, those who had been treated for their stress-related mental conditions with SSRI-type medication—the most widely prescribed class of antidepressants,[*] of which Prozac is probably the most famous—had lower risk for autoimmunity: a clear indication of the bodymind, to use Dr. Candace Pert’s phrasing for the interflow of psychology and physiology in humans, and of the role of emotions in illness. Not only in humans, either. Laboratory mice in a 2013 study were subjected to three weeks’ stress, meant to mimic “the diversity of stressful events in daily human life.” That meant immersing the creatures in cold water, wafting predator odors in their direction, making them endure bright lights or restraint or isolation—unpredictable stresses of variable duration they could not easily adapt to. The researchers called this “chronic variable stress.” Mice so exposed were found to be at an elevated risk for pathogenic