Mind-Body Connection Proven at Last?

Take two Tylenol and call me in the morning? Research now suggests that our emotional and physical pain are interrelated. Maybe Tylenol really is good for more than just headaches.

This is the dichotomy between even the best experimental science and real life as we clinicians see it.

Who has not seen a kid put his or her hand on the umbilicus and say “my tummy hurts” when he or she doesn’t want to go to school?  That child is likely trying to avoid something unpleasant like a bully or a difficult assignment.  Oh, our beliefs in the separation of body and mind are so deeply engrained that adults might even think they are faking.  But perhaps children are just more open and direct.

I am not so sure kids fake.  It may be adults who fake.  Maybe you want to see yourself as strong or invulnerable.  Yes, there can be a lot of payoffs for saying that things that happen in your mind just do not affect your body.

Maybe women are more able to see the connection. I have known at least one woman who, under some clinically significant marital stress, told me she would just take an aspirin and go to sleep, “because it helped.”

And I think it was the Orientals who came up with the acupuncture charts.  I’m pretty sure they had it right.  I remember learning that any illness, be it psychological or physical, was an interruption of the flow of “chi” force.

So this guy Gregory Webster is a psychologist at the University of Florida.  He gets to do a little drug research by giving folks 500mg of Tylenol — or placebo — twice daily.  He then measures them with questionnaires after they are subjected to computerized cyber-ball games.  These games went on in such a way that things did not have “reasons.”  This was intended to simulate frustration.

He then used functional brain imaging to show what the questionnaires seem to suggest is neuro-physiological.  The feelings of social rejection that are ameliorated by acetaminophen show a diminished activity for social rejection on brain scanning.

Before I had read far enough to find out what Webster was using, I was able to retrieve in my head a crystal clear image of my first social rejection.  It may be very much like other people’s experience.

Third and fourth grade public school physical education class, in a black-topped parking lot, kids chose other kids for Dodge Ball.  I was always the fattest, and always the last chosen.  Sometimes I went home and cried.  Not that I could have blamed the kids; I mean, I was always the first struck out when hit by the ball.  I couldn’t play the damned game to save my soul.

Years later I did laugh at Ben Stiller’s movie Dodge Ball.  Ah, the idolatry of sports as religion.

I think at least once when I came home I said my head hurt and got a baby aspirin.

Look, there have got to be a bunch of fibers in the frontal lobe that carry physical pain and interact with emotional pain and vice versa.  My gut is telling me that this is not a time to get deep into brain mapping.  This is a time to observe people.

Gregory Webster is the consummate hyper-cautious academic, telling people not to go out and take Tylenol for social rejection. Oh, how sweet.

I believe that even without neural maps, most anybody could figure out that pain — whether physical or psychic — is not all that different.   No matter where it comes from.  Tylenol (acetaminophen) is both cheap and relatively safe.  I mean, if you follow the directions on the bottle you are highly unlikely to get liver failure or such problems.

People everywhere are taking Tylenol — or aspirin — for some kind of distress so vague they may not be able to discuss it verbally.  I cannot count the numbers of dirt-poor folks in county clinics who have told me they feel better after taking Tylenol or aspirin.

I was only in first year medical school when I met an aristocratic older woman in the bar at the Ritz in Paris.  She told me her family was fighting bitterly over money. I told her – with a French accent that was then quite amusing to her — that my aunts and others in my family in the states were fighting over money, too.  This was even though nobody seemed to have enough to fight over.

I remember she was elegant and well-polished in designer clothes and she suppressed her own laughter at me.  “We have enough to fight over,” she said, “There is nothing I can do,” she continued. “I will go to my room upstairs and take a headache powder and go to sleep.”

Take two Tylenol and call me in the morning.  I would never have imagined this lady could have had it so together.