Mind over matter

I used to do a form of physical therapy that focused on mind-body connections. Quite often, the therapist would ask me to do something I had no idea how to do – say, to bend some part of my body in a direction I wasn’t aware it could bend at all. But I would try and she seemed to feel that my trying produced some results. So it appeared that it was possible to send a mental command out even without being sure that any part of my body could actually receive the command. One reason this made sense to me was that I had the impression that great athletes, and dancers, and yoga adepts really can do things with their bodies that seem simply inconceivable for others: there are circuits within us that lie dormant, or scarcely perceived, but that can be activated. And trying, mentally, to activate them is itself a part of the process of bringing them into action.

If all that is so, then perhaps the same principle can be applied to cancer. I have no idea how to issue mental commands to my immune system. As far as I can tell, this system operates on its own without any conscious input from me. And yet – what if there is a way to guide my immune system (or other parts of the body’s potential defenses against cancer)? I certainly wouldn’t give up on scientific medicine, but if I can give the drugs a boost, well, so much the better.

It seems, for example, that part of what is going on in cancer is that tumors have ingenious ways of avoiding notice by the body’s immune defenses. If immune cells can’t recognize tumors as hostile intruders, they won’t attack. Some current immunotherapy drugs, the “checkpoint inhibitors,” address this difficulty; as I understand it, the specific problem they address is that tumors fool immune cells’ “checkpoints,” and the way they address this problem is to inhibit – turn off – those checkpoints. So presumably the same result could be achieved if I could somehow order my immune system to turn off those checkpoints.

Could I possibly do this? I really don’t know. I do know that cancer affects people in very mysterious ways. Some people go into remission without using any of the apparatus of modern scientific medicine. What have these people done to achieve this? Again, I don’t know. But I think it stands to reason that if people have any power to control how their immune systems function, they need to try to exercise that power in order to activate it. I haven’t done by any means as much of this as I’ve meant to, but lately I’ve been thinking more about how to go about it.

How one should exercise this power, even if it exists, is mysterious. Maybe the right approach is to seek a zen tranquility, in which the body moves of its own accord towards a natural harmony. A visualization CD that I have encourages you to visualize friendly magical beings around a powerful, healing light (though it has some tougher images of immune cells at work as well). Or perhaps, particularly with respect to checkpoint inhibitors, one should visualize the immune cells achieving a form of grace, in which each one “was blind but now I see,” and I’ve tried to visualize exactly this.

But I also incline to another strategy. Good health may feel like natural harmony or salvation, but the microscopic world of the immune system doesn’t seem very zen. It might be more accurate to describe the immune system as a regime of constant slaughter, in which your body’s cells set out to destroy the agents of illness that they encounter. Here’s a description of the functioning of “killer T cells,” from a google search: “When the perfectly shaped virus antigen on an infected cell fits into the Killer T-cell receptor, the T-cell releases perforin and cytotoxins. Perforin first makes a pore, or hole, in [the] membrane of the infected cell. Cytotoxins go directly inside the cell through this pore, destroying it and any viruses inside.” This is the world of violence, and that violence against the tumors is exactly what I want to incite. So perhaps the right image to visualize is of immune cells like soldiers, equipped with night goggles to make sure the cancer cells cannot hide under cover of darkness, and ready to attack with all their might – and I’ve tried this too.

Perhaps, however, images that try to echo real elements of the immune system are too literalistic. Maybe a better possibility is more metaphorical: if I want the tumors gone, what I want is for them to be erased from my body. Teresa imagines, and I’ve tried to as well, an eraser vigorously attacking each of the tumors. This image of erasure strikes me as vivid and physical and also a bit funny, and all of that may be ideal.

Or maybe one should simply send out a direction to the immune system, telling it to attack the tumors. This may be a call which there are no circuits to carry and no recipients to answer. Or it may be the kind of call that begins the difficult process of learning to do something you never had to do before. In any event, the only way to find out is to try.