Bokelskere.no

To complainers everywhere: Turn up the volume!

But I have never admired the "natural" or believed in the "wisdom of the body". Death is as "natural" as anything gets, and the body has always seemed to me like a retarted Siamese twin dragging along behind me, a hysteric really, dangerously overreacting, in my case, to everyday allergens and minute ingestions of sugar. I would put my faith in science, even if it meant that the dumb old body was about to be transmogrified into an evil clown - puking, trembling, swelling, surrendering significant parts, and oozing postsurgical fluids.

The link between the immune system, cancer,and the emotions was cobbled together somewhat imaginatively in the 1970s. It had been known for some time that extreme stress could debilitate certain aspects of the immune system. Torture a lab animal long enough, as the famous stress investigator Hans Selye did in the 1930s, and it becomes less healthy and resistant to disease. It was apparently a short leap, for many, to the conclusion that positive feelings might be the opposite to stress - capable of boosting the immune system and providing the key to health, whether the threat is a microbe or a tumor.