So many things today that are common knowledge were not understood even 100 years ago. One such area that has gone through two separate revolutions in thinking in this short time span is the relationship between health and sickness.
Up until the middle of the nineteenth century, bad air was thought to be a main cause of sickness and infectious disease. With the formulation of the germ theory of disease, bacteria was found to be the chief culprit causing many of our illnesses. During the last fifty years, our modern men of medicine have now been telling us that mental stress and our emotions are the major cause of disease ranging from ulcers to fatal heart attacks.
Psychosomatic illness is not just a “buzz word.” It is a hard reality. Many doctors estimate from 50% to 80% of all our sickness and disease today find their cause in our faulty way of thinking. The intense stress and emotional turmoil we place ourselves under by our modern fast-paced lifestyle are literally deteriorating every organ in our bodies.
How this can happen can be seen if we understand that the emotional center of the brain is constantly transmitting impulses through nerve fibers to every organ and area of the body. It is now well known and medically proven that emotional stress can produce almost any illness imaginable.
The three main ways in which the emotional center produces disease and illness are by changing the amount of blood flowing to an organ, by influencing the secretions of certain glands and by affecting the tension in our muscles.
The next time you are embarrassed, notice how the blood vessels in your face open up, causing you to blush. The next time you are really scared, notice how your heart begins to beat extremely fast as your adrenal glands begin to increase their secretions. Finally, become very angry, and watch how you clench your jaw and send pain throughout your body. If we amplify these occurrences many times over many years, we can start to understand how constant emotional stress will slowly break down our entire body, weaken our disease-fighting resistance and destroy our lives.
The following chart will further illustrate this point:
EMOTIONS DISEASE
Envy Heart Trouble
Guilt Diabetes
Anger Colitis
Worry Ulcers
Jealousy Cancer
Hate Constipation/Diarrhea
Fear High Blood Pressure
You can probably draw arrows from any emotion to any disease and vice versa and over a period of twenty, thirty or forty years find a cause-and-effect relationship. 100 years ago, medicine understood very little about how the mind could affect our health. Today it is a fact that stress is our number-one killer.
In the Book of Proverbs, God has so overwhelmingly shown us how the mind affects our health that it is amazing it took medical science 3,000 years to acknowledge what the Bible has stated all along.
May the five verses below, from the Book of Proverbs, serve to demonstrate that God is indeed the “Great Physician,” and that His knowledge of our emotions is right in stride with our most up-to-date findings in the field:
“A joyful heart is good medicine, But a broken spirit dries up the bones.” (Proverbs 17:22).
“Pleasant words are a honeycomb, Sweet to the soul and healing to the bones.” (Proverbs 16:24).
“Anxiety in a man’s heart weighs it down, But a good word makes it glad.” (Proverbs 12:25).
“A soothing tongue is a tree of life, But perversion in it crushes the spirit.” (Proverbs 15:4).
“A tranquil heart is life to the body, But passion is rottenness to the bones.” (Proverbs 14:30).
One hundred years ago medical science knew very little about how our emotions could influence our well-being, but 3,000 years ago a man named Solomon knew all about it.
We read further, from the Book of Philippians, the best medical advice ever given out:
“Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all comprehension, shall guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good repute, if there is any excellence and if anything, worthy of praise, let your mind dwell on these things.” (Philippians 4:6-8).