Airborne for colds? How about taking a load off…

I was driving to work to see a patient and heard an impressive story about the nature of stress and healing. Did you hear it? It was yet another criticism (seems like there have been a lot lately) of an herbal/vitamin product. It started me thinking about how much internal stress is relieved by BodyTalk.

Essentially, NPR reported that the millions of people each winter who take Airborne for colds and flus may not be boosting their immune system in quite the way that they thought. No research has ever been done to show that Airborne works any better than placebo, and the company’s own study demonstrated that people still took 5 days on average to get over a cold.

But at the same time, I think that many people avert colds and genuinely feel healthier after they reach for Airborne. So if the ingredients in the product don’t do much, what’s helping them feel better?

NPR had a great answer: reaching for a pill that you really believe is giving you an immune advantage reduces your stress. It feels good to do something nice and supportive for yourself. And stress reduction, as the report points out, can keep the viruses away.

To prove it, they quoted some quality research done by Sheldon Cohen at Carnegie-Mellon University:

In one study, Cohen and his collaborators interviewed 400 healthy adults about how stressed out they are. They asked questions such as:

— Do the demands you face exceed your ability to cope?

— How anxious, angry, or depressed have you felt over the last week?

“After we administered the questionnaires,” says Cohen, “we exposed the people in the study to one of five viruses that cause the common cold.”

Cohen’s team then tracked the volunteers for six days and found that those who had reported higher levels of stress were twice as likely to catch a cold as those who were less stressed out.

This correlation has held up in two follow-up studies. Cohen has also evaluated long-term stressors such as marriage problems or the loss of a job.

“So the longer the stress lasted,” says Cohen, “the greater the probability that the participants exposed to the virus would actually catch a cold.”

This statement corroborates boatloads of data on stress and immunity, or “mind-body medicine.” Essentially, to have a major improvement in your health and ability to fight infections, you need to reduce your stress. This fact has been shown in blinded studies.

But, as NPR points out, reducing your stress can be a difficult thing to do. It’s a lot easier for most people to reach for a pill.

With BodyTalk, however, we have a new weapon against stress. BodyTalk changes the way that you function from the inside. It changes your relationship to your stressors so that you don’t have to quit your job or spend Christmas on the beach in order to feel more relaxed.

One patient said it best when he said, “I just feel more at peace with myself and my life.”

Unburdening yourself in this way will do more to keep the viruses away than any pill.

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