POSITIVE PAIN BLOCKERS
Norman Cousins was a doctor who treated leprosy and edited the Saturday Review magazine in the early 1960s. After suffering a painful and prolonged illness, he became fascinated on ways in which to fight against the “pain intensifiers” that he identified as negative emotions that increase the amount of pain a person feels. Cousins concluded that if negative emotions could produce chemical changes in the human body, then positive emotions such as hope, faith, love, joy, will to live, creativity and playfulness could counteract the results of negative emotions and thereby reduce pain. Cousins began a research group at the UCLA medical school and studied the effects of positive emotions on health and pain. He surveyed 649 oncologists and asked them what psychological and emotional factors in their patients seemed important to them. Over 90 percent of those surveyed assigned the highest value to the attitudes of hope and optimism. Paul Brand writes about this research, “One of the most important…
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