Doctors Need to Ask about You Instead of About your Disease

Interview:   Andreas Moritz and Raena Morgan  (2011)

Raena Morgan: You have a quote in your book from Hippocrates. It’s about knowing the person that has the disease rather than knowing what the disease is, right?

Andreas Moritz: Yes.

RM: That’s pretty powerful, and he said that a long time ago.

AM: Yes. That question is hardly ever asked when a person or patient goes to visit a doctor. He doesn’t ask what do you eat or how is your home, how do you feel at home? Do you feel stressed at work? We now know that stress is still the most leading cause of illness, so we all say that but we don’t ask what are you stressed about in your life, we just ask, you know, we just say ‘oh we need to do some tests.’ So they run some tests and that’s the first thing they say and so take the blood test and have a cat scan and whatever, and then we’ll find out what’s bothering you.

RM: That’s the scientific medical model.

AM: Yes. The first question would be, if a person came to me with problems, I’d say ‘what’s bothering you?’

RM: You would say ‘what’s bothering you?’

AM: Yeah. And you usually get an answer and then you probe a little bit and they start coming out and say ‘well, I just- I’m going through this divorce and it’s so painful.’ Well that is a big stress. Ask anyone who’s going through a divorce how painful that is, that’s almost like a battle they’re fighting. That means you are in the fight or flight response. What is your adrenaline doing? Where is it? That means you’re constantly producing stress hormones that the body is not designed to do. If you are producing so much cortisol, the immune system is suppressed.

RM: All right.

AM: Cortisol being a stress hormone that deals with stressful situations. So once we make so much cortisol, it is such a powerful acid, it can destroy so many functions in the body, suppress them, that there is no chance for your body to heal under stress, it’s impossible. So the patients should be considered first. Who is the person-

RM: Then you know.

AM: -…on what you have. And what you have is irrelevant compared to who you are and what you are able to deal with in your life.

RM: Well, stress is unrelenting in western life, you know.

AM: It is true and not true. You can see it both ways. If I travel to an airport and I’m about to lose my plane and say ‘oh my god, I’m not going to make it, and I have a deadline to meet and if I’m re-carded then I may feel that this is the worst thing that could happen to me,’ you might have a heart attack. If another person catching the same plane, going to the same place, the same conference or whatever and is not making it says ‘oh I’d prefer to stay home anyways. I’d like to be with my family, my kids.’

RM: Taking it in stride.

AM: So the first person has severe stress, the second person doesn’t have any stress at all, he says ‘well that’s how life is.’ It’s like a river, it sometimes turns left, sometimes right and you just have to be with the flow, and there must be a good reason why this happens. So it has a completely different interpretation of a given situation. One becomes stressful over it, the other person doesn’t, and so stress is not delivered to us like mail from the outside.

RM: For some people it is.

AM: It is our response to that situation and not understanding why this situation happens in the first place that we start rejecting it or trying to protect ourselves against it. When we try to protect ourselves against it, we have a fight or flight response situation, and that lowers your immunity, your digestion is impaired. You cannot digest food when you’re stressed. You have a lot undigested food, it clogs up your lymphatic system and then you have issues like cancer or heart disease, diabetes.

RM: And so it is in a sense psychosomatic, according to that quote from Hippocrates.

AM: There is no illness that is not including the mind, because the two are not really separate, we have made them separate. Psychiatry deals with just the mind and a typical health practitioner deals with the body. They should never have been separated, mind and body are one. You can never say that I have a thought only. You have a thought and neuropeptides, powerful hormones in the body, by every thought, feeling, and emotion that you have, so you can never separate the two. Any kind of thought, feeling, fear, anxiety, expectation, defensiveness, jealousy, it all translates into biochemistry in the body, therefore there is no separation between the two.

RM: Is there a risk though of blaming the victim for their disease if you take that approach?

AM: Not really.

RM: Like why have you given yourself cancer, you know?

AM: Yes. If you see cancer as a punishment-

RM: All right.

AM: -then it becomes a blame. But if you see cancer as a survival mechanism and say well, my body is doing the very best it can to help relieve itself of the burden, now I can unburden my body. So that puts the power back into yourself, so there’s no reason to blame yourself and say okay, you’ve allowed this to happen and maybe there’s a good reason. Any person, any cancer survivor I speak to I say ‘how do you see your cancer?’ They say ‘well, it’s the best thing that ever happened to me. Everything changed in my life for the better.’ And now if you are going for harsh treatments and you suffer terribly, you would say ‘this was the worst period in my life.’

RM: Okay.

AM: So again how you respond to the cancer, that is up to you, and it’s not about blaming anyone or anything.

RM: All right.

AM: It is about seeing it as a blessing and then turning it around to your advantage so that you can grow from it, you can get stronger than ever, you can deal with some things that you have never been dealing with, like feeling not good enough, feeling sorry for oneself, feeling like always I have to be careful, low self confidence. So cancer can turn these things around, I’ve seen it many times. People start standing up for themselves again. They are no longer taking, what people say, the crap of what other people give them and they say ‘no more. I love myself more, I honor myself more, I respect myself more, I accept myself the way I am, it doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks of me.’ So instead of giving the attention to what other people might think, they say ‘I’m important here. I’m just as important as I see other people as being important.’ And so not putting ourselves but putting ourselves first, and that is sometimes what cancer patients need to do, put themselves right first.

RM: Become their own advocate.

AM: Yes. And loving themselves, because there are certain things they didn’t like about themselves that they hated and that they were sorry for that they felt guilty about. A lot of guilt drives cancer patients into trying to please everyone so that they love them back because they don’t think they deserve to be loved.

RM: But they are.

AM: And they are.