A Valentine for Hyde Park
H yde Park has ample reason to celebrate Valentine's Day as a neighborhood. According to researchers, relationships, even the informal type of exchanges between neighbors, the kind we experience while walking the avenues, visiting with people in the park and the post office, and talking over the fence, help us grow and maintain our health and balance. In fact, some health practitioners are saying relationships are the key to our overall well-being. In my experience, Hyde Park seems to foster those kinds of exchanges more readily than most neighborhoods.
Pioneering cardiologist Dean
Ornish, in his book Love & Survival, makes a very bold statement.
Referring to love and intimacy,
he writes, "I am not aware of any
other factor in medicine -- not
diet, not smoking, not exercise,
not stress, not genetics, not drugs,
not surgery -- that has a greater
impact on our quality of life, incidence of illness, and premature
death from all causes." He goes on
to say "If a new drug had the same
impact as love and intimacy, virtually every doctor in the country
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would be recommending it to their patients. In fact, it would be
malpractice not to prescribe it."
Even less intense relationships than love and intimacy are instrumental in maintaining health. Researchers have found that the number of relationships is important, not just the quality. Being involved in the community -- school, neighborhood, church,family, etc. -- seems to make us healthier. Earlier research pointed to Ornish's conclusion. In the 1970s, Jerry Lewis, a Dallas psychiatrist, using a family systems approach, began studying healthy families. In a lecture delivered at the University of Texas to Austin social workers, Lewis raised the issue of family functioning and physical health: "We've been able, by some painstaking kind of history-taking, to identify a group of families, who've been families for twenty years, who've never had a serious life-threatening illness, who've had no hospitalizations, other than for childbirth, have had no fractures. You go into their homes and open their medicine cabinet doors, you'll find toothpaste and aspirin. "Another group of families, with the same social and economic background, who, in the course of twenty years of being a family, have had sixteen hospitalizations, separate and apart from childbirth, have had three life-threatening illnesses, eleven fractures. You go to their bathrooms, open their medicine cabinet door and everything falls out. Sixty percent of what falls out is over-the-counter preparations. A high percentage of them are for nerves or for gastric distress or those kinds of things. |
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"We've been very much involved in trying to understand
-- how is this possible? What is this all about? We don't expect
any simple answer, but, is their way of being a family, in their way
of loving, fighting, meeting crises, dealing with life's inevitable
slings and arrows, that somehow influences the family members'
immune systems to be more or less effective in warding off disease
agents?"
As a Valentine to the neighborhood, we are posting on the neighborhood web site the complete transcript of Dr. Lewis' lecture. www.hydepark-na.org/archives.html I have found his talk a rich source of insights about the family I came from and the family I helped create. I invite you to download it and give it a look.
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