When Illness Lingers, Do Not Frett; a Good Mood Is Also Medicine

Among the cancer patients I have seen over the years, those who survive longest are almost all optimists. From my own experience, patients who fret easily not only do not recover easily but also handle family and doctor-patient relationships poorly.

In every word and deed of an anxious person, others can feel his or her negative emotions; wounding others with words is common. So other people, when dealing with such patients, mostly keep a respectful distance.

Although I greatly admire the great physician's sincerity advocated by Sun Simiao, treating every patient without discrimination and saving their lives with compassion, in reality I myself cannot do this. In an age of frequent doctor-patient disputes, it is not rational for a physician to be defenseless against patients or families who are verbally or behaviorally aggressive.

I often observe and judge, in my own way, whether a patient or family member is aggressive, and quietly decide whether to avoid certain patients and families. I believe this is an unspoken rule observed by all doctors under heaven. Sometimes doctors inevitably misjudge: patients who fret easily may not themselves be aggressive, but they easily put others on guard. When a doctor dares not take risks for a patient, it means the patient may lose a chance to be saved.

So patients with better psychological makeup, who are frequently pleasant of countenance, do indeed more easily gain doctors' trust, and doctors are willing to take risks for such patients to carve out a way to survive. Anxious, distracted patients easily affect doctors' moods, sometimes not only making doctors afraid to risk treating them, but making doctors afraid to take risks for other patients too.

A friend of mine is an ophthalmologist. She recently told me that a patient in their department jumped off a building and committed suicide a few days ago, leaving the whole department's doctors on tenterhooks lately, afraid to take patients. Doctors become more timid the longer they practice. Why are doctors so cautious? It is simply because they have seen too many such things and have no choice.

So patients who look gloomy all day and sigh are at a disadvantage in obtaining high-quality medical resources, compared with those who are easygoing and optimistic.

Likewise, gloomy patients receive less support from their families than optimistic patients. I often meet family members of patients who are tormented beyond endurance by the patient's bad moods.

Research by Martin Seligman, the father of positive psychology, shows that optimistic people generally live longer than negative, fretful people, and that in old age optimistic people are better able to care for themselves. Seligman collected much statistical data to support his view but did not analyze the causes in more detail. In my practice I have come to feel that optimistic people, when ill, receive far more medical resources and family care than negative people who fret all day, so even when ill they are more likely to live longer.

No one can resist a smiling face and sincere, kind words. Being ill is of course painful, but if one wallows in that pain, scattering one's own vexation and discontent everywhere, then inevitably it never rains but it pours, and misfortunes never come singly.

In my first year of college I was financially hard up, not sure of three meals a day, and looked gloomy all day. Until one day my counselor said to me: everyone in this world has their own pressure; no one owes it to you to put up with your face. That sentence really had an eye-opening effect on me; it made me realize that my bad mood was affecting those around me, and that I had become an unwelcome person.

My counselor said this to me with a straight face; at the time I thought him rather heartless, but later I was very grateful that he taught me this lesson in how to be a person. He was an outstanding college counselor widely recognized. Now, 22 years later, I still remember these heartfelt words he spoke to me. After I entered the wider world, I learned that no matter what hardships I suffered, when with others I should still be as kind as possible and not scatter my own displeasure around.

Optimistic people also have stronger immune function than pessimistic ones. In the "Being Mortal" trilogy, Dr. Atul Gawande of Harvard Medical School tells a case: an American doctor named Thomas remodeled a nursing home, bringing in pets for the residents to care for, and also letting staff bring their children to the home, making it lively and energetic. The residents went from a deathly still state to an optimistic, lively one. Medication in the nursing home dropped by more than half, yet the residents' physical condition improved greatly. Practice has proved that worry lowers immunity, while happiness aids recovery.

Many cancer patients have seen their cancer markers drop after receiving psychological suggestion therapy. Some doctors in our country are also trying this: they do not prescribe, merely gather patients together to listen to stories of survivors, and a few lucky patients see their cancer markers drop. This shows that treating cancer patients to reduce mental stress indeed aids recovery.

I often write to teach people how to reduce psychological stress, and that is also my purpose. A good mood is indeed good medicine; for chronic disease patients, a joyful mood is especially important. If the haze in the heart cannot be dispelled, disease inflicts on the patient a double torment, physical and mental.