Psychosomatic Medicine, Nutrition, and Orthodox Christianity: The Relationship Between Spiritual and Physical Health

Vladyslav Nazarchuk

In today’s world, it is common, even among Orthodox Christians, to follow the philosophy of Descartes in treating the incorporeal soul and the material body as two distinct, separate things. A Christian might think of eating well and exercising as maintaining the health of his body, and of going to church and participating in the sacraments as taking care of his soul. When this boundary between soul and body is crossed—such as when prayer results in the healing of a grave illness, or when a sin is punished by a fitting physical disease—it is often treated as a miraculous and rare phenomenon, rather than the natural norm. Meanwhile, both the tradition of the Orthodox Church, as well as certain fields of medicine (which tend not to be part of mainstream medical practice today), testify that the soul and body are connected is a far more significant way, with changes in one having a direct causal effect on the other. In particular, this means that spiritual and physical health cannot be treated separately from one another, but must be approached together—even if the precise relationship which God instituted between them remains mysterious. As Dr. John Millet, former professor at the New York School of Psychiatry, writes,

“Even the most dogmatic of men would hardly claim to hold all the keys to those secrets that lie hidden in our human frames, whether they be the many unknowns in our physical constitution, the even more inexplicable processes that seem to us to be basically a part of our mental field, or the various manifestations of the opposing principles of good and evil … It would indeed require omniscience to elaborate the interconnections of these elements in human nature.”¹

Accordingly, this essay investigates the relationship between spiritual and physical health, from both secular and sacred perspectives. “Spiritual health” here simply means “health of the soul”: since both the mind and spirit are part of the soul, health of the soul includes what is often termed “mental health” as well. Primarily, two twentieth-century medical approaches will be discussed: the principles of psychosomatic medicine, and the work of Dr. Weston A. Price on the connection between nutrition, physical health, and mental health. These approaches are fruitful both as being based in objective medical evidence, and as encompassing both the physical and spiritual aspects of man—which generally was not the norm among the materialistic and atheistic tendencies of the twentieth century. Commentary from the Orthodox Christian perspective will be given along the way, and the essay will conclude with a brief discussion of the practice of fasting in the Orthodox Church, as a capstone of the ideas presented. By the end, the reader will hopefully form a more comprehensive understanding of how health of the body and health of the soul relate to one another, and thus how a Christian should approach both of them to become a healthy individual overall.

Psychosomatic Medicine

Psychosomatic (“soul-body”) medicine is a medical field which developed in the twentieth century, ultimately originating from the work of neurologist and psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud (1856–1939). At its basis, psychosomatic medicine is about giving importance to both the soul and the body when treating a disease, and recognizing that mental processes can have physical effects in the body. As Millet defines it, psychosomatic medicine represents “the full recognition by medical science of the interdependence of physical and mental events in producing an integrated or healthy organism, and … that a disturbance of this integration in either the mental or the physical field can produce an upset in the adaptive equilibrium leading to an amazing variety of symptoms.”² In particular, a psychosomatic approach to a physical disease requires that the patient always be examined for psychological pathology as well. If found, this psychological issue may be considered as the cause, or one of the causes, of the patient’s physical symptoms. For instance, psychiatrist Dr. Gotthard Booth (1899–1975) cites studies of stomach ulcers which found that in 60% of the cases, the patients had a “weak stomach and a normal soul,” while in 40% of the cases the patient “had a psychopathic soul which made the normal stomach sick.”³

Booth also cites a striking example from his own medical practice, of a man with Parkinson’s disease. Although the physical symptoms of the man’s disease were manifest—rigidity, tremor in hands and feet, paralysis, degeneration of the brain—Booth writes that “judged from the point of view that disease is the result of some abnormality, there was no explanation, either physical or psychological, which could explain why this particular patient contracted Parkinsonism.”⁴ However, digging deeper into the patient’s life, Booth found the following psychological characteristics: the man was always willful, ambitious, physically active, “anxious to improve his performance and position,”⁵ and a strict moralist with a lack of sympathy for others. As such, the man’s Parkinsonism can be viewed as a natural extension or caricature of his psychological traits, where, after suffering failure in actualizing these traits by achieving success in the external world, “the personality regresses from realistic satisfactions to a level of merely symbolical satisfactions.”⁶ While previously the man thrived in action, now he is forced to act by the involuntary shaking of his hands and feet; while the man displayed a domineering personality in the past, he is now unable to move on command; and his former moral anxiety and lack of sympathy for others makes him a difficult patient to care for and please, even when he is now bedridden and entirely dependent on outside help.

Booth uses this example as an illustration for a more general psychosomatic theory of the origin of disease. In brief, each person has a certain “personality orientation” or psychological “leading function,”⁷ which in turn is associated with a specific organ or organ system in the human body. When this dominant function fails to meet the demands of an individual’s life situation, becoming “ineffective with respect to practical purposes, the disease process maintains it in the center of the personality orientation”⁸ through the dysfunction of the corresponding organ. Much like the Parkinson’s patient, whose compulsive psychological need for action was “satisfied” through the involuntary trembling of his limbs, “the function finds satisfaction symbolically, although its satisfaction means practical defeat.”⁹ In fact, Booth argues that “so far there has been increasing evidence that disease always befalls the function which has been leading in the personality orientation.”¹⁰ Treatment of disease, then, requires either that the frustrating life situation be remedied so that the patient’s leading function can become effective once more; or, which is the better approach, that the patient reorients his own personality, developing its weaker or previously neglected aspects, accepting his limitations, and sacrificing his pride and ego in favor of compassion and human fellowship.

Is the psychosomatic understanding of health and disease—essentially that the body makes itself sick to maintain its spiritual orientation in the face of changing life conditions—valid? When considered from an Orthodox Christian perspective, the answer seems mixed. On one hand, whether one takes the extreme view that every bodily disease arises in the way explained above by Booth, or merely that bodily diseases can sometimes have mental causes, psychosomatic medicine should be commended for affirming the link between spiritual and physical health—a principle which is largely absent in modern mainstream medicine. In turn, this creates a more receptive environment for the use of religion in the medical field in general. For example, Booth notes the frequent phenomenon of religious conversions in times of sickness, and argues that Christianity can play a positive role in the “personality reorientation” which a patient needs to undergo to cure his psychosomatic illness. He writes,

“Communion and unction are sacraments in which the consciousness of the sick and isolated individual is drawn back into the experience of his basic humanity and common relatedness to God. In this way he may become able to use those sides of his personality which he had neglected because they did not serve the purposes of his ego.”¹¹

Millet, as well, sees psychosomatic medicine as an opportunity to reconcile medical science and religion, writing that “the common ground on which science and religion can meet without procedural complications is the ground of promoting a more complete understanding of the causes of unrest and conflict in the lives of human beings.”¹²

On the other hand, since psychosomatic medicine has its origins in secular psychology, it still remains a secular field that is not able to capture or appreciate the fullness of Christianity. The close connection between a psychological function and its “representative organ” is explained in psychosomatic medicine by defining the soul—rather than as a real, immaterial thing distinct from the body—as essentially the totality of the body’s material processes, only viewed from a different perspective. Booth, for example, argues that “there is no borderline between the material and the immaterial parts of the living organism, between somatic and psychological realities. … All body organs form part of our personality.”¹³ He compares this phenomenon to how electrical energy used to be thought of as an immaterial force contained in matter, but has since been discovered by physicist Ernest Rutherford (1871–1937) to be itself made of material particles: electrons.¹⁴ Millet, too, recognizes the existence of a human “spirit” that is distinct from a person’s body, emotions, and intellect, but defines it as an individual’s “own particular form of struggle toward a total expression of the self which he would find satisfying,”¹⁵ rather than adhering to the Christian definitions of the term: either the animating force of the body (animal or human), or the nous, the highest faculty of the soul by which humans receive God’s grace. Hence, it is evident that by collapsing the soul and body into the same material entity, psychosomatic medicine ultimately degrades those spiritual aspects of a human being which form a key part of Christian anthropology. In this respect, psychosomatic medicine can simply be seen as an “overcorrection” to the materialistic medical science of its time. Instead of disregarding the soul entirely, psychosomatic medicine treats the body and soul as the same thing, so that diseases in the soul always imply diseases in the body and vice versa. It is clear, however, that the relationship between bodily and spiritual health is in reality much more subtle and multifaceted, and that further approaches to this question need to be considered.

Weston Price: Nutrition and Spiritual Health

Another twentieth-century “rediscovery” of the connection between physical and spiritual health comes from the work of Dr. Weston A. Price (1870–1948), a Canadian dentist who published his masterpiece study Nutrition and Physical Degeneration in 1939. Working as a dentist in Cleveland, Ohio, he noticed that the dental health of his patients was rapidly worsening, along with related physical attributes such as the shape of their dental arches and facial structure. Hypothesizing that the primary cause of this was poor nutrition, Price began to travel widely—Switzerland, the Hebrides, Alaska, Polynesia, New Zealand, Peru, and other places—seeking out various groups of people who still followed traditional diets and ways of life, and making extensive observations of their dental and physical health, diet, and traditions. Price believed this was necessary because he could not find sufficiently healthy populations around himself which would represent man in his normal, natural state. He writes, “Search for controls among remnants of primitive racial stocks has been resorted to as a result of failure to find them in our modernized groups … Only the primitive groups have been able to provide adequate normal controls.”¹⁶ “Primitive” here simply means “not modern,” as opposed to having a pejorative meaning. In fact, Price’s research consistently found that, largely as the result of their nutritionally-dense, traditional diets, these groups enjoyed excellent health and avoided the various physical and mental aspects of degeneration which Price observed in the “civilized” Western society of his day. Price summarizes his findings as follows:

“While a primary quest was to find the cause of tooth decay which was established quite readily as being controlled directly by nutrition, it rapidly became apparent that a chain of disturbances developed in these various primitive racial stocks starting even in the first generation after the adoption of the modernized diet and rapidly increased in severity with expressions quite constantly like the characteristic degenerative processes of our modern civilization of America and Europe. … These have included facial and dental arch changes.”¹⁷

While it is easily believable that taking in a diet of processed foods and added sugars, while depriving oneself of vital nutrients and the factors needed to absorb them, would affect a person physically, what is striking is just how often Price observed the association between physical and mental degeneration. He notes, “After one has lived among the primitive racial stocks in different parts of the world and studied them in their isolation, few impressions can be more vivid than that of the absence of prisons and asylums.”¹⁸ For example, one of the groups studied by Price were the Swiss people of the Lötschental, a high-elevation alpine valley which had remained relatively isolated before it was made accessible by railway in the early twentieth century. The people there followed a traditional, locally-produced diet consisting of whole rye bread, dairy (especially as produced by cows on pasture on the wooded slopes near the glaciers in the summer), meat eaten once per week, and some leafy greens. Price observed the people’s resulting hardy constitutions, fine physiques, and perfect dental health, noting that “they have neither physician nor dentist because they have so little need for them; they have neither policeman nor jail, because they have no need for them.”¹⁹ At the same time, Price expresses admiration for these people’s “devotion to cultural and spiritual values rather than to material values,”²⁰ as, for example, reflected in Lötschental’s annual festival of lighting bonfires throughout the valley to symbolize the spiritual unity and solidarity of the valley’s two thousand inhabitants. Observing all this, Price laments,

“How different the level of life and horizon of such souls from those in many places in the so-called civilized world in which people have degraded themselves … One immediately wonders if there is not something in the life-giving vitamins and minerals of the food that builds not only great physical structures within which their souls reside, but builds minds and hearts capable of a higher type of manhood in which the material values of life are made secondary to individual character.”²¹

In contrast, Price observed that the physical degeneration of the people of American society of his day was accompanied by an increasing frequency of mental problems. Regarding these problems, Price writes,

“A certain percentage of this affected group [nutritionally-deficient children] has not only these evidences of physical injury, but also personality disturbances, the most common of which is a lower than normal mental efficiency and acuteness, chiefly observed as so-called mental backwardness … From this group or parallel with it a certain percentage develop personality disturbances which have their expression largely in unsocial traits. They include the delinquents who at this time are causing so much trouble and concern because of evidence of increase in their numbers.”²²

For example, Price cites a 1935 article by Donald Laird which found that one out of every four Americans is unable to take care of themselves due to mental deficiency of some kind.²³ Regarding the association of mental deficiency with physical abnormality, in Price’s examination of boys at Cleveland’s Thomas A. Edison School for pre-delinquents, he found that 98.4% of them had abnormalities in their dental arches or deformed facial structures.²⁴ Similarly, when studying children at the Outwaithe School in Cleveland, a school for mentally backward children, Price found that, among his sample group, 97% had abnormality in their dental arches, and in general that “a very high percentage with definite disturbances in facial growth were evident”²⁵ among the children. Finally, during Price’s visit to the Ohio State Penitentiary, “in observing over half the population at work or exercise, I did not see one with a typically normal facial development.”²⁶ Thus, while Price acknowledges that “we cannot by viewing the face evaluate the kind or extent of brain injury that is associated with prenatal malnutrition of that individual”²⁷—since similar facial and dental deformities are shared between criminals, mentally deficient people, and even people who otherwise constitute respectable, productive members of society—nevertheless Price’s evidence decisively shows that physical abnormality is a direct contributing factor to, or even a prerequisite of, mental abnormality.

How are these observations related to nutrition? From his own studies, and from the work of other medical researchers, Price concludes that poor nutrition of the parents in producing the sperm and the egg, of the mother during her pregnancy, and of the child during his or her formative years (running through puberty, but especially in the time period immediately following birth), is often the cause of physical deformities in the child. When these deformities concern the face and the bones of the head, this causes disturbances in the development of the brain, which in turn can lead to mental backwardness and character abnormalities. For example, Price cites research which indicates that a lack of vitamin E impairs the functioning of the pituitary gland, which is situated on the underside of the brain and is “the governing body for the activity of growth.”²⁸ In turn, the impaired pituitary gland causes defects in the development of the skull, and narrowing of the nose and dental arches, which prevents normal brain development. Price concludes:

“When we realize that one of the best sources of vitamin E is wheat germ, most of which is removed from white flour, usually along with four-fifths of the mineral, we see one cause of the tragedy that is overwhelming so many individuals in our modern civilization. … If the whole wheat is prepared and eaten promptly after grinding and exposing the [seed] embryo to oxidation, the effect desired by Nature is adequately provided.”²⁹

In connection with this, Price describes an operation he performed on a sixteen-year-old boy with Down syndrome. By separating and pushing apart the two maxillary bones (which form the roof of the mouth), Price stimulated the pituitary gland by producing a downward tension on the floor of the brain. As a result, the boy physically went through puberty over the course of a few weeks, and significantly developed mentally to the point where he could read, ride public transportation, buy groceries, and play pranks on people—even though previously, the boy was physically underdeveloped and had the mind of a four-year-old child.³⁰

For the present purposes, the key aspect of Price’s nutritional discoveries is that health of the body has a direct causative effect on health of the soul, through the physical vehicle of the brain which can be said to “house” the mind. Conversely, this means that some defects in the mind can only be corrected through correcting defects in the body itself, a surprising proportion of which have their origin in poor nutrition. From a Christian perspective, however, one must be careful not to misinterpret this relationship between soul and body to conclude, for example, that a person with defects in the brain has a “defective” soul, is worth less as a person, or is unworthy of God’s love and salvation. Every person’s soul is of equal worth—but in some, the physical conditions of the body do not allow the soul to express itself fully, to realize all of its God-given capabilities in pursuing virtue and seeking God’s grace. Since such a state is clearly not part of God’s intention for mankind, Price is entirely correct in arguing that it is the responsibility of society as a whole to ensure that proper nutrition be provided for its younger generations. He writes,

“Like the successful primitive racial stocks, we, too, can make, as a first requisite, provision for adequate nutrition both for generation and growth … We, like the successful primitives, can establish programs of instruction for growing youth and acquaint it with Nature’s requirements long before the emergencies and stresses arise. … Is it just for society to permit production of physical and mental cripples?”³¹

Conclusion

Drawing together the experience gained from two secular medical approaches of the twentieth century—psychosomatic medicine and Dr. Weston Price’s research in nutrition—it can be safely concluded both that the body can affect the soul, and that the soul can affect the body. Thus, mental or spiritual health and physical health are connected, and sickness in one of them can have its origin in the other. However, the body and soul are still distinct from one another, and thus it is also possible for only one of them to be sick. On one hand, the research and theory of psychosomatic medicine suggest that physical illnesses that seem to have no physical cause can be explained by mental vices and defects in character. Although from an Orthodox Christian perspective, some of these cases could instead be understood as a person’s sins being punished by God with a fitting physical illness (for example, breast cancer being a common punishment for women who have had an abortion), it remains valid that examination for mental pathology should be a normal part of treating a patient who suffers from a physical disease. On the other hand, the research of Dr. Weston Price conclusively shows how defects in nutrition lead to physical deformities, which in turn lead to mental abnormalities—although Price also admits that some individuals can have physical deformities without necessarily having severe mental deficiencies. All this indicates that spiritual and physical health cannot be treated in isolation from one another, but must be dealt with holistically, as simply the health of the entire human being.

The fact that Orthodox Christianity wisely recognizes this relationship between spiritual and physical health is evident, among other things, in the practice of fasting, which every Orthodox Christian is enjoined to do if he or she is able. Orthodox Christian fasting is distinctive in that it has a myriad of benefits, healing both body and soul: as St. Athanasios the Great writes in On Virginity, “Behold what fasting does—it cures ills and dries up bodily humors, casts out demons, and turns away evil thoughts; it makes the mind brighter, the heart clean, and the body holy.”³² Fasting also “paves the way for the best and most effective prayer,”³³ and in the Idiomelon from the Sunday of Cheese-fare is compared to a sword that “cuts away all badness from the heart,” that is, diseases of the soul.³⁴ However, even when divorced from its spiritual context, fasting has great benefit for the body as a secular medical practice. For example, schemamonk and scholar Constantine Cavarnos cites works published by therapist Herbert Shelton in 1964 and psychiatrist Allan Cott in 1977, which promote scientific fasting (abstinence from food and drink, except for water, for certain periods of time) as a way to cure many diseases, improve the functioning of various organs, bring clarity to the mind, and attain a long life.³⁵ Cavarnos explains that this is possible because, during fasting, the body is able to divert its energy from digestion to the process of detoxification, expelling the illness-causing poisons that accumulate in the body due to a bad diet and an unclean environment.³⁶ Thus, fasting in the Orthodox Church can truly be considered a “psychosomatic” practice that bridges nutrition, bodily health, and spiritual health. Fasting itself is both physical (eating a certain diet) and spiritual (involving the exercise of temperance and moderation), and most importantly brings healing that is also both bodily and spiritual.