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Dean Ornish, MD, who is best known for developing a diet that reverses heart disease, has written a book (Love and Survival) based on a simple but powerful idea: "Our survival depends on the healing power of love, intimacy, and relationships. Physically. Emotionally. Spiritually. As individuals. As communities. As a country. As a culture. Perhaps even as a species."

Most people tend to think of his work as being primarily about diet. But what he's really concerned with is healing the heart. And he has found that, although diet and exercise or, for that matter, of drugs and surgery, are important for healing diseased hearts, there's more to it than that. He has found that perhaps the most powerful intervention, and in his opinion the most meaningful, is the healing power of love and intimacy.

As a physician, he researched the idea that love and intimacy may be the most powerful factors in health and illness, even though these ideas are largely ignored by the medical profession. Medicine today tends to focus primarily on the physical and mechanistic: drugs and surgery, genes and germs, microbes and molecules. We tend to lump other healing practices that focus on the emotional and spiritual roots of illness into one category called Alternative Medicine. These alternative practices may include massage therapy, hypnosis, energy techniques such as Reiki, as well as traditional Chinese medicine, acupuncture, and many other modalities. As your family doctor, or your cardiologist or oncologist about love, and if you're not laughed out of the examining room, you'll probably be told to consult a psychologist - or maybe a minister. Love and medicine just don't seem to go together.

Think back to all those kids in Romanian and Russian orphanages. These kids were placed in cribs and kept there - no touch, no activity, and definitely no love. And what happened to these kids? They suffered from what the medical community generally refers to as "failure to thrive." In other words, their physical well-being suffered because their emotional needs weren't being taken care of. Even many of those who were adopted into loving families were never able to thrive. Deprived of love and affection during infancy, they didn't develop the ability to love - or to accept love. They were unable to attach to anyone.

If you were to follow kids like this through life, what do you think you'd find? In addition to the inability to attach, the inability to feel and express love, do you think you'd find physical issues as well?

Yet some of those kids, with love and counseling and lots of affection, were able to make the leap. They were able to meld into their families. But it wasn't medicine that helped them to adjust. It wasn't medicine that gave them ability to love and be loved.

If a new drug had the same impact, virtually every doctor in the country would be prescribing it for their patients. It would be malpractice not to prescribe it - yet, with few exceptions, doctors do not learn much about the healing power of love, intimacy, and transformation in their medical training.

Learn more about this author, Roxianne Moore.
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