THE MINDFUL BODY

Thought-provoking exploration of the mind-body connection and its relationship to health.

Langer, a professor of psychology who was the first women to be tenured at Harvard, opens with mention of an experiment in which several elderly men roomed together in housing “that was retrofitted to suggest that time had gone backward twenty years.” The men quickly began to behave as if they were 20 years younger: “Their vision, hearing, strength, and even objective appearance improved.” Received medical wisdom has no room for such “miracles,” relying instead on hard measures that are, Langer holds, sometimes arbitrary and probabilistic. For example, there’s not much difference between A1C counts of 5.7 and 5.8, but one is held to be normal and the other prediabetic. Furthermore, telling someone they are prediabetic often leads to diabetes owing to the way people are inclined to read medical judgments as infallible and fixed. “Labels aren’t just labels,” Langer writes. “They also can change how we behave.” That behavior involves decision-making, a fraught venture: Will we decide correctly in making a medical decision such as whether and when to get that hip replaced? The thing to do, the author suggests, is to allow the possibility of uncertainty and become mindful about how we “take these probabilities and convert them into absolutes, making it hard for us to question basic assumptions.” Devotees and practitioners of integrative medicine will be on top of some of Langer’s thinking already, though more traditional doctors may not be quick to endorse her view that “in some sense, health may be only a thought away.” Regardless, a reminder to keep tabs on how we feel and what cues we respond to isn’t out of place, and Langer is both lucid and encouraging.

A readable primer on how to navigate emotions and, in the bargain, become a more discerning medical consumer.