Saints and Sinners: The power of positive thinking
Obituary writers on metropolitan daily newspapers share a glaring fault. They feel they must tell us in graphic, intimate detail how the deceased person died, beginning with the first symptoms of the illness and continuing with a recitation of the stages leading up to the person’s death.
I am always grateful when I pick up the obituary section of a small-town paper, which tells us simply that “Fred Taylor passed away yesterday at his home,” or “Emma Schneider died Wednesday after a long illness.”
Complete strangers don’t have to know the state of our liver, kidneys or heart when we die. Some things ought to be a private matter between a patient and his doctor.
Arthur Christiansen, who was editor of the London Daily Express, had a rule that obituaries were to mention the cause of death only if the deceased person was under 50 years old. That would be a good rule for editors today who never miss an opportunity to tell us what somebody died of — especially if it was cancer.
But it isn’t only obituary writers. We are just as bad in our conversations. We can’t let it go by saying, “Matilda is sick.” We have to add, “She has cancer.”
Cancer is a fear word. We know this from the reaction we see in people who are told they have cancer. Fear words, even when they are not directed at us, can “scare” our bodies into malfunctioning.
This doesn’t happen every time we hear a fear word, but the effects of fear, like the effects of X-rays, are cumulative. The results may not be noticeable at first, but repeated exposure can make us vulnerable to all sorts of serious side effects.
A hundred years ago, Mary Baker Eddy wrote, “The press unwittingly sends forth many sorrows and diseases among the human family. It does this by giving names to diseases and by printing long descriptions that reflect images of disease distinctly in thought. A minutely described disease costs many a person his earthly days of comfort. What a price to pay for human knowledge.”
The Christian Science Monitor, one of the most respected newspapers in the world, which Mrs. Eddy founded, counsels editors and writers in its stylebook to “avoid the glib use of the word ‘fear’ and other terms indicating trepidation or expectation of evil.”
Christian scientists, it should be noted, rely on prayer or positive mental models rather than medicine in the treatment of illness; therefore they avoid words that introduce fear or anxiety into a person’s thinking.
As for such words as “festering” or “opening old wounds” — “avoid them,” says the Monitor stylebook. A “staggering inflation rate” is to be preferred over a “crippling inflation rate” as “crippling” creates an image of illness.
The medical profession in this country has become a partner in spreading fear. Partly out of threat of malpractice suits, doctors now withhold no information from patients, no matter how bad.
But is it false hope the patient is getting?
Dr. Bernie Siegel, author of the best-selling “Love, Medicine and Miracles” (HarperCollins, 1988), says there is no such thing as false hope. There is only “false no-hope.”
The renowned French surgeon, Alexis Carrel, would have agreed. “Hope,” said Carrel, “generates action, even within the cells of the body.”
There is nothing that gives hope to a sufferer like the words of Ella Wheeler Wilcox, an American author who said, “Talk good health. You cannot charm or please by harping on that dreary, never-ending tale of mortal maladies. So, say that you are well and all is well with you. God will hear your words and make them true.”
(George Plagenz is a syndicated columnist.)