Mind Over Malady

By MICHAEL D. LEMONICK

THE TALK USED TO BE CONFINED TO NEW-AGE BOOKSTORES, health-food shops and holistic magazines printed on whole-grain paper. But alternative medicine has now gone slickly mainstream: the subject of TV talk shows, best sellers and even an Oscar-nominated film, Lorenzo's Oil. This veritable flowering -- or plague -- of holism is almost always presented with wide-eyed enthusiasm and a hefty dose of conventional-medicine bashing. Critics of alternative healing are just as narrow-minded: these therapies are unscientific, they say, and therefore cannot work.

Bill Moyers avoids both extremes in a five-part PBS series premiering this week called Healing and the Mind and in a companion book that has already hit the best-seller lists. Level-headed, curious and skeptical, Moyers is the perfect tour guide. His question: Are our emotional lives entirely separate from our physical lives, or can one affect the other? To some degree, the latter is obviously true. Under mental stress, the heart rate climbs, and muscles tense. Conversely, breathing deeply and relaxing muscles can calm the mind.

But in five forays into different aspects of the mind-body problem, Moyers presents convincing evidence that the link between psyche and soma is more intimate and profound. The first episode takes place in China, where Moyers is guided through that country's ancient medical traditions by Dr. David Eisenberg, who studied there in the 1970s. Herbalists, acupuncturists and massage therapists all tell of the mysterious mental-physical energy known as qi (pronounced chee), which pervades both mind and body and is the basis for good health.

Moyers then repairs to the U.S. for the rest of the series. His first stop is with doctors who study the biology of emotion. Using Method actors to portray extreme anger and fear, the researchers show that even these artificially conjured emotions produce telltale changes in blood chemistry.

Moyers also visits U.S. hospitals in which nontraditional therapies have taken hold, including one in Massachusetts where Buddhist meditation is part of the regimen for patients with intractable pain. He winds up at Commonweal, a retreat in California where terminal cancer patients seek relief from the anguish that comes with their illness. They learn, says Moyers, "that healing is possible even when a cure is not."

Moyers asks the questions we would probably ask. When a biochemist states that the mind resides throughout the body, his eyebrows go up. "You don't mean that my big toe can feel sad, do you?" Moyers asks. The biochemist does, and what's more, her reasoning makes sense. When a Chinese pharmacist shows Moyers dried scorpions and lizards used to make curative tea, he wants to know how it works but also how it tastes. Answer: really awful.

That is not to say Moyers is never taken in. He is amazed that a woman can undergo brain surgery with acupuncture, perhaps not realizing that Western doctors have long recognized that the method can be as effective as chemical anesthetics. But in the end, Moyers presents a convincing case that conventional medicine still has much to learn.