Rx: Intimacy -- Is Being Close Key To Good Health? Dean Ornish Says Yes

Although Dr. Dean Ornish has become known for pioneering research showing a low-fat diet can reverse heart disease, currently he's not as interested in what you're eating as what may be eating you.

Like loneliness. Or feeling isolated or friendless.

Those are powerful toxins, the San Francisco-based physician argues. And the reverse - strong social connections to family, friends, community, religion, even your dog or cat - may be even more powerful than traditional medicine in keeping you well.

That's the gist of his fifth book, "Love & Survival" (HarperCollins; $25), which he was in Seattle promoting this week, just days after Newsweek magazine featured him in a cover story.

Newsweek's headline: "Can this man save your heart? Diet, love and meditation: How Dean Ornish is shaking up medicine."

There's certainly nothing new about the idea that strong social ties make for happy people.

What is new is that respected mainstream-medicine doctors like Ornish, 44, are not only saying it, but providing the medical proof to back it up.

And Ornish isn't the only one. As the baby boom ages, and becomes predictably concerned with mortality, a slew of books and articles are echoing the same theme.

Also published this month is "Successful Aging" by John Rowe and Robert Kahn (Pantheon; $24.95). It reports the results of the 10-year, multimillion-dollar MacArthur Foundation study on how people actually age (vs. the rocking chair or supergranny stereotypes), and what they need to do to age successfully. Much of "Successful Aging" also has to do with the positive health implications of rich friendships and an upbeat attitude.

Ornish isn't against conventional medicine; in fact, he takes great pains to say he's in favor of whatever it takes, including drugs and surgery, to save a person's life.

But through his book, his two-part series based on it now running on public television (he'll be at Seattle's KCTS-TV on April 4), and his work as a medical school professor at the University of California, San Francisco, he's trying to enlarge the approach.

"If you're trained to use drugs and surgery, and not talk to patients, that's what you do. What I'm trying to do is create a new model for medicine that's more caring and compassionate."

One that - he's convinced - works. In "Love & Survival," Ornish presents the results of more than a dozen medical studies that show the power of relationships to healing.

One study actually started out to prove the opposite. Dr. David Spiegel was irritated at being confused with Dr. Bernie Siegel, whose 1986 best seller, "Love, Medicine & Miracles," argued that social support could prolong the lives of cancer patients.

Spiegel, of the Stanford University Medical School, set out to prove Siegel wrong. So he studied two groups of women with advanced breast cancer. One group got conventional medical treatment only; the second got that plus a year of weekly support group sessions where they were encouraged to talk about their disease.

Five years later, Spiegel was astounded to learn that the only women still alive were some of those in the support group.

As Ornish notes, modern life is working against such closeness. In 1976, Americans attended an average of 12 club meetings annually; now it's five. And the number of households composed of a single individual has grown from 5 percent in 1900 to 25 percent today.

As Americans move often or change jobs, as they forgo getting together with friends or working on strong family ties because they're otherwise too busy, they're in danger of paying a high price, Ornish says. That price may be their physical health.

Head of the nonprofit Preventive Medicine Research Institute outside San Francisco, Ornish has led thousands of heart patients through the group sessions that are part of his diet-exercise-meditation program. Many initially told him they thought the sessions would be a waste of time. But many later confided that the sense of connectedness they gained in group was, surprisingly, the most valuable part of his program.

And yet Ornish himself was having problems. A fast-talking, driven, admittedly type-A person, his marriage was shrinking as his fame was growing (several of his books have been on New York Times best-seller lists, and he's been nutritional counselor to scores of notables, including President Clinton). Moreover, he realized he didn't know how to truly be intimate because he wasn't able to do what that required: be vulnerable with another person.

After a divorce and psychotherapy, Ornish finally felt he was prepared both to write his latest book, which contains a great deal of self-revelation, and to be in a committed relationship.

He was in Seattle with the woman he refers to frequently as his "beloved," Molly Blackwell, a computer business manager whom he'll wed in June. He hopes parenthood is in the future.

"Nothing in my life brings me a tenth of the joy as the time I spend with Molly," he says, confiding: "It wasn't always that way because I wasn't aware I could be intimate. I was walled off."

So how can others find ways of cultivating intimacy and social connectedness? Ornish's book lays out many paths, including joining support groups or organizations, getting therapy, practicing meditation and volunteering. "When you help others, you also help yourself," he says.

Whatever path people take, Ornish hopes they realize its value, because emotional isolation, he stresses, is an illness that affects not just the soul, but one's physical health as well.