Coming up on this week's episode of the Doctors Pharmacy.

I'm just sort of marveling here because what you're talking about is a total paradigm shift

in how we think about medicine. It's not only about treating the disease, it's about the science

of creating health, and it's a very big paradigm shift. Hi, I'm Kay Aparoet, one of the producers

of the Doctors Pharmacy podcast. Chronic stress has become an epidemic in our society where faster

is considered better and packing more obligations into your ever-expanding schedule earns you a badge

and while we know that chronic stress wreaks havoc on your physical and emotional well-being,

emotions are often dismissed during the conversation around stress. In a recent interview,

immunologist Dr. Leonard Calabrese shared fascinating clinical results with Dr. Hyman about how

things like joy and gratitude have been found to be beneficial to health outcomes. Let's listen in.

It's well accepted that stress is bad for your immune system. Classic, chronic stress. A cute stress

run from the Sabre-tooth Tiger. That's really good. Chronic stress of my job, my life, the

environment, politics, and the world is bad. We are now starting to appreciate that the opposite of

that, the immunology of joy can be immunologically potentiating. And you mentioned a very nice example.

I call this the immunology of gratitude. Gratitude has wide-ranging biological effects. There's a

recent study done at UC San Diego that showed that patients with asymptomatic echocardiographically

documented congestive heart failure with six weeks of gratitude journaling could improve ventricular

function. Your heart pumps better and faster if you're grateful. It's such a great phase. The

immunology of joy. Some people, Cohen from Carnegie Mellon, has done such beautiful work looking

at resistance to respiratory viruses and the effects of hugs. And did this elegantly controlled

study where they measured social interactions, the amount of touching that goes on in a person's

life and then actually inoculated all the people in the study with a cold virus and then measured

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