Khrodha, shokha, bhaya, aayaasa........................,
Raktha, pittha, prakopayeth.....!

[ Anger, deep sorrow, fear, and exhaustion........would send the blood coursing hither and thither, resulting in many disasters.]

The above stanza must have been written five thousand years ago. Even in modern medicine there have been great thinkers, like William Harvey (1648), who wrote about the mind-heart connection in no uncertain terms thus:
" I was acquainted with another strong man, who having received an injury and affront from one more powerful than himself, and upon whom he could not have his revenge, was so overcome with hatred and spite and passion, which he yet communicated to no one, that at last he fell into a strange distemper, suffering from extreme oppression and pain of the heart and breast and in the course of a few years died. His friends thought him poisoned by some maleficient influence, or possessed with an evil spirit........ In the dead body I found the heart and aorta so gorged and distended with blood, and cavities of the ventricles equaled those of a bullock’s heart in size. Such is the force of the blood pent up, and such are the effects of its impulse......... We also observe the signal influence of the affections of the mind when a timid person is arrested, a deadly pallor overspreads the surface, the limbs stiffen, the ears sing, the eyes are dazzled and blinded, and , as it were, convulsed.........And what indeed is more deserving of attention than the fact that in almost in every affection, appetite, hope or fear, our body suffers, the countenance changes, and the blood appears to course hither and thither. In anger the eyes are fiery and pupils contracted; in modesty the cheeks are suffused with blushes; in fear, and under a sense of infamy and of shame, the face is pale, but the ears burn as if for the evil they heard or were to hear; in lust how quickly the member distended with blood and erected! " [Harvey quoted by Inglis B.: A history of Medicine, Cleveland. The World Publishing Company, 1965, pp 179-180 ]
The mind-heart connection is so strong that nothing happens to the heart without the mind having a say in it. The old adage that for all the ills of the body the main treatment would be to keep the mind tranquil holds good even today. Unfortunately in the last forty odd years cardiology developed on very linear way with the advent of cardiac chamber imaging and the echocardiography, it was believed that the panacea for all cardiac problems are the mechanical corrections of the anatomic defects. So quickly the valvular and congenital heart diseases came under the surgical umbrella and re recently even such a complicated and difficult to understand disease of the coronary system was equated with patency or otherwise of the surface coronary vessels. With the accidental injection of the contrast material into one of the coronary arteries Mason Sones, and later Judkin, devised simple methods of visualizing the surface coronary arteries. The dictum that an open vessel is better than a closed vessel became the slogan of the cardiologist. This is too simplistic and the coronary artery syndromes are now known to more genetically determined than the patency or otherwise of the vessels. Even here elegant studies have shown that anginal pain is much more severe with mental depression and they get better and many times disappear altogether when the patient gets better and feels happy!
The heart rate variability ( HRV ) with respiration is now taken to be a good yardstick of the health of the cardiovascular system. Studies have shown how this changes for the worse with bad thoughts, or even watching television with crime scenes, and, the same returns to normal, when once the thoughts get better, or the television programme is pleasing to the mind. Anxiety and fear of death are the other two strong predictors of the detrimental effect on the heart of the human mind.
Mind control technics, like yoga, could help but the latter is not easy to practise. There have been half hearted attempts at making man tranquil by the quick fix methods of the West which have not yielded consistent results. The eastern philosophy of Universal Love is the best antidote to heart diseases.

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