Lets get it on...
When It Pays to Argue With a Spouse
nytimes.com
There are those who may think it is something out of an Edward Albee play, or
maybe "The Newlywed Game" meets Jerry Springer. But for the couple tired of
flowers, chocolates and renting Nora Ephron films, it could just be another way to
celebrate their love.
Researchers at Ohio State University are
placing volunteer married couples in a hospital
room for two 24-hour sessions, inflicting small
wounds and then encouraging the couple to
chat about anything from in-laws to their sex
lives. Then they take regular samples of blood,
saliva and sometimes fluid from the wounds.
Though it seems like "get the guests" -- the venomous game in Albee's "Whose Afraid of
Virginia Woolf?" -- taken to new extremes, serious science is going on. The exercise is one
of a series of studies at the university that are taking a look at how emotions affect healing,
for better or worse. And the results may help change how surgery patients are treated,
among other things.
The experiment and related research
are taken so seriously that the
National Institutes of Health recently
gave grants totaling $18 million to
studies at Ohio State's Institute for
Behavioral Medicine Research.
The couple behind the studies, Dr.
Janice Kiecolt-Glaser, a psychiatrist,
and her husband, Dr. Ronald Glaser,
an immunologist, are in the growing
field of psychoneuroimmunology,
which explores mind-body issues as
they relate to health. Already they
have found strong evidence that stress
can not only make it harder to recover from illness, but also make a person more
susceptible to it.
But the thing about the Glasers' experiment that seems to interest people the most is not
the science, but simply how the volunteers feel. And they seem especially interested in
those little wounds given at the outset of each session, which include blisters administered
on the forearm with a small suction device called a chamber.
"It sounds terrible, I know, when you hear about it," said Dr. Kiecolt-Glaser, who said she
and her husband had both been "chambered" several times. "But it's not. It's like someone
gently pinching your arm."
The arguing is not that bad, either, she said, adding that the goal was not to provoke 24
hours of disharmony. The couples, who are paid $1,800 and must consider themselves
happily married, are asked to discuss a contentious issue (identified in earlier discussions)
for only a half hour during the second session. During the first session, they are asked to
talk about more neutral aspects of their relationship, like how they met (although this, too,
can lead to conflict). Over the next 24 hours, researchers draw fluids to check for levels of
hormones like cortisol, which indicates stress, as well as healing agents like leukocytes.
Later, they correlate their findings with a videotape taken of the entire session to see when
the stress points were.
In the past, the researchers have studied wound healing in other people considered to be
under stress, among them medical students and people who care for Alzheimer's patients,
and found that their healing mechanisms were impaired. But in those cases, they had to
settle for people who reported being under stress. Bound by ethics, the researchers could
not design experiments in which human subjects, unlike animal studies, were placed under
deliberate psychological pressure.
Then some years ago, the Ohio scientists, drawn by the stress that naturally occurs in
relationships and the ability to measure it physically in a lab setting, thought of using
married couples. "We wanted to take a real-life situation that was filled with a lot of
emotion and a lot of history," said Dr. William B. Malarkey, an internist who is involved in
the studies.
At first, the married couples were not given wounds, but simply studied to see how their
immune and other biological systems were affected as they argued. The latest experiment is
the first in which the volunteers are given either blisters or small wounds called
punch-biopsies. The researchers hope to study about 100 couples, which could take several
years.
Glaser said the findings could help convince hospitals that reducing stress can improve
patient care and even shorten their stays, which would lower costs. Although much has
already been written about the dangers of stress, he said he wanted to establish clearly the
connection between it and wound healing. "The medical community is a very conservative
community," he said, "and it takes a while to convince people." |
