Chapter 1. Classical Conditioning and the Immune System: Combating Lupus

Short Description

The clip presents the case of Merritt, a young girl who suffered from lupus. In this illness, a person’s immune system becomes overactive and antibodies begin to attack one’s own body and tissues. Powerful steroids prescribed for Merritt’s illness produced troubling side effects.

Long Description

The clip presents the case of Merritt, a young girl who suffered from lupus. In this illness, a person’s immune system becomes overactive and antibodies begin to attack one’s own body and tissues. Powerful steroids prescribed for Merritt’s illness produced troubling side effects.

Merritt’s mother relates her concern about the psychological and physical effects that the steroids were having on her daughter. As a clinical psychologist, she was familiar with Robert Ader’s work with white mice suffering from lupus. Ader had used classical conditioning to teach the mice to suppress their overactive immune systems. After he associated sweetened water with the drug that causes immune suppression, the inert substance alone triggered the conditioned immune response. As a result, the mice survived longer.

Might the same strategy help humans suffering from lupus? Merritt had to learn to associate a strong taste or smell with the steroid drug that slowed down her runaway immune system. The conditioning worked. Soon, just the taste or smell of the steroid enabled her to reduce her drug dosage.

Merritt’s mother reports that her daughter died in 1995 of a heart attack. However, the conditioning very likely lengthened her life by ten years.

Questions