HOW YOUR MIND HEALS YOU

In one of brain biology's most amazing advances,scientists have found that our brain may actually help our immune system fight diease.It took 20 years ofcareful experiments for Kevin Tracey,MD,to see it that way.It also took a very special patient-an 11 month-old girl named Janice."She changed my life," says Dr Tracey,a neurosurgeon,immunologist and director of the Feinstein Institute of Medical Researcher in New York.In the spring of 1985,Dr Tracey was a surgeon in training at New York Hospital,treating patients for such things as gunshot wounds,head injuries and infection,when Janice was admitted.She had been crawling on the kitchen floor of her grandmother's apartment when her grandmother,who was cooking pasta,tripped over her and split a large pot of boiling water onto the baby girl.Dr Tracey cared for the girl,who had suffered second-and third-degree burns over 75 percent of her body.A week after she was admitted,Janice developed severe sepsis,a condition in which the immune system massively overreacts to a bacterial infection,indiscriminatelytraining its cannons on the body's own tissues.