By Liam Mannix
Where do you go when your core belief can lead you no further? Into doubt. That’s where Dr Stephen Mattarollo is heading, one slow step at a time.
In another life, Mattarollo was a scholar in a hurry. He headed a research team investigating the immune system: how it could be harnessed to attack cancer, and how chronic stress can damage it in ways that make us chronically ill.
Dr Stephen Mattarollo, on his Brisbane property this week, is a Qigong instructor.Credit: Glenn Campbell
And then he got chronically ill. And science, his lodestone, had nothing to offer him. So Mattarollo is now walking his own path, and it’s led him to some very unexpected places – like leaving science, and becoming a Qigong instructor.
From knowledge, into doubt.
“I question myself a lot,” says Mattarollo. “I was very close-minded: ‘there’s no proof, it’s all woo’.
“You really have to release that control. The analytical part of you has to make way for the experiential part.”
Mattarollo is quiet, introspective, and most comfortable in his own company. He’s also analytical, detail-oriented, open-minded. Science was a natural choice, as was immunology, the study of a system of dazzling interconnection and complexity.
Those attributes let him make quick strides. He worked on a team that developed a vaccine for blood and skin cancers, and was soon handed his own research team under Nobel laureate Ian Frazer at the University of Queensland. “He moved really fast,” remembers colleague and now friend Erica Sloan.
Sloan and Mattarollo bonded over a shared, somewhat-furtive interest: how the way we think might in turn affect our stress system, and how that might be shaping the immune system. Twenty years ago, that idea was on the fringes; not pseudoscience as such, but no one could prove anything.
Mattarollo is on a new path.Credit: Glenn Campbell
Inflammation – hyperactivation of the immune system, often driven by stress – was once thought to cause a few diseases. “We tend to dismiss stress as a weakness, and really nothing to do with health,” says Sloan. Their grant applications were “casually dismissed”.
But over the past 20 years scientists have linked it to more and more conditions, including heart disease, stroke, cancer, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s; more than 50 per cent of all deaths, globally, are now linked to inflammation-related diseases.
Suddenly, “neuro-immune was the hottest thing”, says Sloan, a professor who now researches how stress and cancer interact at Monash University. “It’s absolutely exploded, the whole field.”
Mattarollo was on track to ride that explosion to the top. And then, suddenly, he couldn’t see straight. He’d be working on a paper and his screen, his desk, then the walls of the lab would start to shiver, like an earthquake localised to that room. His head ached so badly doctors thought he had a brain tumour.
Our mechanism for tracking where we are in space is very clever. Tiny tubes lined with fine hairs and filled with fluid run through the inner ear. As we move, the fluid accelerates. The hair-cells sense the acceleration and feed that data back to the brain. Without that data we cannot stand up, or see straight.
Mattarollo’s hair cells were dying, a condition known as bilateral vestibular hypofunction. BVH is rare, and cases like Mattarollo’s where both ears are affected are rarer still. There are several possible causes: bacteria attacking the cells, or the body’s own immune system turning on them. But unlike other cells, they do not grow back. Science had no cure to offer him.
The diagnosis left him relieved, confused, disappointed, in denial. He went back to the office, tried to keep doing the work, all while living with a constant sickening sense of movement. “It’s almost like being on a boat and a rollercoaster at the same time.”
It takes enormous mental effort to fight your own inner ear. The reserves of intellectual power he always had at his call were gone, replaced with confusion and disorientation.
“I got to the point …” Mattarollo pauses. His voice, slow and steady, wavers. “… where I just couldn’t do it any more.”
Think back to the last time you caught the flu. Did you feel a sense, on your skin, of exposed nerves that ached with every contact? Did your joints hurt?
Viruses typically don’t cause physical pain. Instead, the increased sensitivity to pain is coming from cross-talk between your immune system and your nerves.
“Your head is connected to your body,” says leading neuroimmunologist Professor Mark Hutchinson, now director of the Institute for Photonics and Advanced Sensing. “Who knew?”
What’s become clearer in the last decade is that road runs both ways. The immune system can influence the nervous system – and the brain can influence the immune system.
Over hundreds of millions of years evolution has honed an incredibly powerful response to stress. A deer confronted by a lion instantly speeds its heart-rate and breathing, draws blood to the heart, drives sugar to the muscles. Its cognition sharpens, and armies of immune cells are mobilised.
We humans have the same response, except we only see lions in zoos. We’ve replaced them with imaginary lions: social media notifications, emails from bosses, global heating. We live in a stress-society, and it wears on us, and keeps our immune systems in a constant state of flux. Moment to moment stress fires the immune system but, wickedly, life-long stress seems to have the opposite effect, leaving it exhausted.
We have “lovely evidence” stress affects the brain, which in turn affects the immune system, says Professor Elisa Hill, who heads the Gut-Brain Axis Lab at RMIT. “If we were able to understand the signals between the nervous system, stress, and the back and forth communication, we might have some really novel ways of toning down or ramping up the immune system.”
This realm of grey, a foot dangling out into the void beyond the edge of scientific knowledge, is where Stephen Mattarollo found himself.
After quitting research, Mattarollo was housebound. His social network shrivelled. “You could easily crawl into a hole in the couch, do nothing.”
But the scientist was still there. Mattarollo started keeping a diary filled with daily observations. What made the symptoms worse, and what made them better. One major trigger kept coming up: stress.
“‘Oh crap’,” he thought. “I can’t have any stress in my life.”
When he’d presented his work on stress and immunity at scientific conferences, audiences had always asked him: so what can we do? Mattarollo was never able to offer an answer – but now he was determined to find one for himself. He started with breath work and meditation, but struggled with finding a calm centre. Frustrated, he took a walk deep in the forest that backs onto his house. He came back, for the first time, feeling a little better.
He found he could slow and focus his thoughts on the movement. Looking for a similar sense of deep relaxation, he came on Qigong, a system of gentle movements, breathing patterns and mindfulness developed as part of traditional Chinese medicine (Tai chi is one form) that could be done out the back, in the forest.
”A lot of people can’t sit still and meditate. Qigong provides this awareness,” says Mattarollo. With practice, he’s felt some of his symptoms abate. He can play soccer again. He can run. “I wouldn’t have been doing any of this stuff”. He’s even become certified as a Qigong instructor and nature therapist. “I can’t do science any more. But maybe I can still help people.”
Qigong is based on the concept of Qi – life essence – broadly considered by Western researchers to be unprovable. A 2013 review of seven studies found Qigong effective for reducing stress – but those studies are of extremely low quality. “The best evidence,” noted one sceptical scientist, “is shit.”
It’s also plausible Qigong is providing a strong placebo effect. But so does exercise and panadol for some conditions. Placebos are powerful healers.
And we only replace doubt with knowledge by experiment – and sometimes self-experiment. “In science, we’re all about evidence-based practice,” says Sloan. “What Steve is doing is practice-based evidence. He’s a true scientist in that sense.”
Mattarollo used to think about all this a lot. He’s had to release a lot of his analytical, critical mindset. That was actually a big part of his healing: acceptance. Acceptance who is not who he was. Acceptance he must walk a new path, into doubt.
“Some of it may be placebo,” he says. “We’ll never know how much. But who cares?
“If someone believes enough in something … if it helps them, who cares?”
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