I have tried throughout this book to make a coherent case, accounting for as much material as I could. One great value of the concept of the meaning response is that it allows us to look carefully and creatively at things which, to now, have seemed mysterious and puzzling, to make sense of them, and to see how they relate to one another. Another value is that it lets us connect together under one umbrella things which previously seemed to be unrelated, or simply off the charts. Among those are the research on “adherence” and on “self-rated health.” I am confident that these are important instances of the effects of meaning on human health; but the details of how this is the case are not at all clear.

Adherence and survival

One of the strangest instances of the meaning response involves the notion of “adherence,” also called “compliance.” In the late 1960s, a major study was carried out involving several drugs including one called clofibrate which lowers the levels of cholesterol and triglycerides in the blood. The study was an attempt to learn if this treatment actually reduced the rate of mortality from heart attacks. The patients in the study were all men between the ages of 30 and 64 who showed evidence of having had a myocardial infarction (a heart attack) in the previous three months.