Quit hexing yourself by looking for disease
“It’s supposed to be a professional secret, but I’ll tell you anyway. We doctors do nothing. We only help and encourage the doctor within.”–Albert Schweitzer
We are constantly being slapped around with the crazy idea that our bodies are plotting against us.
Just watch an hour of television. The drugs ads warn us into great vigilance:
Better watch out for this symptom.
Make sure you’re aware of that problem.
It’s only a matter of time until your body is going to reach out and strangle you.
Here’s the ad I’d like to run:
Your body is a self-healing masterpiece. It is brilliantly equipped with natural self-repair mechanisms that fight infections, repair broken proteins, kill cancer cells and keep you in tip-top shape. The only thing that ever stops it from doing its job is your ridiculous belief that it is not your closest ally.
As Derren Brown, the popular British mentalist who just opened a one-man show at the Linda Gross Theater in Chelsea, “we are all trapped inside our own minds.”
In 2012 on a show called Fear and Faith, he cured dozens of people of everything from phobias to addictions with a powerful drug he called Rumyodin.
In reality, Rumyodin (an anagram for “your mind”) was a sugar pill but it worked because his “patients” believed it worked.
I was reminded of another powerful placebo story (you may recall the Placebo Experiment from E-Cubed) while watching Dr. Lissa Rankin’s video on the Hay House Summit. (If you haven’t already signed up for this free event, you have exactly one more week.) You can sign up at this link:
She told the story of a doctor who was assigned a patient who was literally days away from dying. The patient had tumors the size of oranges. But he’d heard about a new experimental drug and he begged his new doc to try it. Miraculously, the “wonder drug” he’d read about eliminated his tumor.
Several weeks later, however, reports hit the airwaves that this new drug was not as powerful as originally thought. The tumors returned. His doctor, by now savvy, gave his patient a placebo, telling him it was a stronger form of the drug and that the ineffective trials had been using too little of this powerful drug. Once again, the tumors from his stage 4 lymphoma began to disappear.
Finally, the FDA pronounced the drug ineffective and pulled it off the market. The patient, who had been rapidly recovering, died within a week.
I could go on and on about how 79 percent of medical students develop the symptoms they’re studying. Or about the woman with a split personality who has diabetes in one of her personalities and normal sugar levels in the other.
But I’m not a doctor and would never dream of prescribing anything.
But I do know this:
We should teach our children that their bodies have self-healing superpowers.
And we should quit hexing ourselves by looking for disease.
‘And we should remember that if chimpanzees can lower their blood pressure at will, something Harvard doc, Herbert Benson, discovered in his research, there’s probably not much we CAN’T do to heal ourselves.
Pam Grout is the author of 18 books including E-Squared: 9 Do-it-Yourself Energy Experiments that Prove Your Thoughts Create Your Reality and the recently released, Thank and Grow Rich: a 30-day Experiment in Shameless Gratitude and Unabashed Joy.