Can the mind really heal the body? For obvious reasons mainstream healthcare and media would say “no”. Imagine, it wouldn’t be too good for business if more people started healing themselves.
The "placebo effect" is defined as “a beneficial effect produced by a placebo drug or treatment, which cannot be attributed to the properties of the placebo itself, and must therefore be due to the patient's belief in that treatment.”
The "placebo effect" is concrete evidence that the body holds within it innate self-repair mechanisms.
If you doubt the power of the placebo effect look no further than The Spontaneous Remission Project, a database compiled by the Institute of Noetic Sciences of over 3500 case studies of patients who have been cured from seemingly "incurable" illnesses. Stage 4 cancers have disappeared without treatment, HIV positive patients became HIV negative, heart disease, kidney failure, diabetes, high blood pressure, thyroid disease, autoimmune diseases… all gone.
A Case of Advanced Lymphosarcoma
In a case study from 1957 Mr. Wright had advanced lymphosarcoma. His liver and spleen were enlarged, and he had tumors the size of oranges in his armpits, neck, chest, and abdomen. Every day his lungs had to be drained of two quarts of milky fluid in order for him to breathe.
Mr. Wright was not giving up hope. He had heard about Krebiozen, a new wonder drug and begged his doctor, “just give me some Krebiozen, it's all going to be good.” Now, Krebiozen was only available on a research protocol and the protocol required that the doctor does an assessment on the patient, and says that the patient has at least 3 months to live. His Doctor couldn’t just do that, so Mr. Wright kept badgering him, until his doctor gave in.
So, Mr. Wright got his Krebiozen on a Friday, although his doctor believed he wouldn’t make it through the weekend. But, on Monday things were different, Mr. Wright was walking around the wards. His tumors had shrunk to half of their original size, melted like snowballs on a hot stove, and after ten days on Krebiozen they were gone.
Mr. Wright praised Krebiozen for two months, until the initial reports came out and said that Krebiozen may not be working too well. He fell into a deep depression and his cancer came back.
His doctor then got sneaky, and said “You know that Krebiozen that you got, that was a tainted version, not so good. But I got us some ultrapure highly concentrated Krebiozen.” He then injected Mr. Wright with nothing but distilled water, and once again, the tumors disappeared, and so did the fluid in his lungs.
All was going well for Mr. Wright until the American Medical Association published a nationwide study that proved definitively that Krebiozen was worthless. Two days after hearing the news Mr. Wright died.
Measurable Changes in Physiology
Some of The Spontaneous Remission Project studies are fascinating. Give a bunch of bald men placebos, tell them it’s Rogain and they grow hair. The opposite is also true, so if you give people a placebo and tell them it is chemotherapy, they vomit, and lose their hair.
The changes in physiology are measurable. Patients getting placebos were found to have ulcers that healed, colons that became less inflamed, bronchi that dilated, warts that disappeared, and cells looked different under the microscope. It's provable, even though it's initiated by the mind.
Listen to Lissa Rankin talk about her new wellness model, the Whole Health Cairn:
