MIND POWER NEWS 179: Is the Mind the Source of All Illness?

In this issue:

THE NOCEBO EFFECT: PLACEBO'S EVIL TWIN: Ten years ago, researchers stumbled onto a striking finding: Women who believed that they were prone to heart disease were nearly four times as likely to die as women with similar risk factors who didn't hold such fatalistic views.

THE SOURCE OF ALL ILLNESS: What causes illness is stress... Stress is a temporary or a prolonged coexistence of active contrasting beliefs, activated by the current situation, and clashing one against the other... Contrasting beliefs have the effect of pulling your sub-conscious in two or more directions. The result is stress and, as a consequence, the development of physical illness.

NO CLEAR EVIDENCE MEDIATION CAN BOOST HEALTH: Some of the studies suggested that certain types of meditation could help reduce blood pressure and stress and that yoga and other practices increased verbal creativity and reduced heart rate, blood pressure and cholesterol in healthy people.

MEDITATORS PREDICT UTOPIA IN AMERICA: The group takes credit for, among other things: the Dow Jones Industrial Average reaching a record high of 14,022 last week, unemployment rates falling to a six-year low at 4.5 percent, and North Korea shutting down its nuclear reactor.

THE POWER OF HYPNOSIS IN THE FIGHT AGAINST AGING: The mind and body are too important to let be controlled by chronological aging when much of how our bodies age is within our control. Hypnosis has several approaches to helping slow the affects of aging.

HOW TO EXPERIENCE TOTAL FREEDOM: You can always cope with the Now, but you can never cope with the future -- nor do you have to. The answer, the strength, the right action, or the resource will be there when you need it, not before, not after.

The Nocebo Effect: Placebo's Evil Twin

By Brian Reid
Source: Washington Post

Ten years ago, researchers stumbled onto a striking finding: Women who believed that they were prone to heart disease were nearly four times as likely to die as women with similar risk factors who didn't hold such fatalistic views.

The higher risk of death, in other words, had nothing to with the usual heart disease culprits -- age, blood pressure, cholesterol, weight. Instead, it tracked closely with belief. Think sick, be sick.

That study is a classic in the annals of research on the "nocebo" phenomenon, the evil twin of the placebo effect.

While the placebo effect refers to health benefits produced by a treatment that should have no effect, patients experiencing the nocebo effect experience the opposite. They presume the worst, health-wise, and that's just what they get.

"They're convinced that something is going to go wrong, and it's a self-fulfilling prophecy," said Arthur Barsky, a psychiatrist at Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital who published an article earlier this year in the Journal of the American Medical Association beseeching his peers to pay closer attention to the nocebo effect. "From a clinical point of view, this is by no means peripheral or irrelevant."

Barsky's target is drug side effects, which cost the U.S. health system more than $76 billion a year, according to a 1995 University of Arizona study. If even a small percentage of those costs are caused by patient expectations of harm, addressing the nocebo effect could save a nifty sum.

But convincing doctors that their patients' problems may be more than biochemical is no simple trick. The nocebo effect is difficult to study, and medical training leads doctors to seek a bodily cause for physical ills.

"Nocebos often cause a physical effect, but it's not a physically produced effect," said Irving Kirsch, a psychologist at the University of Connecticut in Storrs who studies the ways that expectations influence what people experience. "What's the cause? In many cases it's an unanswered question."

The Source of All Illness

By Lorenzo P.
Source: RealitySeeds.com

For thousands of years humans have been trying to cure illnesses afflicting body and mind. Endless types and strands of disorders seem to be ever changing and constantly mutating into more complex forms. We try hard to study and understand them with a scientific methodology, but we often have hard time making progress because our scientific models fail to describe much detail of how the human body works. While the science of health is making great steps forward, there is still a lot of guess work involved in applied medicine that often is more like a form of art based on the experience and gut feelings of the doctors, than a science with clear rules.

When we study illness, we notice the symptoms and we explore them; this research gives us clues on how to fix the symptoms, and often we discover possible causes and we attempt to attack these as well. This approach is similar to the approach we take when a car breaks, except that it is much more difficult given how complex the physical body is. It often works, but often doesn’t fix the cause, and the illness comes back to hunt us again. Many times things just resolve themselves and we have no idea what the problem was, and why it is gone.

I remember when I was a teenager I started having troubles breathing at night. I was a young and healthy, much into all kinds of sports and always active. Nevertheless, this night breathing problem was bothering me a great deal. I went to my doctor. He asked me if I had that problem only at night, which I did. He also asked me if I had that problem while in vacation somewhere else, or if I had any known allergies. I answered “no” to both questions. In fact, I could sleep just fine while in vacation, and I had no known allergies. He asked me if I spent much time in my room, which I did. That’s all he needed to hear. His prescription was “Change your room around! Move the furniture, take whatever is on the walls and change it with something new, paint the room with a different color. In short, make it feel new”. I thought it was an odd cure for my problem, but he is a very experienced doctor and I trusted him. Well, believe it or not, that “cure” fixed my problem, which never came back again. Later he explained that I had problems breathing because I was associating my room with something bad that happened in my life, putting me in a negative state of mind and stress. Changing the room around was a way to deactivate these negative memories.

He didn’t really understand all the details of why that negative state of mind was causing the problems with the breathing; he just knew that it worked that way.

What is the real cause of illness? Most important, why is the body sometimes unable to fix itself?

We know that parts of the body completely regenerate themselves every day, some parts every few weeks, others every few month and a handful every couple of years. In other words, today you have a completely different body that you had a couple of years ago. It completely regenerated itself.

The body is able to regenerate because it has a