Suggestions
How confident are you that your mind is your most powerful tool for health? Perhaps you're willing to believe changing your mind could affect certain kinds of physical problems, but you draw the line somewhere.
Yesterday, in a conversation on this subject with a curious, but somewhat skeptical friend, I offered evidence for the power of the mind over the body.
I told her about Dr. Stewart Wolf's 1950 experiment conducted with a group of pregnant woman who were experiencing persistent nausea and vomiting. The women were given syrup of ipecac, which is used to cause vomiting, but they were told that it was a powerful anti-nausea drug. All the women experienced complete relief, and their stomach contractions (which were being monitored to see if the body was affected along with the mind) calmed to normal.
I mentioned an experiment where patients getting spinal taps were divided into two groups, one being warned that they might experience headaches as a result of the procedure, while the other was not warned to expect headaches. Of the group that was warned, all of them reported headaches. In the unwarned group, only one of the thirteen reported a headache.
I told her about a study of the power of suggestion in Japan. Children there are cautioned to avoid contact with leaves of the lacquer tree because it can produce an itchy rash similar to American poison ivy. In an experiment with Japanese high school boys who had previously had severe reactions to lacquer tree leaves, the boys were blindfolded and rubbed on one arm with leaves from a lacquer tree but were told they were leaves from a chestnut tree. On the other arm, they were rubbed with leaves from a chestnut tree, but were told they were leaves of the lacquer tree. Almost instantly, the arms that the boys thought were being rubbed with the poison leaves began to break out in the typical rash. The arms that were actually rubbed with lacquer tree leaves remained almost entirely unaffected.
My friend thought these studies were interesting, thought provoking, and even impressive. But what about something like cancer, she asked. You know, something REAL, with tumors and stuff you can see. Cancer doesn't respond to suggestion, does it?
So I told her about the patient with advanced lymphosarcoma who begged to be treated with the experimental drug, Krebiozen. His disease had progressed so far that he was not eligible for the drug trial, but his persistent requests for the drug finally caused his physicians to allow him treatment as a "compassionate exception."
The patient's belief in Krebiozen was so strong that his tumors shrank to half their size in just a few days. He was declared free of disease and released from the hospital. But in a few weeks he read a newspaper article declaring Krebiozen ineffective. His disease promptly returned.
This time his doctors told him that the problem was the strength of the treatments. They assured him they were getting a more powerful form of Krebiozen. After receiving "treatment" with a saline solution that he believed was a new and improved version of Krebiozen, the patient again recovered.
He was free of symptoms for two months before reading another report that the Krebiozen was worthless. He returned to the hospital with all his symptoms increasing and died in a couple of days.
These examples are only a tiny sample of the overwhelming evidence that what we call suggestion has an undeniable effect on health all the time.
You continually talk yourself into and out of physical reactions, symptoms, health and ill health using the power of suggestion. You also allow your health or ill health to be triggered by suggestions from others -- like your doctors, public health announcements, health reporting in the media, and advertising for health products and services.
Like the man who placed his faith in Krebiozen, your beliefs obstruct or allow your body's natural inclination to heal. Until you understand where your true power for health lies, you will continue mistakenly to look for it outside of you, and your physical condition will be at the mercy of suggestions you're hardly aware of.
My suggestion?
Increase your confidence in the power of the mind-body connection so you can use it with awareness.
Resources
For a heaping helping of scientifically recognized case studies supporting the power of the mind-body connection, read Spontaneous Remission: An Annotated Bibliography. Published by the Institute of Noetic Sciences in 1993 and now on-line in it's entirety, this book lists 1,051 case reports published in peer-reviewed medical literature of "exceptional and unexplained partial or complete disappearance of cancer and other life-threatening conditions without medical intervention."
Or for bite-sized morsels of mind-body health confidence, read Dr.
Harold Brody's excellent book, The Placebo Response: How You Can Release
the Body's Inner Pharmacy for Better Health.