Transcriber: Gabriel Orozco Hoyuela Reviewer: Chryssa R. Takahashi
Can the mind really heal the body?
And if so, is there any scientific evidence
to convince skeptical physicians like me?
These are the questions that fueled the last few years of my research
and what I discovered is that the scientific community,
the medical establishment, has being proving for over 50 years,
that the mind can heal the body.
We call it the "placebo effect".
And we've been trying to outsmart it for decades.
(Laughter)
The placebo effect is a thorn in the side of the medical establishment.
It's an inconvenient truth, that gets in between,
trying to bring new treatments, new surgeries into the medical establishment.
So it's a problem! Supposedly.
But I actually think, this is really good news!
The placebo effect is excellent news!
Because it's concrete evidence
that the body holds within it innate self-repair mechanisms
that can make unthinkable things happen to the body.
So, if you find this surprising,
if you have a hard time believing that the body can heal itself,
you need look no further than The Spontaneous Remission Project,
a database compiled by the Institute of Noetic Sciences
of over 3500 case studies in the medical literature
of patients who have gotten better from seemingly "incurable" illnesses.
You think there's such a thing as an incurable illness?
I swear, if you go look at this database, it will blow your mind.
Everything is in there.
Stage 4 cancers that disappeared without treatment.
HIV positive patients, that became HIV negative.
Heart disease, kidney failure, diabetes, high blood pressure,
thyroid disease, autoimmune diseases, gone.
A great example of this in the medical literature,
is a case study from 1957 of Mr. Wright who had advanced lymphosarcoma.
So, things weren't going well for Mr. Wright, time was really running out.
He had tumors the size of oranges in his armpits, neck, chest, abdomen.
His liver and spleen were enlarged,
and his lungs were filling up with two quarts of milky fluid every day
that have to be drained in order for him to breathe.
But Mr. Wright wasn't giving up hope.
He had heard about this wonder drug called Krebiozen,
and he was begging his doctor,
"Come on, just give me some of that Krebiozen, it's all going to be good."
Now, unfortunately the Krebiozen was only available on a research protocol
and the protocol required that the doctor be able to make an assessment
that says that this guy has at least three months to live.
And his doctor, Dr. West just couldn't do that.
But Mr. Wright was tenacious and he didn't give up.
He kept badgering his doctor,
until finally his doctor was like, "OK, fine I'll give you the Krebiozen."
So he dosed him up on a Friday,
not expecting that Mr. Wright would make it through the weekend.
But to his utter shock, when Dr. West came in to do rounds on Monday,
Mr. Wright was up, walking around the wards,
and his tumors had shrunk to half of their original size.
They had melted like snowballs on a hot stove.
And ten days after getting the Krebiozen, they were gone.
So Mr. Wright was up rocking and rolling like praising
Krebiozen as the miracle drug he believed it to be, for two months,
until the initial reports came out about Krebiozen
that said that it didn't really look like Krebiozen was working so well.
Mr. Wright fell into a deep depression and his cancer came back.
This time Dr. West decided to get sneaky, and he told his patient, that,
"You know that Krebiozen that you got, that was a tainted version, not so good.
But I got us some ultrapure highly concentrated Krebiozen,
This stuff's got it going on."
He then injected Mr. Wright with nothing but distilled water.
And once again, the tumors disappeared, the fluid in his lungs went away.
Mr. Wright was up rocking and rolling for another two months.
And then the American Medical Association blew it,
by publishing a nationwide study
that proved definitively that Krebiozen was worthless.
Two days later, Mr. Wright, after hearing this news, died.
Soon after that, I came across another study
in the medical literature that was the stuff of fairy tales.
Three baby girls were born, delivered by a midwife,
on Friday the 13th in the Okefenokee Swamp, near the Georgia-Florida border.
And the midwife pronounced that these three babies,
born on such a fateful day, were all hexed.
The first, she said, would die before her 16th birthday.
The second, before her 21st.
The third, before her 23rd birthday.
And as it turned out, the first girl died the day before her 16th birthday,
the second died the day before her 21st birthday,
and the third girl, who knew what had happened to the other two,
got wind of that, and the day before her 23rd birthday,
she showed at the hospital hyperventilating,
begging them, to make sure she survived.
She wound up dying that night.
These two case studies are great examples from the medical literature
of the placebo effect, and its opposite, the nocebo effect.
When Mr. Wright got that distilled water and his tumors melted away,
that's a great example of the placebo effect.
When you get a seemingly inert treatment
and yet something is happening physiologically in the body,
such that the disease goes away.
The nocebo effect is the opposite.
So the three hexed girls are an example of the nocebo effect.
When the mind's belief that something bad is going to happen in the body
then it comes to manifest.
So the scientific literature, medical journals
like the New England Journal of Medicine
and the Journal of the American Medical Association,
these scientific journals are full of evidence that the placebo effect,
and the nocebo effect are incredibly powerful.
We've known this since the 1950s,
and we've seen countless case studies
that show that in almost everything you study,
if you give people a fake treatment, a sugar pill
a saline injection, or most effectively, a fake surgery,
(Laughter) - yeah, really -
18-80% of the time, people get better.
And it's not just in their mind, that's what I thought in the beginning,
like "Oh! They're just feeling better, they're thinking better."
But is not. It's actually in their physiology.
This is measurable.
You can actually see what happens to the body.
So for example patients getting placebos
were found to have ulcers that healed,
colons that became less inflamed, bronchi that dilated,
warts that disappeared, cells looked different under the microscope.
It's provable, it's happening in the body,
even though it's initiated by the mind.
So, when you look at these, some of the studies are just amazing.
I love the Rogain studies.
You get a bunch of bald men, you give them placebos.
They grow hair! (Laughter)
The opposite is also true, so if you give people a placebo
and you tell them it's chemotherapy,
they vomit, and they lose their hair.
So this is really happening in the body.
My question was,
Is it just the mind's positive belief that's making this happen?
Not according to Harvard researcher Ted Kaptchuk.
According to him, he thinks that the most essential part
is actually the nurturing care of a healthcare provider,
more so even than the mind's positive belief
that some of the studies actually say that the doctor is the placebo or can be.
So Ted Kaptchuk wanted to study this,
and he did a great study looking at patients
that were getting placebos for an illness,
for treatment of an illness and he told them,
"You're getting a placebo, there's nothing in here,
inert ingredients, nothing active." They still got better.
Most likely, Kaptchuk postulated, because they felt tended, nurtured,
they felt like they were doing something, they felt like somebody cared.
So to say that you can heal yourself is sort of a misnomer.
You know, the body can heal itself.
The body has these innate natural self repair mechanisms,
but the scientific data proves that you need
the tending nurturing care of a healthcare provider, of some sort, of a healer,
to facilitate that process.
It's not an easy process to go through alone,
so it makes a big difference
if somebody else is holding that positive belief with you.
But the problem is while the doctor can be the placebo,
the doctor can also be the nocebo.
So, what patients need from us, as healthcare providers,
they need us to be forces of healing, not forces of fear or pessimism.
So every time your doctor tells you, "You have an incurable illness,
you're going to have to take that medication for the rest of your life,"
or God forbid, you get cancer and they say,
"You've got a 5% five-year survival rate,"
it's really no different that when that midwife told those three baby girls
that they were hexed.
It's a form of medical hexing that's so prevalent.
As doctors, we think we're being realistic, you know?
We're giving people the kind of information
we think they need to know,
but we actually can be harming them.
Instead we need be more like Dr. West. You know?
Taking that distilled water, "Really Mr.Wright,
I promise, this is going to do it for you."
But do we have to count on our doctors to dupe us?
Do we have to get fake surgeries and fake drugs,
and wind up in clinical trials?
This is what led the next phase of my research.
So in my last TEDx talk, l talked about
a new wellness model that I developed,
called the Whole Health Cairn,
and this came about as part of my research,
trying to find how else can we harness this mind's power
that's clearly evidenced by the placebo effect and the nocebo effect,
can we do something without being in a clinical trial?
And my hypothesis was that in order to heal ourselves,
in order to be optimally healthy,
we need more than just a good diet, regular exercise program,
getting enough sleep, taking your vitamins, following your doctor's orders.
Those things all are great, and critical and important.
But I also came to believe that we need healthy relationships,
a healthy professional life, a healthy creative life,
a healthy spiritual life, a healthy sex life,
a healthy financial life, a healthy environment.
In essence, we need a healthy mind.
So I wanted to try to prove this, and I went into the medical literature
and the copious data that I found,
proving that all of those things are essential, really blew my mind.
I compiled them all into my upcoming book,
"Mind Over Medicine: Scientific Proof You Can Heal Yourself".
But I want to give you a few highlights about what this is all about.
So you can see from the Whole Health Cairn,
that all this facets are built upon a foundation stone
that I call your Inner Pilot Light.
And for me that's the essential authentic part of you,
that knows what's true for you.
That's willing to tell you the truth
about maybe what's out of alignment in your life,
what stones in your Whole Health Cairn might be out of balance.
And as you see I've put the body, physical health,
on the top of the Whole Health Cairn
because it's the most fragile, the most precarious,
and the most easy to kind of fall out of balance
if other things in your life aren't going so well.
So what I found in the medical data is that relationships matter.
People that have a strong social network have half the rate of heart disease
compared to those who are lonely.
Married people are twice as likely to live long lives than unmarried people.
In fact, curing your loneliness may be
the most important measure of prevention you can enact upon your body.
More so than quitting smoking or starting to exercise.
Your spiritual life matters.
Those who attend religious services live up to fourteen years longer.
Your professional life matters.
You really can work yourself to death. In Japan they call it karoshi.
Death by overwork, and the survivors of those who die of karoshi,
can actually apply for workman's comp-like benefits in Japan.
But it's not just Japan, it's actually happening even more in the United States,
we just don't get benefits here.
So one study found that people that fail to take their vacation,
are actually a third more likely to get heart disease.
Your attitude really matters.
Ηappy people live 7 to 10 years longer than unhappy people,
and optimists are 77% less likely to get heart disease than pessimists.
So how does this happen?
What is happening in the brain that is making the body change?
This is what was fascinating to me.
I found that the brain communicates with all the cells in the body
via hormones and neurotransmitters.
So, for example, if you have a negative thought, belief
or feeling in the brain, your brain triggers this as a threat.
Something's wrong.
If you feel lonely or pessimistic, things are bad at work,
you are in a toxic relationship, the amygdala says, "Τhreat! Τhreat!"
and it turns on the hypothalamus, that talks to the pituitary gland,
that communicates with the adrenal gland and the adrenal gland start spitting out
stress hormones like cortisol, norepinephrine, epinephrine.
Ιt turns on what Walter Cannon at Harvard called the stress response,
that triggers the sympathetic nervous system,
and puts you into that fight or flight mode, which is adaptive,
it's protective if you are running away from a mountain lion,
but in every day life, you're supposed to have that quick stress response
if there is a threat and then it's supposed to switch right off.
This isn't what happens in our regular lives these days.
But fortunately there is a counter balancing relaxation response
that Herbert Benson at Harvard described.
And when this comes about, the stress response turns off,
the parasympathetic nervous system turns on,
and healing hormones like oxytocin, dopamine, nitric oxide, endorphins
fill the body and bathe every cell in the body.
What I found the most amazing about this
is that those natural self-repair mechanisms that we all have,
they only flip on when the nervous system is relaxed.
So when you're having stress responses,
all those natural self-repair mechanisms get flipped off.
The body is too busy trying to fight or flee, in order to heal itself.
So, when you think about this, you have to start to wonder like,
How can I possibly start to change the balance in my own body?
So one study showed that on average we have
more than 50 stress responses per day.
And if you're lonely, or depressed or pessimistic or unhappy at work
or in a miserable relationship that number is going to be more than twice as many.
Now this relaxation response is what researchers think
explains the placebo effect.
So when you're going to get supposedly maybe a new wonder drug -
you don't know whether you're getting the placebo or not -
it triggers that relaxation response,
that combination of the mind's positive belief
and the nurturing care of a healthcare provider
relaxes the nervous system.
And then all those natural self repair mechanisms can come into play.
Fortunately though you don't have to be in a clinical trial
to turn on your relaxation responses.
There are lots of simple pleasurable activities
that turn on the relaxation responses
and these have been proven in the medical literature.
So you can meditate, you can express yourself creatively,
you can get a massage, do yoga or tai chi,
you can go out with your friends, you can do work that you love,
you can have sex, you can laugh, exercise, you can play with animals.
So I ask you to consider the Whole Health Cairn in your own life.
Which stones in your Whole Health Cairn might be out of balance?
Each of these stones can be a factor
for creating stress responses or relaxation responses.
How might you turn on more relaxation responses in your body?
And most importantly,
what does your body need in order to heal?
What prescription do you need to write for yourself?
And are you going to be brave enough
to take action on the truth of what your inner pilot light already knows?
I believe our healthcare system is badly broken,
and it's largely because we've lost respect
for the body's ability to heal itself.
The medical establishment has gotten arrogant.
We've come to think that with all of our modern technology,
and all that we've learned in the past century,
that we've mastered nature, and we find it repelling
to think that maybe nature could be better than we are sometimes.
And yet, spontaneous remissions from incurable diseases are proof
that sometimes nature is just better than we are.
It's a narcisitic wound for physicians.
We don't know what to do with that.
It makes us feel helpless and hopeless and useless.
But fortunately, we're needed.
The physician and all the other healthcare providers
are absolutely essential to this process.
We need to embrace this.
And patients need to change their outlooks on this as well.
It is not just doctors.
We need patients to stop thinking that your body is not your business,
taking your power and handing it over to other healthcare providers.
Your body is your business, and your mind has tremendous power
to communicate with your body, such that your body can heal itself.
So I once had a dream, and in my dream I was standing there,
looking at these mountainsides, full of millions of people
that were standing shoulder to shoulder,
and they were all facing due north, dressed in all these tribal garbs,
beautiful colors covering the mountainsides like a quilt.
And there was a bright streaming light on their face
and everyone was facing this light,
and that's what I think of, when I think of healthcare.
I think of all of us, standing up, and facing the light.
So please stand with me for a moment.
It's going to take all of us.
Just because things have gotten bad doesn't mean they can't get better.
I believe that just like there are no incurable illnesses
there are no incurable systems.
But it's going to take all of us, needing to open our heart and our minds,
and bring care back to healthcare.
So please hold hands with your fellow neighbor
and let's just set the intention right here,
that things are going to be different from now on,
that we can start this grassroots effort that it all starts with you.
Be the love that you want to see in healthcare,
and I believe miracles can happen.
As we do this you're releasing oxytocin, dopamine, you start to heal yourself
and as we do so we can heal healthcare.
Thank you.
(Applause)