Your Mind is Superior to your Body. Healing should start in mind
Jaison Chacko
Excerpts from the Introduction to the book ” Mind over Medicine’ by Dr. Lissa Rankin M. D.
“It’s no wonder the notion that the mind might have the power to heal the body would be threatening to many mainstream doctors. After all, we spend a decade learning the tools that supposedly give us mastery over other people’s bodies. We want to believe that the time, money, and energy we’ve put into becoming doctors isn’t wasted.
We’re professionally and emotionally invested in the idea that if something breaks down physically, you must seek our expertise. As doctors, we like to believe we know your body better than you do. The whole medical establishment is based on such a notion. Most people are happy to function within this paradigm. The alternative—that you have more power to heal your own body than you’ve ever imagined—lobs the responsibility for health back into your court, and many people feel like that’s just too much responsibility. It’s much easier to hand over your power and hope some expert who is smarter, wiser, and more experienced can “fix” you. But what if we’ve got it all wrong? What if, by denying the fact that the body is naturally wired to heal itself and the mind impacts this self-healing system, we’re actually sabotaging ourselves?”
Then I read the New York Times article1 about the Greek war veteran who was sent to the United States in the 1940s for treatment of a combat-mangled arm. He got work doing manual labor in the U.S., married a Greek American woman, and settled down to have children. When he noticed that he was getting short of breath
while doing his work, he went to the doctor and was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer and told he had only nine months to live. He was offered aggressive treatment, but after nine months doctors apparently assured him that it wouldn’t save his life, he decided to save his money, decline treatment, and move with his wife back to his native Ikaria, a Greek island, where he could be buried with his ancestors in a graveyard overlooking the Aegean Sea. He and his wife moved with his elderly parents into a small house on a vineyard, where he expected he would die soon. While he prepared to die, he reconnected with his faith and started going to his old church. When his friends got wind of the fact that their old buddy was back home, they showed up with bottles of wine, books, and board games to entertain him and keep him company. He even planted vegetables in a garden, not expecting he’d be around to harvest them. Over the next few months, he basked in sunshine, savored the salty air, and relished in his love for his wife. Six months passed, and not only did he not die; he was actually feeling better than ever. He started working in the untended vineyard during the day, making himself useful, and in the evenings, he’d play dominoes with friends. To get to church, he had to climb up and down the hills of Ikaria, which, over time, he was better able to manage. Every day, he, like many other
residents of Ikaria, drank a homemade herbal tea sweetened with honey, which is believed by the locals to cure all that ails you. He took a lot of naps, rarely looked at a watch, and spent a lot of time outdoors. Forty-five years later, the man who’d allegedly had end-stage cancer celebrated his 98th birthday. He never underwent treatment. At one point, 25 years after his diagnosis, bewildered by what had happened, he went back to the United States to ask his doctors for an explanation. In an ironic twist of fate, the doctors who had treated him were all dead.
The mind-body-spirit link has been advocated by medical pioneers for decades. Yet, in spite of this, it has failed to shoulder its way into the mainstream medical community. As a young doctor, I received my medical degree well after renowned physicians such as Bernie Siegel, Christiane Northrup, Larry Dossey, Rachel Naomi Remen, and Deepak Chopra had raised awareness about the mind-body-spirit link, and you might think their teachings would have been included as part of my medical education. But I was largely unfamiliar with their work until long after I finished medical school. Not until I began doing my own research did I even read their books.
One of the first books I studied, Harvard professor Anne Harrington’s mind-body medicine history book, The Cure Within, left me feeling physically dizzy and viscerally unsettled. In the book, she refers to the mind-body phenomenon as “bodies behaving badly,” meaning that sometimes bodies don’t respond the way they “should,” and the only way we can explain such mysteries is through the power of the mind.2 As examples of bodies behaving badly, Harrington tells stories of children living in institutional settings whose material needs were all met but who wound up developmentally and mentally stunted because they were improperly loved. She also cites 200 cases of blindness in a group of Cambodian women forced by the Khmer Rouge to witness the torture and slaughter of their loved ones. Although medical examination could find nothing wrong with the eyes of these women, they claimed to have “cried until they could not see.”
Growing up with a physician father, I thought only doctors cured sick people. It wasn’t even on my radar to think that patients could potentially heal themselves and that, as a result, radical remission without medical intervention might be in the realm of possibility.
As a medical student and resident, I believed it was my responsibility to diagnose what was wrong with a person’s body and prescribe the right treatment. If they got better, I credited myself. If they didn’t, I blamed myself. As a practicing physician, I felt the weight of my job—to make the right assessments, settle on the right diagnoses, and deliver the proper treatments without ever making a mistake. Aside from hoping my patients would participate in lifestyle modifications like smoking cessation, exercise, and a better diet, I didn’t expect much of them. I certainly didn’t expect them to heal their own bodies. That’s what I was there for.
But after I became more experienced as a young doctor, I had a sneaking suspicion I might have it all wrong. After all, who knows the patient’s body better than the patient? While doctors may know the names of the arteries in the hand or the muscles in the leg better than most patients, in some cases, especially those related to stress, the patient is actually the best diagnostician. Perhaps, instead of believing we doctors know what’s best for the body, patients would be better off diagnosing the root causes of their illnesses and writing their own Prescriptions for what needs to change in their lives in order to make their bodies ripe for miracles.
After all, that’s what I ended up doing on my own healing journey as a patient. My Healing Journey By the time I was 33 years old, I was stressed out, burned out, and living in a near-constant state of fear, anxiety, and overwhelm. I was extremely unhappy in my job as a full-time partner in a busy obstetrics and gynecology practice, where I was expected to work 36- or 72-hour shifts in the hospital, performing surgeries and delivering babies. I had become disillusioned with our broken healthcare system, which required me to churn through 40 patients a day, often scheduled in hurried seven-and-a-half-minute slots, leaving little time for us to actually talk, much less bond.
My heart felt broken when a longtime patient wrote to tell me she had planned to confess to a sensitive health issue she was hiding from me. She had rehearsed what she would say for days, with the support of her husband. But when it came time for her to spill the beans, she wrote, I never removed my hand from the exam-room door. My hair was disheveled and I was dressed in dirty scrubs. She suspected I had been up all night delivering babies—and I probably had been. Although she knew I was probably tired, she kept praying I would touch her arm, sit down on the stool next to her, and offer enough tenderness and connection to make her feel safe to talk about her concern. But, she said, my eyes were blank and I never let go of the door handle. When I read that letter, I got choked up, felt a hiccup in my chest, and knew in my heart that practicing this kind of medicine was not what drew me to my profession.
I had been called to medicine the way some are called to the priesthood, not to churn out prescriptions and blow through physical exams like a machine but to be a healer. What drew me to the practice of medicine was the desire to touch hearts, to hold hands, to offer comfort amid suffering, to enable recovery when possible, and to alleviate loneliness and despair when cure wasn’t possible. If I lost that, I would love everything. Every day of being a doctor was chipping away at my integrity. I didn’t have language for it at the time, but Harvard doctors are now calling it “moral injury,”4 the same kind of traumatic wound that war veterans experience when they follow orders that require them to betray their own ethics. It was eroding my mental, physical, and spiritual health to practice medicine inside a corrupt system that gives lip service to patient well-being but, in practice, prioritizes the financial bottom line. I knew the kind of medicine my soul wanted to practice, yet I felt helpless to reclaim the doctor-patient connection I craved, as well as victimized by managed-care companies, the pharmaceutical industry, malpractice lawyers, politicians, and other factors that threatened to widen the rift between me and my patients. But what were my alternatives? I was the sole breadwinner in my family, responsible for covering my medical school debt, my husband’s graduate school debt, the mortgage, and my newborn daughter’s college fund. Quitting my job was out of the question.
Now, mind you, healing yourself is not for the faint of heart. It’s also not something you can do with the force of your will. At first, I tried to just grab myself by the ovaries and make some scary-ass choices, but bullying myself didn’t work. The only thing I could do, over and over again, was surrender, often in tears, to the force of love that had created me and trust that if there was something I was meant to do, my Inner Pilot Light would show me the way. (For a guided meditation that helps you practice this kind of surrender, sign up for the Connect to Your Inner Pilot Light program at Inner PilotLight.com.
I spent two years growing increasingly deeper in debt while I hiked every day, practiced yoga, learned to meditate, participated in transformational workshops, got into therapy, spent a lot of time in Big Sur at Esalen Institute, painted in my art studio, found my spiritual mentor in Kitchen Table Wisdom author Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D., and started writing my first book. But something didn’t feel right, and I started feeling a painful longing in my heart. The truth was that, as much as I was enjoying painting and writing, I missed my patients. I didn’t know when I left the hospital that you can quit your job, but you can’t quit your calling. I couldn’t imagine going back to the hospital. I sensed it might kill me. But I realized I needed to find a way to express the healer inside me.
When I was offered a job at an integrative medicine practice in Marin County, near San Francisco, it felt like kismet. In West Marin County, I’d have the chance to live by the ocean, where the redwoods meet the mountains, right off scenic Highway 1. The environment felt like medicine, and the doctors I would be practicing with were open-minded and interested in alternative methods of healing. I had a hard time envisioning a way to practice medicine that would allow me to live in alignment with my values, but the lovely physician in charge of the integrative medicine practice offered me the world—
A Radical New Kind of Patient Intake
I started digging deep into the personal lives of my patients, asking questions most doctors had never thought of: Is anything keeping you from being the most authentic, vital you? If so, what is holding you back? What do you love and celebrate about yourself? What’s missing from your life? What do you appreciate about your life? Are youin a romantic relationship? If so, are you happy? If not, do you wish you were?
Are you fulfilled at work? Do you feel like you’re in touch with your life purpose? Do you feel sexually satisfied, either with a partner or by yourself? Do you express yourself creatively? If so, how? If not, do you feel creatively thwarted, like there’s something within you dying to come out? Do you feel financially healthy, or is money a stressor in your life? If your fairy godmother could change one thing about your life, what would you wish for?
I came to see that these patients were unhealthy, not because of bad genes or poor health habits or rotten luck, but because they were gut-wrenchingly lonely or miserable in their bad relationships,
stressed about work, freaked out about their finances, profoundly depressed, or suffering from a huge load of unhealed trauma. Most, when I asked on my intake form “What’s missing from your life?” wrote a long list. And when I asked the same question in person, the majority of these patients wept. Something was going on that had nothing to do with vegetables or exercise or vitamins. On the flip side, I had other patients who ate poorly, exercised rarely, forgot to take their supplements, and enjoyed seemingly perfect health. When I read their intake forms, they revealed that their lives were filled with love, fun, meaningful work, financial abundance, creative expression, sexual pleasure, spiritual connection, and other traits that differentiated them from the sick health enthusiasts. They also tended to report less trauma, or they admitted to having done a lot of psychological or spiritual inner work that they felt had helped them clear much of their trauma burden. They were, in essence, happy and fulfilled. And even though they didn’t take the best care of their bodies, their bodies responded with good health.
That’s when I began asking my patients two mother-lode questions: “What do you think might lie at the root of your illness?” and most important, “What does your body need in order to heal?” I now also ask the question Rachel Carlton Abrams, M.D., asks in her book Bodywise: “What would it take to live a life your body would love?”
But more often than not, when I asked, “What do you think might lie at the root of your illness?” my patients said things like these: “I give until I’m depleted.” “I’m miserable in my marriage.” “I absolutely hate my job.” “I need more ‘me’ time.” “I’m so lonely I cry myself to sleep every night.” “I’m out of touch with my life purpose.” “I don’t feel God anymore.” “I hate myself so much I can’t look at myself in the mirror.” “I’m avoiding facing the truth.” “I can’t forgive myself for what I’ve done.” “I’m living a lie and I feel like a total fraud.” And when I asked my patients, “What does your body need in order to heal?”
my patients shocked me with their answers: “I have to quit my job.” “It’s time to finally come out of the closet to my parents.” “I must divorce my spouse.” “I have to finish my novel.” “I need to hire a nanny.” “I’m so lonely; I need to make more friends.” “I need to meditate every day.” “I have to tell my husband I’m having an affair.” “I need to stop being such a pessimist.” “I need to forgive myself.” “I need to love myself.” Whoa . . .
While many patients simply weren’t ready to do what their intuition was telling them their bodies needed, the patients who were ready for real transformation listened to the quiet voice within and made radical changes. Some quit their jobs. Some finally committed to doing the deep trauma–clearing therapeutic work that actually releases trauma from the body. Others left their marriages. Some moved to new cities. Others finally pursued long-suppressed dreams. The results these patients achieved were astonishing. Sometimes, a laundry list of illnesses would disappear, often very quickly. My patients were healing themselves after years of medical therapies had proven useless. I was in awe.
I had frequent dreams of sitting at the bedsides of patients from the past, the ones I hadn’t had the time to fully attend to. In the dreams, I listened to their stories with no eye on my watch and no hand on the door. I’d wake up in tears, as if I had retrieved a piece of my soul. My new practice allowed me to heal what had been broken in me. With a whole hour to spend with patients, I was finally able to open my heart, listen, and practice true healing arts. Around this time is when those remarkable stories of patients who healed themselves from incurable and terminal illnesses started trickling in, not just from the patients in my practice but from people all over the world.
I didn’t understand what was happening to my patients. They were crediting me with their cures, but I hadn’t done anything other than ask good questions and listen with love. It didn’t make any sense to me, so I did what I always do when I don’t understand something—I researched it. I hadn’t intended to become a researcher of radical remissions, but one serendipity after another led me down an unplanned, uncharted path, as if birds were dropping crumbs, blazing a trail to my Holy Grail. Books fell off the shelf. Physicians appeared on my path with messages
I started waking up from the deep anesthesia my medical education and years of practice had induced, and in my groggy haze, I began to see the light. One question led to another, and before I realized what was happening, I was knee-deep in journal articles, trying to ferret out the truth about what is happening in the body when the mind is healthy and why we get sick when the mind is unhealthy or when we become spiritually disconnected. I realized that I didn’t have to order lab tests, prescribe drugs, or operate in order to be of service as a doctor. I could help even more people by discovering the truth about how to help people heal themselves. What followed was a deep dive into the gospels of modern medicine, the peer-reviewed medical literature, where I sought scientific proof that you can heal yourself in journals like the New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the American Medical Association. What I found changed my life forever, and my hope is that it will also change your life and the lives of your loved ones.
All of these paradigm-shifting changes in my life translated into many transformations in my physical, emotional, mental, spiritual, and relational health. Through my local and online community, I discovered a tribe of people interested in consciousness who were committed to radical self-care and healing the world—the people I had been looking for my whole life. Suddenly, I was no longer lonely. I knew my life’s purpose. I loved my work. My home environment was medicine for me. I was in love. I felt a deepening spiritual connection to all of life. And I was happier than I had ever been in my life. One by one, I got off all of my medications and my health conditions completely resolved.
Today, I’m off all of my allergy shots, my cervix has returned to normal without further surgery, my sexual disorder is gone, my cardiac arrhythmia has disappeared, and my blood pressure has normalized. As an added bonus, I lifted my mood from depressed to frequent bouts of joy, lightened my trauma load, bolstered my capacity for empathy and deep intimacy, deepened my connection to Source, and feel almost unbearably grateful to be able to do the sacred, transformational, creative, and activist work I do.
Is there scientific data to support the seemingly miraculous stories of self-healing that float around? You betcha. There’s proof that you can radically alter your body’s physiology just by changing your mind, opening your heart, and connecting to your spirituality. There’s also proof that you can make yourself sick when your mind thinks unhealthy thoughts, your heart closes, and you’re spiritually disconnected. And it’s not just mental. It’s physiological. How does it happen? Don’t worry; I’ll also explain exactly how unhealthy thoughts and feelings translate into disease and how healthy thoughts and feelings help the body repair itself.
But there’s more. There’s proof that doctors might facilitate your recovery, not so much because of the treatments they prescribe, but because of the authority you ascribe to them. There’s also proof that one surprising factor can benefit your health more than eliminating cigarettes, that something you may consider unrelated to the health of the body can add more than seven years to your life, that one fun thing can dramatically reduce the number of doctor visits you’ll need, that one positive shift in your mental attitude can make you live 10 years longer, that one work habit can increase your risk of dying, and that a pleasurable activity you probably never linked to a healthy life can dramatically reduce your risk of heart disease, stroke, and breast cancer. These are just a few of the scientifically verifiable facts I share in this book that have radically changed how I think about medicine.
This book is divided into three parts. In Part One, I’ll make the argument that the mind has the power to alter the body physiologically through a potent combination of positive belief and the nurturing care of the right health-care providers.
In Part Two, I’ll show you how the mind can alter the body’s physiology based on the life choices you make, including the relationships you choose to nurture, your sex life, the work you do, your financial choices, how creative you are, how spiritually attuned you are, whether you live in a place your body loves, whether you’re an optimist or a pessimist, how happy you are, and how you spend your leisure time. I’ll also teach you one valuable tool you can use anywhere—one that could save your life.
Keep in mind that the tips I give you aren’t just for sick people but also for healthy people interested in preventing disease. I don’t want you to wait until your body starts screaming at you with life-threatening diseases. Instead, I want to encourage you to listen to the whispers from your body: these are touchstones on your path to optimal health, leading you away from what predisposes you to illness and toward what has been scientifically proven to result in better health and vital longevity, setting you up to increase the likelihood that your health span will equal your life span.
“What happened? Seventy-one percent of those subjected to the sham surgery got better, whereas only 67 percent of those who got the real surgery improved.13 Internal mammary artery ligation now exists only in medical history.
The data I was collecting was impressive, and I had to wonder if it might be even more impressive if every effort weren’t made to minimize the placebo effect in clinical trials. If researchers perceived the placebo effect as a positive phenomenon, something to embrace, perhaps we’d see even higher percentages. But that’s not the focus most researchers have.
On the contrary, clinical-trial coordinators and medical researchers (who are mostly employed by pharmaceutical companies) go out of their way to diminish the placebo effect. After all, patients who get better from placebos interfere with a drug’s ability to get approved for market.
To screen out those considered to have “excessive placebo responses,” many randomized, double-blinded, placebo-controlled trials of drugs are actually preceded by a “washout phase,” in which all participants take an inert pill and anyone who reacts favorably to it is eliminated from the study.
So, if the majority of researchers for new pharmaceuticals weren’t getting paid handsomely by Big Pharma, we might see placebo response rates shoot even higher in clinical trials. I know this from personal experience, since I was once one of those clinical researchers, enrolling patients in pharmaceutical trials as a way to try to cover the skyrocketing cost of malpractice insurance and the overhead of running a practice in California, where reimbursement rates were plummeting. We were instructed by the pharmaceutical company to screen out the people who seemed to have an unusually exaggerated placebo response. In fact, after observing me with study patients, one pharmaceutical researcher suggested to me that I stop being so nice to my patients, since their symptoms seemed to be resolving before they even got randomized into the study. The goal of this research is to prove that the drug works better than placebo. If placebo rates are too high, it’s hard to prove that a new drug is efficacious, since efficacy is defined as “better than placebo.”
I also became aware of two similarly titled books written in the 1960s, Boyd’s The Spontaneous Regression of Cancer and Everson and Cole’s Spontaneous Regression of Cancer, which spawned an increase in the number of such case studies reported in the medical literature. As I read through case study after case study of spontaneous disease remission, I felt my heart race with excitement. For the most part, the case studies didn’t address how the spontaneous remissions happened. The patients weren’t interviewed about whether they believed they would get well, whether they were taking placebos, or whether they had done anything else remarkable to heal themselves. But they did give me proof that almost no disease can be called “incurable.”
Many of the health conditions from which patients spontaneously got well were the kinds of illnesses I was taught were terminal and untreatable. Clearly, I had been taught wrong.
I wasn’t the only one whose curiosity was sparked by case studies like this, wondering why conventional medicine wasn’t asking more questions about those outliers who experienced cures from seemingly “incurable” diseases. At the same time as I was hounding the halls of IONS, Kelly Turner was getting her Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, after traveling the world to interview people who experienced “radical remissions” from stage 4 cancers that had been either untreated by conventional medicine or given treatment deemed to be inadequate for cure. Her book Radical Remission, compiling her stories and conclusions about the nine factors these patients had in common, was released
Years later, I would also meet physician, ordained minister, and Harvard instructor Jeffrey Rediger, M.D., M.Div., who, in addition to practicing medicine, received a master’s in divinity from the Princeton Theological Seminary, giving him the perfect credentials to research the intersection of science and spirituality. He published a book, Cured: The Life-Changing Science of Spontaneous Healing, detailing the findings of his research into the health outliers who have experienced unusual health outcomes. I was relieved and grateful to meet another legitimate academician with a tendency to nerd out like I did about the mind-body-spirit connection. I discovered that, since 2003, he has been collecting stories of radical remission, as Kelly Turner and I had. With degrees in both medicine and theology, he stood with one foot in two worlds, bridging the scientific explanation of such phenomena as “spontaneous remissions” or “placebo effects” on the one side of the bridge and holding the tension with the religious world on the other side that would classify such things as “miracles” or “spiritual healing.” As he writes, “These terms are all black boxes that have not been unpacked by the tools of modern science.”34 He has been tracking these cases for so long that he’s had the opportunity to see how some of these health outliers fare over the long haul–stories of better-than-expected outcomes in patients with pancreatic cancer, the worst forms of brain cancer, idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, and other potentially fatal diseases.
The nocebo effect is probably most obvious in “voodoo death,” when a person is cursed and told he or she will die, then dies.12 The notion of voodoo death doesn’t just apply to witch doctors in tribal cultures. The literature shows that patients believed to be terminal who are mistakenly informed that they have only a few months to live have died within their given time frame, even when autopsy findings reveal no physiological explanation for the early death.13
Nocebo symptoms can manifest in large groups as well as individuals. For example, after the nuclear power plant disaster in Japan following the 2011 tsunami, people with no evidence of radiation exposure reported symptoms of radiation poisoning as far away as the United States. Similarly, thousands of people with no evidence of disease reported symptoms of swine flu after the media blasted reports of the epidemic all over television, newspapers, and the Internet. Similar “epidemics” have been reported in workplaces, schools, and towns where gas leaks, strange odors, or insect bites have been reported in the media.16 So how does this happen? How can someone shed hair when given saline? How can they vomit when given sugar water? How can they become diabetic or allergic to orange juice just by switching personalities? What is occurring, both in the brain and in the body? I kept digging to find my answers.
Scientists believe the nocebo effect is caused primarily by activation of the same stress response the placebo effect relieves. When a patient is cursed, either by a witch doctor, a family member, or a modern physician, the stress of the bad news stimulates the stress response. For example, when patients were told they would experience pain (but were given only an inert substance), the HPA axis was stimulated, increasing cortisol levels. Both pain and excess stimulation of the HPA axis were experienced
