Is there scientific proof we can heal ourselves? | Lissa Rankin, MD | TEDxAmericanRiviera

Transcriber: Gabriel Orozco Hoyuela Reviewer: Chryssa R. Takahashi Can the mind really

heal

the body? And if so, is there any

scientific

evidence that could convince skeptical doctors 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 been proving for over 50 years that the mind can

heal

the body. We call it the "placebo effect." And we've been trying to outwit it for decades. (Laughter) The placebo effect is a thorn in the side of the medical establishment. It is an uncomfortable truth, which gets in the way, trying to introduce new treatments, new surgeries into the medical establishment.

Then it's a problem! Supposedly. But I actually think this is really good news! The placebo effect is excellent news! Because it is concrete evidence that the body contains innate self-repair mechanisms that can make unthinkable things happen to it. So if this surprises you, if you find it hard to believe 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 more than 3,500 case studies in the medical field. literature about patients who have improved from apparently "incurable" illnesses. Do you think there is an incurable disease?

I swear, if you look at this database, it will blow your mind. It's all there. Stage 4 cancers that disappeared without treatment. HIV positive patients, who became HIV negative. Heart disease, kidney failure, diabetes, high blood pressure, thyroid disease, autoimmune disease, they are gone. A great example of this in the medical literature is a 1957 case study of Mr. Wright who had advanced lymphosarcoma. So things were not 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 filled with two liters of milky fluid each day that he had to drain in order to breathe.

But Mr. Wright was not giving up hope. He had heard about this wonderful medicine called Krebiozen and he was begging his doctor: "Come on, give me some of that Krebiozen, everything will be fine." Unfortunately, Krebiozen was only available through a research protocol, and the protocol required that the doctor be able to make an assessment that said 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 did not give up. He continued to pester his doctor, until finally his doctor said, "Okay, I'll give you the Krebiozen." So he administered the dose on a Friday, not expecting Mr.

Wright to make it through the weekend. But, to his complete surprise, when Dr. West came to make rounds on Monday, Mr. Wright was up, walking around the rooms, and his tumors had shrunk to half their original size. They had melted like snowballs on a hot stove. And ten days after receiving the Krebiozen, they were gone. So Mr. Wright was praising Krebiozen as the miracle drug he believed it to be, for two months, until the initial reports about Krebiozen came out saying that it actually didn't seem like Krebiozen was working that well. Mr. Wright fell into a deep depression and his cancer returned.

This time Dr. West decided to be clever and told his patient: "You know the Krebiozen you have is a contaminated version, not as good. But I bought us some ultra-pure, highly concentrated Krebiozen. This is happening." He then injected Mr. Wright with nothing but distilled water. And once again the tumors disappeared, the fluid in his lungs disappeared. Mr. Wright was active for another two months. And then the American Medical Association blew it by publishing a nationwide study that definitively showed Krebiozen was worthless. Two days later, Mr. Wright, after hearing this news, died. Shortly after, I came across another study in the medical literature that was the stuff of fairy tales.

Three girls were born, attended by a midwife, on Friday the 13th in the Okefenokee swamp, near the border between Georgia and Florida. And the midwife declared that these three babies, born on such a fateful day, were all bewitched. The first, she said, would die before her 16th birthday. The second, before the 21st. The third, before turning 23. And it turned out that 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, found out, and the day before turning 23, he showed up at the hospital hyperventilating, pleading with them to make sure he survived.

He ended up dying that night. These two case studies are excellent examples from the medical literature of the placebo effect and its opposite, the nocebo effect. When Mr. Wright drank distilled water and his tumors melted, it was a great example of the placebo effect. When you receive a seemingly inert treatment and yet something is happening physiologically in the body, so the disease goes away. The nocebo effect is the opposite. So the three bewitched girls are an example of the nocebo effect. When the mind believes that something bad is going to happen in the body, then it manifests.

So the scientific literature, medical journals like the New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the American Medical Association, 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 showing that in almost everything that is studied, if you give people a fake treatment, a sugar pill, a saline injection or, more effectively , a fake surgery, (Laughs) - yes, really - between 18 and 80% of the time, people get better. And it's not just in their mind, that's what I thought at first, like "Oh!

They just feel better, they're thinking better." But it is not. Actually, it's in your physiology. This is measurable. You can actually see what happens to the body. So, for example, it was discovered that patients who received placebos had ulcers that healed, colons that became less inflamed, bronchi that dilated, warts that disappeared, and cells that looked different under the microscope. It is demonstrably happening in the body, even though it is initiated by the mind. So when we look at these, some of the studies are just amazing. I love Rogain studios. If you get a group of bald men, you give them placebos.

Their hair grows! (Laughter) The opposite is also true, so if you give people a placebo and tell them it's chemotherapy, they vomit and lose their hair. So this is actually happening in the body. My question was: Is it just the mind's positive belief that makes this happen? No, according to Harvard researcher Ted Kaptchuk. According to him, the most important thing is actually the loving care of a health professional, even more than the positive belief that some studies actually say that the doctor is or can be a placebo. So Ted Kaptchuk wanted to study this and he did a big study looking at patients who were receiving placebos for a disease, for the treatment of a disease, and he told them, "You're getting a placebo, there's nothing here, inert ingredients." , nothing active." They still got better.

More likely, Kaptchuk postulated, they felt cared for, cared for, felt like they were doing something, felt like someone cared. So to say you can heal yourself is a bit of a misnomer. You know, the body can heal itself. The body has these innate natural self-healing mechanisms, but scientific data shows that it takes the loving care of a healthcare provider, of some kind, a healer, to facilitate. That process is not an easy process to do alone, so it makes a big difference if someone else holds that positive belief with you. But the problem is that while the doctor can be the placebo, the doctor can also be the nocebo.

So what patients need from us as healthcare providers is for us to be forces of healing, not forces of fear or pessimism. So every time your doctor tells you, "You have an incurable disease, you're going to have to. take that medicine for the rest of your life," or God forbid, you get cancer and they tell you, "You have an incurable disease." 5% five-year survival rate," is really no different than when that midwife told those three girls that they were bewitched. It's a form of medical hex that's 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 may actually be harming them.

Instead, we need to be more like Dr. West, drinking that distilled water, "Really, Mr. Wright." , I promise, this will do it for you." But do we have to count on our doctors deceiving us? Do we have to get fake surgeries and drugs and end up in clinical trials? This is what led to the next phase of my research. So in my last TEDx talk, I talked about a new wellness model that I developed, called the Whole Health Cairn, and it came about as part of my research, trying to find how else we can harness the power of this mind that is clearly evidenced in The placebo effect and nocebo effect, can we do something without being in a clinical trial?

And my hypothesis was that to heal

ourselves

, to be optimally healthy, we need more than just a good diet, a regular exercise program, getting enough sleep, taking vitamins, and following doctor's orders. All of those things are great, 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 sexual life, a healthy financial life, a healthy environment. In essence, we need a healthy mind. So I wanted to try this and I looked in the medical literature and the wealth of data I found, showing that all of those things are essential, really blew me away.

I compiled them all in my upcoming book, “Mind Over Medicine: Scientific Proof You Can Heal Yourself.” But I want to give you some highlights about what this is all about. So you can see in the Comprehensive Health Cairn that all of these facets are built on a foundation stone that I call your Inner Pilot Light. And for me that is the authentic and essential part of you, the one that knows what is true for you. That is willing to tell you the truth about what may be out of alignment in your life, what stones in your Holistic Health Cairn might be out of balance.

And as you can see, I have put the body, physical health, at the top of the Total Health Cairn because it is the most fragile place, the most precarious and the easiest to throw out of balance if other things in your life don't work. It's not going very well. So what I found in the medical data is that relationships matter. People who 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 as single people. In fact, curing your loneliness may be the most important prevention measure you can implement on your body.

More 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 die working. In Japan they call it karoshi. Death from overwork, and survivors of those who die from karoshi, can actually apply for benefits similar to workers' compensation 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 who don't take their vacations are actually a third more likely to suffer from heart disease.

Your attitude really matters. Happy people live 7 to 10 years longer than unhappy ones, and optimists are 77% less likely to suffer from heart disease than pessimists. So how does this happen? What is happening in the brain that is causing the body to change? This is what fascinated me. I discovered that the brain communicates with all the cells in the body through hormones and neurotransmitters. So, for example, if you have a negative thought, belief, or feeling in your brain, your brain activates it as a threat. Something is wrong. If you're feeling lonely or pessimistic, things are going wrong at work, you're in a toxic relationship, the amygdala says, "Threat!

Threat!" and activates the hypothalamus, which talks to the pituitary gland, which communicates with the adrenal gland and the adrenal gland starts spitting out stress hormones like cortisol, norepinephrine, epinephrine. It activates what Walter Cannon at Harvard called the stress response, which triggers the sympathetic nervous system and puts you in that fight or flight mode, which is adaptive, it's protective if you're running away from a mountain lion, but on every day. In life, you're supposed to have that quick stress response if there's a threat and then you're supposed to shut it down.immediate. This is not what happens in our daily lives these days.

But fortunately, there is a relaxation response that counteracts the one described by Harvard's Herbert Benson. And when this happens, the stress response shuts down, the parasympathetic nervous system activates, and healing hormones like oxytocin, dopamine, nitric oxide, and endorphins fill the body and bathe every cell in the body. What I found most surprising about this is that those natural self-repair mechanisms that we all have only activate when the nervous system is relaxed. So when you have stress responses, all of those natural self-repair mechanisms are turned off. The body is too busy trying to fight or flee to heal itself.

So when you think about this, you have to start asking yourself: How can I start to change the balance of my own body? Thus, one study showed that, on average, we have more than 50 stress responses per day. And if you're lonely, depressed, pessimistic, unhappy at work, or in a miserable relationship, that number will more than double. Now, this relaxation response is what researchers believe explains the placebo effect. So when you're supposedly going to receive a new wonder drug (you don't know if you're getting the placebo or not), it triggers that relaxation response, that combination of the mind's positive belief and the loving care of a healthcare professional.

The provider relaxes the nervous system. And then all those natural self-repair mechanisms can come into play. Fortunately, you don't have to participate in a clinical trial to activate your relaxation responses. There are many simple pleasurable activities that activate relaxation responses and 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 the work you love, you can have sex, you can laugh, you can exercise, you can play with animals. That is why I ask you to consider the Comprehensive Health Mark in your own life.

What stones in your Whole Health Cairn might be out of balance? Each of these stones can be a factor in creating stress responses or relaxation responses. How could you activate more relaxation responses in your body? And most importantly, what does your body need to heal? What recipe do you need to write to yourself? And will you be brave enough to act on the truth of what your inner pilot already knows? I think our healthcare system is very broken, and that is largely because we have lost respect for the body's ability to heal itself. The medical establishment has become arrogant.

We have come to think that with all our modern technology and everything we have learned in the last century, we have mastered nature, and we find it repulsive to think that maybe nature could be better than we are sometimes. . And yet, spontaneous remissions of incurable diseases are

proof

that sometimes nature is simply better than us. It is a narcissistic wound for doctors. We don't know what to do with that. It makes us feel helpless, hopeless and worthless. But, fortunately, we are necessary. The doctor and all other healthcare providers are absolutely essential to this process. We need to accept this.

And patients must also change their perspective on it. It's not just about the doctors. We need patients to stop thinking that their body is none of their business, to take their power and turn it over to other healthcare providers. Your body is your business and your mind has tremendous power to communicate with your body so that your body can heal itself. So once I had a dream, and in my dream I was standing there, looking at these mountainsides, filled with millions of people who were standing shoulder to shoulder, and they were all facing north, dressed in all these tribal outfits, beautiful colors. covering the slopes of the mountains like a quilt.

And there was a bright light on their faces and they were all facing this light, and that's what I think about when I think about healthcare. I think of all of us, standing and facing the light. So please stay with me for a moment. It's going to need us all. Just because things have gotten worse doesn't mean they can't get better. I believe that just as there are no incurable diseases, there are no incurable systems either. But it will take all of us to open our hearts and minds and bring the focus back to healthcare. So please take your neighbor's hand and let's set the intention here that things will be different from now on, that we can begin this grassroots effort so that it all starts with you.

Be the love you want to see in healthcare and I believe miracles can happen. By doing this, you release oxytocin and dopamine, you begin to heal yourself, and by doing so, we can heal healthcare. Thank you. (Applause)