Superhealing: Engaging Your Mind, Body, and Spirit to Create Optimal Health and Well-Being (ARC) (4 page)

Health cannot be achieved through treating physical symptoms

while ignoring the underlying psychological and emotional issues

that are now understood to cause illness. To achieve a balanced state of health in an ongoing manner and develop an effective treatment

plan for anything that ails you, you must be inclusive and take physical, emotional, and psychological factors into consideration.

Like wellness, disease is a dynamic process involving the entire

body, even if only one organ system is seemingly affected. You don’t have to be sick to be unhealthy. Because health includes your mental and spiritual well-being, you can be considered unhealthy if you are physical y intact while emotional y imbalanced or devoid of a meaningful relationship with your spirit. Research has shown that hostility is a risk factor for heart disease and that loneliness contributes to the development of several diseases.

Becoming healthy again after an ailment or an injury depends in

part on your willingness to accept responsibility for healing the disease or condition and to make a commitment to explore aspects of

your experience that defy and interfere with personal wholeness. You must take care of your body, mind, and spirit.

Optimal health and well-being—the highest possible level of vi-

tality and resilience and the strongest immunity—is not achieved

by treating only the physical symptoms while ignoring the underly-

ing psychological and emotional issues that cause illness. There is a crucial relationship among the physical, mental, emotional, and

spiritual aspects of our being that each of us must embrace if we wish to significantly enhance our quality of life. Although the healthcare industry has failed, thus far, to cohesively shift the medical paradigm from treatment to effective prevention, there is no doubt that 6

Introduction

the latest research acknowledges that the vast majority of chronic diseases—including heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and high blood pressure—can be prevented.

Disease is the manifestation of an existing imbalance that an in-

dividual is unable to resolve on any level of being. It is caused and shaped by a number of influences that may or may not bear a direct causal relationship to one another. These influences have usual y

been present and adversely affecting the individual for some time.

The creation of optimal health and well-being, as well as the management of illness, ultimately requires the individual to understand as many of these influences as possible.

WE HAVE FORGOTTEN WHAT WE

ONCE KNEW ABOUT UNITY

Across the globe, since time immemorial, spiritual traditions have viewed the mind as a doorway to greater spiritual and emotional

awareness and increased physical health and well-being. Mind, body, and spirit were recognized as integrated parts of our being for thousands of years, so healers employed mind-body techniques to aug-

ment treatments that promoted healing of the body. Ancient Greek

physicians, for instance, used holistic and natural healing practices, including techniques that involved the mind, body, and spirit that were passed on to them by the Egyptians.14

More than 2,000 years ago, Hippocrates, the Greek physician who

is considered the father of medicine, observed that certain personality traits were more common in people with cancer. Identifying these traits led him to devise a course of treatment.15 As the first holistic physician, he considered health to be a state of internal and external harmony with the self and the environment. Many years ago, not long after my experience with Melissa, I was blessed to discover the con-

Introduction

7

cept of holism that Hippocrates promoted, which has enabled me to

provide my patients with better care. I was surprised to discover that its ancient roots extended around the globe and were present in many cultures.

While mind-body techniques remained in use in the Far East, in

places such as India and China, Western scientists threw the baby out with the bathwater a little more than 200 years ago. An unfounded

belief in the separation of mind, body, and spirit became dominant in our culture because of a political desire for separation of church and state. The body was given to the scientists, the mind and soul to the priests.

The split happened in the mid-seventeenth century, when René

Descartes—a lawyer, philosopher, mathematician, and scientist—

proposed a theory of the innate distinction between mind and body

that prompted a disregard of the more organic and holistic approach-es of that time. It wasn’t a purely scientific notion, but one that was created in response to an agreement that he had to make with the

pope to get access to the bodies he needed to study by dissection. 16

Descartes basical y, and perhaps understandably, cut a deal with

the Catholic Church that would allow him to continue with his studies and research. He publicly agreed that the body was separate from the mind and the soul. Those realms of our experience were relegat-ed to the domain of the Church so that he could claim the physical realm as his own territory.18 Alas, Descartes’s bargain set the tone and direction of Western science over the next two centuries, which divided the human experience into two distinct and separate spheres of experience. This artificial perspective is the foundation of mainstream medical science as we know it today.

Because of Descartes’s agreement, mainstream culture, including

the vast majority of our physicians, remains largely ignorant about 8

Introduction

the important role that the mind and the emotions play in the de-

velopment of disease and in the healing process. Therefore, for most contemporary physicians (like my supervisor during my psychiatric rotation), even the mere thought of considering the emotional

components of disease while treating patients seems to threaten the scientific approach to medicine. Since the beginning of my medical education, I’ve known I didn’t want to become that kind of doctor.

Medical discoveries that do not involve drugs or surgery are often ignored or misunderstood by doctors, even when research supporting

these discoveries is reported in prestigious medical journals.

In truth, the separation of mind, body, and spirit is not real, although we have long been led to believe that it is—and we have created our treatments accordingly. Remarkable discoveries are being

made all the time now that prove there is so much more to what we

are than we can see with our eyes. We don’t even know yet what these discoveries mean, but I believe that in the future these will influence our treatments for all kinds of diseases and conditions.

Quantum physicists, beginning with John Stewart Bell in 1964,

have done studies on the phenomenon of nonlocality
.
In
Healing
Words,
a book that explores the power of prayer to heal (which several studies have supported), Dr. Larry Dossey explained, “If distant objects have once been in contact, a change thereafter in one causes an immediate change in the other—no matter how far apart they are, even if they are separated to opposite ends of the universe.”19 As he pointed out, we are currently discovering how this applies to issues of health and well-being. After al , our bodies, like everything else in existence, are made of particles. However, we can be assured that this phenomenon is not theoretical; it rests on experiments.

The evidence for Dossey’s statement is fascinating. A 1993 study

conducted by the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command

Introduction

9

determined that white blood cel s removed from the body continue

to have a persistent, invisible connection to those remaining in the body.20 The army wanted to better understand the influence of emotions on systems that were far apart in location but remained con-

nected.

Scientists scraped white blood cel s from the mouths of volun-

teers. Then, using polygraph probes, they separately monitored the cel s in their test tubes and in their donors. The donors were placed in a room and exposed to emotional y charged videos. While the

donors were watching violent scenes, the polygraph probe detected

that the donors’ white blood cel s in another room down the hal way also became extremely excited, despite the distance. The experiment was repeated with up to a fifty-mile distance between the donor and cel s, and similar results occurred. This experiment gives credence to the belief that all things are connected through an invisible web of life—and things that were once proximate, as they are in the body, are even more entangled.

The army study, the studies of particles done by physicists, and

Dossey’s investigations of the power of prayer reveal a similar con-nectivity and all point to the same thing: at birth, each of us was given access to an infinite mind,
a kind of intelligence that is greater than we are but of which we are a part. Although modern medicine would

have us believe that the mind and the brain are one and the same

thing, numerous valid studies have in fact clearly demonstrated that the mind is not limited to the brain or even to the body. Your mind is vaster than your body, and it is also nonlocal, which means that its effect extends far beyond your body and canbe measured physical y.

In fact, your mind is a phenomenon related to the entire web of life.

Fortunately, a growing number of open-minded and occasional y

surprised scientists are now causing a shift in our view of health and 10

Introduction

disease through their investigations. As news of their observations and findings percolate through our culture, they are quietly ushering in a dramatic paradigm shift by challenging the traditional view of health and disease and, in some cases, dramatical y changing the as-sumptions from which we operate. We are witnessing changes of such epic proportions that I believe only hindsight will clearly show how earthshaking their significance is. Ours is a revolutionary era that’s bringing the truth about healing into the open.

THE LIMITATIONS AND DANGERS

OF MODERN MEDICINE

In one of the most memorable lectures I ever heard in medical

school, “A Tale of Two Cities,” a guest lecturer on epidemiology (the study of disease trends) described a study by medical economist

Victor Fuchs comparing health statistics from Nevada and Utah.21

Although the study’s participants from the two states were nearly

identical in income level, education, and age, the states had strikingly different rates of disease and mortality. The healthier residents were from Utah. Fuchs determined that this could be directly linked to positive lifestyle patterns. The participants from Utah had good diets, exercised regularly, and avoided tobacco, excessive caffeine and alcohol, and drugs. Our lecturer concluded by saying that in the United States, the vast majority of chronic disorders—like heart disease, cancer, diabetes, hypertension, and stroke—can be considered lifestyle diseases. The government has estimated that 85–90 percent of these diseases are preventable.22

I was awed as well as confused by this lecture: awed because it

showed we do possess the power to control disease, and confused

because so little control was being exercised. I eventual y developed the opinion that people don’t modify their lifestyles to boost their

Introduction

11

health to optimum levels because they have excessive faith in the

power of medications and surgery to save them from their own poor

choices. They give up responsibility for their wellness to their doctors. As Donald B. Ardell asserted in
High-Level Wel ness,
“The single greatest cause of unhealth in this nation is that most Americans neglect, and surrender to others, responsibility for their own health.”23

John Knowles, the former president of Rockefeller University in

[AU: Give location], suggested that people have been duped, either accidental y or on purpose. He wrote, “People have been led to believe that national health insurance, more doctors, and greater use of high-cost hospital-based technologies will impart health. Unfortunately, none of them wil .”24 It never made sense to me why we

would depend on medications, which have the risk of significant

side effects, when other choices are available and more important.

My confusion about our choices was reinforced by experiences I had in hospitals.

My first year on a ward as a real doctor, after graduating from medical school, was fraught with a constant mixture of chronic exhaustion, sleep deprivation, uncertainty, and fear. In the second month of my internship, during a typical on-call evening, something occurred that would change my thinking and my life forever.

As I was sitting at the nurses’ station, around 8:00 pm, complet-

ing an admission of yet another patient, I noticed one of the nurses behind me in the pharmacy area preparing a bag containing a thick, ominous-looking, brown fluid. Her crisp white uniform glistened

against the steel cabinets and countertops. A few moments earlier, she’d mentioned that she needed to prepare a child’s chemotherapy.

For some strange reason, she spoke out loud as she connected the

brown bag of fluid to the intravenous (IV) line. “I need to be careful and not get any of this chemo on my uniform.”

12

Introduction

I was an intern, a newbie, fresh out of medical school and still wet behind my medical ears. Wondering why she’d made this statement,

I asked, “Is that because you don’t want to stain your uniform?”

“Honey,” she replied, with a look of utter disdain, “are you kidding me? You think I’m worried about a stain? This chemo eats through

cloth. I don’t want to get any on my uniform because it will burn a hole in it.”

And we’re putting this in kids’ bodies?
I thought.
That’s not right.