You Are the Placebo: Making Your Mind Matter
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| Programming the Subconscious In the first few chapters, you read about many different individuals who accepted a possible imagined scenario, and like magic, their bodies responded to that picture in their minds individuals who’d been trapped for years by the involuntary tremors of Parkinson’s disease but increased their dopamine levels by thought alone, only to see their spastic paralysis mysteriously vanish a chronically depressed woman who, over time, physically changed her brain and transmuted her debilitating emotional state into joy and well-being; asthmatics who experienced a full-blown bronchial episode brought on by nothing more than water vapor, but then reversed their bronchial constriction in seconds by inhaling exactly the same water vapor and, of course, the men with severe knee pain and compromised range of motion who miraculously improved after having sham knee surgery and remained healed years later. In all of these cases and more, it could be said that each subject first accepted and then believed in the suggestion of better health, and then surrendered to the outcome without further analysis. When these people accepted the potential of recovery, they aligned themselves with a future possible reality—and changed their minds and brains in the process. As they believed in the outcome, they emotionally embraced the idea of better health, and as a result, their bodies, as the unconscious mind, were living in that future reality during the present moment. They conditioned their bodies to anew mind and so began to signal new genes in new ways and express new proteins for better health—and they moved into anew state of being. Once they surrendered to anew possible scenario, they no longer analyzed how it was going to happen or when it would manifest they simply trusted in abetter state of being and maintained that new state of mind and body for an extended period of time. It was that sustained state of being that switched on the right genes and programmed them to stay on. Whether they took a regimen of daily sugar pills lasting weeks or even months, received a single saline injection, or submitted to fake surgery, these individuals reaffirmed their acceptance, belief, and surrender for 134 the duration of the study they participated in. If they were taking a pill daily to relieve pain or depression, the pill was a constant reminder for them to condition, expect, and assign meaning to their intentional activity, thus reinforcing the internal process over and over again. If it was a weekly visit to the hospital to see a doctor and be interviewed about their improvement, the choice to interact in a particular environment with doctors, nurses, equipment, and waiting rooms triggered a host of sensory responses, and through associative memory, they were reminded of a possible new future. They were conditioned from past experiences that the place called a hospital was where people went to get well. They began to anticipate their future changes and, therefore, assigned intention to the whole healing process. Because all these factors had meaning, they helped make the placebo patients more suggestible to the outcomes they experienced. So now let’s address the elephant in the room No real physical, chemical, or therapeutic mechanisms made these changes happen. None of these people had actual surgery, took active medication, or received any real treatment to create these significant alterations in health. The power of their minds so influenced their bodies physiology that they became healed. It’s safe to say that their real transformation happened independent of their conscious minds. Their conscious minds may have initiated the course of action, but the real work happened subconsciously, with the subjects remaining totally unaware of how it happened. The same is true of Ivan Santiago. The power of his mind under hypnosis so influenced his physiology that even when he was sitting in a freezing ice-cube bath, he didn’t so much as inch. It was the power of his subconscious mind altered by a mere suggestion, however, not his conscious mind, that was responsible for this feat. If he hadn’t accepted the suggestion, the outcome would have been very different. In addition, he did what he did without thinking about how he was able to do it in fact, in his mind, he wasn’t sitting in an ice bath. He was sitting in a perfectly pleasant tub of warm water. So just as with hypnosis, the placebo effect is created by a person’s consciousness somehow interacting with the autonomic nervous system. Quite simply, the conscious mind merges with the subconscious mind. Once the placebo patients accept a thought as a reality, and then believe and trust in the end result emotionally, the next thing that happens is that they get well. A cascade of physiological events automatically carries out the whole biological change—without their conscious minds being involved. They’re able to enter the operating system where these functions already happen 135 routinely, and when they do, it’s as if they’ve planted a seed infertile ground. The system automatically takes over for them. In fact, it’s not anyone’s job to do anything. It just happens. None of the subjects could consciously spike dopamine levels by percent and control involuntary tremors with the mind, manufacture new neurotransmitters to combat depression, signal stem cells to morph into white blood cells to mount an immune response, or restore knee cartilage in order to reduce pain—just as Santiago couldn’t have consciously avoided flinching when he lowered his body into that tub. Anyone trying to accomplish any of these feats would certainly be unsuccessful. These people would have to get help from a mind that already knows how to initiate all of these processes. To succeed, they’d have to activate the autonomic nervous system, the subconscious mind, and then assign it the task of making new cells and healthy new proteins. Download 5.46 Mb. Share with your friends:
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