How the mind can help heal the body

The mind holds no clinical significance in today’s modern medical practice,” laments Dr. Bernie Siegel in his pioneering book “Peace, Love and Healing.”

In fact the mind is completely ignored by most physicians in the treatment of disease.

Indeed modern medical science tends to regard the human being as simply a machine, and if something goes wrong with it, all the doctor has to do is give him something to correct or replace it.

For example, if one has a headache, he is given paracetamol; if there’s an infection, an antibiotic. If there’s a tumour, it is surgically removed, and so on.

There is hardly any attempt to find out what is going on in the person’s mind or in his environment that might have a bearing on the disease.

In 1985, an editorial in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine declared “that our belief on disease as a direct reflection of mental state is largely folklore.”

“A hundred years ago,” says Harris Dienstfrey in his book “Where the Mind Meets the Body,” “Louis Pasteur fought for the belief that individual diseases were each caused by individual microscopic entities… and is today regarded as a model for understanding all disease.”

If not a germ, then the cause of the disease could be a deficient gene, or a chemical imbalance in the patient’s body. This view of diseases, he says, obviously leaves the mind with very little influence.

Some scientists even doubt the existence of the mind, with its own thinking process and emotional states and regard it merely as an epiphenomenon of the brain, meaning, it is the result of the chemical reactions in the brain.

One American female neuroscientist, when asked about the possibility of a disease having a spiritual or emotional cause, replied, “I am a scientist and have no idea what a spirit is or how it affects the body.”

To modern medical scientists, “the mind and the psychic functions exist only as abstractions with no real or objective existence in the space-time continuum,” according to the book “Some Unrecognized Factors in Medicine,” published by Theosophical Society.

Modern medical science by and large looks at man as “being a body with perhaps a soul or spirit tacked on to it somewhere.” On the other hand, ancient or esoteric sciences, mainly coming from the East, holds that man is a spirit with a body that he uses in order to function on the physical plane or receive information from such plane.

Over the last 20 years, however, there seems to be a growing shift in the way mainstream or orthodox medical science looks at man and the nature of disease. This has been largely due to the observation that the purely mechanistic view of man proves to be inadequate in explaining the many mysteries of diseases and their causes.

Why, for instance, are ambition-driven Type-A personalities more prone to heart disease and hypertension compared to the more leisurely or laid-back Type-B personalities? Or how does medical science explain the numerous instances of spontaneous remission of illness without any medical intervention?

Furthermore, how can medical science explain the mysterious effects of hypnosis on the body? For example, psychologist Theodore Barber, according to Dienstfrey, reported “over 60 clinical studies in which people under hypnosis or suggestion succeeded in altering physiological processes of their bodies simply by imagining the changes or otherwise mentally directing their bodies to make the changes… People afflicted with medically untreatable skin disease (such as fish scale) restored much of their disturbed skin to normal condition and 70 women increased the size of their breasts.”

In my seminar on Practical Mind Dynamics, several of my students with various diseases healed themselves simply by using a visualization technique that I teach. These diseases included myoma on the uterus, herniated disc, sinusitis, back pain, skin rashes and asthma.

In 1984, I suffered from a strange ailment in which my left ring finger mysteriously and suddenly folded down my palm one morning when I woke up. When I tried to straighten up that finger, it hurt. An orthopedic surgeon I consulted diagnosed it as a rare form of arthritis and wanted to operate on it. I refused. Two acupuncturists, one from Japan and the other from Hong Kong, treated it with only temporary results.

Desperate for a cure, I consulted an entity from the upper 5th dimension named Ang Suh, which was then being channeled by a business executive. When I asked Ang Suh what to do with my finger, he said, “Talk to it.” I said, what? The answer came again through automatic writing, “Talk to it.” But he did not tell me what to say.

For the next three days, I talked to my finger asking forgiveness for whatever wrong I may have done to it.

On the first two attempts at this one-sided conversation nothing happened. But after the third attempt, I woke up in the morning with the problem completely gone! It never recurred.

How could simply talking to my body effect a cure that no medicine could, I do not know. All I know is that it worked!

Source: Philippine Daily Inquirer/Asia News Network

Category: Wellness and Complementary Therapies