Whether you’re battling a life-threatening illness, saddled with a “chronic” health condition that Western medicine hasn’t been able to cure, or battling nuisance symptoms that decrease your quality of life, or just hoping to optimize your energy, vitality, looks, and longevity, there is scientific proof that you can heal yourself.
As a skeptic herself, Dr. Lissa Rankin makes an irrefutable case, documenting with cold, hard science that the medical establishment has been proving that the mind can heal the body for over 50 years.
Loads of data proves that the mind can believe itself well. In clinical trials, we call it “the placebo effect.” Patients treated with placebos don’t just feel better. It’s not just “in their heads.” They’ve actually had warts disappear, bronchi dilate, colons become less inflamed, hair growth on the heads of bald men, ulcers heal, and other measurable physiological phenomena. We also know that the opposite is true, and the mind can think itself sick, which researchers call “the nocebo effect.” When patients are given injections with saline and told it is chemotherapy, they vomit and lose their hair.
How do such things happen physiologically? In her book Mind Over Medicine: Scientific Proof You Can Heal Yourself, Lissa Rankin, MD, explains the science behind how a positive or negative thought or emotion in the mind translates into spontaneous repair in the body. As it turns out, the body has built in self-repair mechanisms that fix damaged proteins, repair DNA, correct hormonal imbalances, and gobble up cancer cells, infectious agents, and foreign bodies that our bodies are exposed to everyday. These mechanisms explain the spontaneous remissions that are reported in the medical literature from seemingly “incurable” diseases like Stage 4 cancer, HIV, hypothyroidism, diabetes, and even an untreated gunshot wound to the head. Yet patients often feel powerless to harness these natural self-repair mechanisms.
Not anymore. In this book, Dr. Rankin teaches a scientifically-founded six step process you can follow to optimize the body’s capacity to flip on its natural self-repair mechanisms when the body becomes ill. She also teaches the tools to implement the power of the mind as preventative medicine, to increase the chance that you will one day die of “old age,” rather than dying too young as the result of disabling of the body’s ability to repair itself.
What disables the body’s natural self-repair mechanisms? We all know that stress is bad for the body. But do you understand how this works? Loads of data proves that stress comes in different forms — the stress of feeling lonely, work stress, financial stress, marital stress, family stress, the stress of feeling creatively blocked or spiritually disconnected. Regardless of what triggers it, stress flips on a series of physiological cascades associated with the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis and the “fight or flight” response of the sympathetic nervous system. In other words, whether you’re stressed about money, your marriage, or your job, your body can’t tell the difference between a perceived threat, such as impending bankruptcy, and a real threat, such as getting chased by a lion.
But here’s the kicker. The body can only repair itself when the body is in a state of physiological rest. Whenever the body thinks it’s time to run away from the lion (or whatever chronic, repetitive perceived threat it believes itself to be under), it shuts down self-repair. After all, who cares about long term maintenance like killing unwanted cancer cells if you’re about to be eaten by a lion? In Mind Over Medicine: Scientific Proof You Can Heal Yourself, Dr. Rankin shares not just the scientific proof that you can heal yourself, but also tips for using the power of the mind to optimize the body’s natural self-repair mechanisms, so disease prevention and spontaneous remissions aren’t just something that happens randomly, but something you might be able to experience for yourself.
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