MIND & HEALTH (PART 4) by Dr D B Nugegoda

CONTINUATION FROM PART 3………………

Booth has said “altering the state of mind” may help overcome disease more than intervening solely at the level of the immune system (Holden). The message given to the mind need not be correct, for it is said that the mind can heal the body when bolstered by hope and expectation even when the message is wrong.

Quantum physicists David Bohm and Stewart Wolf say that we change ourselves at the atomic level with different emotions (Siegel).

Menninger is of the opinion that we communicate with our inner selves all the time. He says “Make sure the message that gets through is a healing one” (Siegel).

Wolf had given a group of pregnant women who had persistent nausea and vomiting a drug given to induce vomiting (syrup of Ipecac) saying that it would stop their vomiting ; they did stop vomiting due to their belief in the treatment (Benson and Stark) ! A group of patients with Parkinson’s disease were subjected to fontal cell transplant sham operation (where they only drilled a small hole in the skull and patched it up) ; they too benefited , almost as much as those patients who had live fontal cells implanted in their brains (Brody).

The same author refers to a study done on children with asthma, who were given their asthma medicine in vanilla flavored syrup. After a period of time when only the vanilla syrup (without the medicine) was given to these children, still they recovered. An experimental treatment for Parkinson’s similar to the one quoted above conducted in 2011, with cutting of two holes through the patient’s skull and injecting a protein named neurturin, a patient who received only a placebo had a marvelous recovery.