Do you believe in mind body connection?
Can the mind actually influence the physical body in any significant ways?
The myth of mind body connection is beginning to see more lights as science progresses to show the true capability of our human mind. Mind-body healing is increasingly recognized as the alternative ways of healing for health issues including physiological, mental and emotional. The wonders of these mind power secrets have taken another great leap in the field of health, medicine and psychology.
In the following passages, you will find information on some interesting experiments that provide evidence for the amazing phenomenon of mind-body connection.
Mind-Body Healing – A Case on Healing
A sixty-one year old man named Frank was diagnosed as having a fatal type of throat cancer. His weight had dropped to 98 pounds, he had trouble breathing and could barely swallow. Doctors placed his survival rate at 5% and even pondered whether he should be placed under radiation therapy, since the treatment might only add to his discomfort and not significantly increase his survival odds. After much thought, the doctors decided to put him under radiation treatment anyway. Fortunately for Frank, Dr. O. Carl Simonton, then medical director of the Cancer Counseling and Research Center in Dallas, Texas, was asked to participate in Frank’s treatment. Simonton suggested to Frank that he himself had the ability to influence the course of his own disease, and taught Frank a number of relaxation and mental-imagery techniques.
The Treatment of Visualization
Frank had to visualize...
- the radiation he received consisted of thousands of tiny bullets of energy bombarding his cells;
- his cancer cells as being weaker than the normal cells and thus unable to repair the damage they suffered;
- his body’s white blood cells as coming in and swarming over the weakened cancer cells;
- flushing the cancer cells out of his body through his liver and kidneys.
The results were astonishing and far exceeded what usually happens when a patient is treated solely with radiation therapy. Frank experienced almost none of the negative side effects – the skin and mucous membrane damage that normally followed such treatment. In a mere two months he had not only regained his weight and strength but all signs of his cancer had vanished. He had experienced the amazing power of mind healing.
Frank is one of thousands of cancer patients that have benefited from imagery therapy through the Simonton Cancer Center. This is indeed a powerful testimony to the mind power secrets and the amazing wonders of mind body connection.
The Mysterious Placebo Effect
Scientists and doctors have long been puzzled by how certain patients have been able to heal themselves of life-threatening diseases. Doctors have found that a patient can trigger self-healing by the mere belief that they will be cured. This is commonly called the placebo effect. Doctors are finding that many people manage to get cured when they are given fake medication, called placebos, which usually consist of nothing more than sugar pills or distilled water, and then told by their doctors that they were taking real medication.
There is no explanation for why the placebo effect works, except that somehow, the patient’s belief that they are getting cured triggers some sort of self-healing ability within the patient. The placebo effect is probably the best-documented evidence of the mind power secrets, in which the mind is known to affect the body.
The placebo effect, using some of the most outrageous remedies, has worked exceptionally well with warts. In 1934, a physician conducted a double-blind study showing that placebos worked almost as well as sulpharsphenamine, the drug commonly used to treat warts at the time. 53% of patients given the actual medicine were cured. But of the patients given the fake medicine, which was nothing more than distilled water and told it was a genuine wart cure, 48% were cured.
The opposite also works. If you believe something is harmful to you, it tends to be.
One study showed that 19 out of 40 subjects developed asthmatic symptoms after inhaling a saline solution they believed to be allergenic. Twelve developed full-blown wheezing and bronchial spasms, which disappeared completely three minutes after receiving another saline solution placebo. The researchers concluded that suggestion played a significant role in precipitating asthmatic attacks.
The placebo effect also works with surgery.
In the summer of 1994, a surgeon named J. Bruce Moseley had 10 patients scheduled for an operation intended to relieve the arthritis pain in their knees. All 10 were wheeled into the Houston Veterans Affairs Medical Center, draped, examined and anesthetized. All 10 were then dispatched to the recovery room and sent home from the hospital by the next morning equipped with crutches and a painkiller. All 10 men believed they had just gone through a reliable medical surgery to cure them of their knee arthritis pain. But this was not the case.
In fact, while two of the men would undergo the standard arthroscopic surgery for their condition – the scraping and rinsing of the knee joint – and three would have the rinsing alone, five would have no recognized surgical procedure at all. Their surgery would be a placebo. Moseley would cut the placebo patients’ knees three times with a scalpel – to make it feel and look real, there had to be incisions and scars for the patient to believe he had undergone surgery – but that was it.
The placebo worked.
Six months after surgery, the 10 patients still didn’t know whether they had been faked out or not. But all of them reported much less pain. The placebo effect can be so powerful that all modern drugs have to be tested against a placebo before they are released to the public. And many former treatments and drugs have been taken off the market when their healing properties were found to be solely due to the placebo effect
Other Evidences of Mind Body Connection
Hypnotism is another way to demonstrate the effect of mind-body connection. A hypnotist can cause someone to trigger their body’s own healing mechanism at will.
Jose Silva used to demonstrate how he could put someone into an hypnotic state of mind and then suggest to them that the pencil he was holding was red hot and that if the pencil touched their skin they would feel no pain but their skin would produce a blister. One in five people would actually develop the blister from the touch of the pencil. The blister could then be made to disappear automatically, again with mere suggestion.
A good hypnotist can even get a subject to tan their skin on command. Another weird phenomenon of mind-body interaction is that of people with multiple or split personalities. Psychologists have observed that when multiples switch personalities their body also shows dramatic changes.
Eyesight can improve or worsen, allergies can reappear or disappear and even brain wave patterns can change. Multiples can also change their voice patterns in ways that even the best actors cannot emulate.
This leads to an interesting question....
Just how much of your physical body is influenced by your belief system?
The gap between mind and body seems almost non-existent. Spiritual healers and meta-physicists believed that as much as 90% of all physical ailments are induced and curable by the mind. Mind healing is a common method of health treatment that utilizes the mind power secrets.
The Growing Acceptance
The scientific evidence for mind-body healing is well established and public acceptance is now going mainstream. A 1990 Gallup Poll on American attitudes to paranormal phenomenon found that 25% of Americans have had success with mind healing.
The May 2001 Gallup Poll discovered that “Americans with the highest levels of education are more likely to believe in the power of the mind to heal the body”.
The same Gallup Poll on Americans’ beliefs on the Paranormal, updated the statistics in June 2005, showing that more than 55% believe in the connection between the mind and the body in healing. These healing powers of the mind on both the physical and emotional have been demonstrated empirically, reflecting the power of placebos.
Furthermore, according to a famous survey published in 1993 in the New England Journal of Medicine, 34% of adult Americans reported using at least one unconventional therapy in the past year. This includes meditation, yoga and visualization techniques.
And finally, the 1993 New England Journal of Medicine survey found that alternative medicine - a category which includes mind healing, energy healing and spiritual healing, is most likely to be practiced not by the socially marginal or the cognitively defective but by affluent (incomes above $35,000), college-educated people.
But Can You Practice Mind Healing On Someone Else’s Body?
Let’s ask a more daring question.
Can you use your mind to heal a loved one – at a distance?
Some of the most surprising evidence for distant healing comes from psychologist William Braud and his colleagues at The Mind Science Foundation of San Antonio, Texas. Braud’s studies, conducted over 17 years, involved having people mentally attempt to influence the nervous system of remote participants. The results of the study were simply mind blowing.
The Receivers
Braud would wire up the first group of people, known as receivers, to machines that measured up to seven different physiological responses such as blood pressure, skin conductivity and muscle tremor.
The Senders
A second group of people, known as senders, would be placed in a different room and asked to attempt to arouse or calm the receiver solely by thinking about them. Both senders and receivers were ordinary people who had volunteered for the study.
Braud’s 37 experiments involved 665 sessions, 449 people and 13 experimenters. What Braud found was that at the exact moment the sender was asked to think of their receiver, the receiver would show a change in his or her physiological condition.
The 37 experiments combined resulted in odds against chance of more than 100 trillion to one in favor of distant mental interactions between the participants.
In short, the ability of one person’s mind to affect another person’s body is a scientific fact.
But Just How Powerful is it?
Now, we know that one person’s mind can somehow influence someone else’s physical body – but is the effect really powerful enough to make a difference in someone’s state of health?
Again, the answer is surprising.
The effects of distant healing have been proved to be significantly greater than many drugs deemed to be highly successful in medicine.
For example, numerous studies have shown that propranolol and aspirin are effective in reducing heart attacks. But their effects pale in comparison to distant healing. Effect sizes of drugs are measured on a scale from 0 to 1. An effect size of 0.03 in a medical life-or-death situation would mean that 3 out of 100 people survived. An effect size of 0.3 would mean that an additional 30 out of 100 survived.
In medical tests the effect size of aspirin on reducing heart attack is 0.03. The effect size of propranolol was not much higher, at 0.04. These sizes were sufficient enough proof for the government to authorize the drug manufacturers to state that their products prevent heart attack.
But the effect size of distant healing in Braud’s experiments was a surprising 0.25.
This means that if 100 people were going through a therapy with a success rate of 35%, this success rate would go up to 60% with the addition of distant healing. Almost twice as many patients would be saved.
In his studies, Braud also discovered some strange properties of distant healing. His volunteers were asked to participate in another experiment where they would attempt to mentally calm down two groups. One was a group of highly nervous people and the other a calmer group.
First, Braud found that the distant healing effect was the strongest when the person on the receiving end actually had a serious need for healing. The effect size on the highly nervous group was far greater than on the calm group.
More surprisingly, he found that the effect size on the agitated group by those trying to calm them down was only slightly less than the effect that people had on themselves when using relaxation techniques.
In statistical terms this means that other people could have the same mind-body effect on you as you could have on yourself and vice-versa.
What’s Next?
In the following articles, you will find out how you can:
Tap the mind power secrets to accelerate healing process
