Mind Power News Issue 64

Mind Power News

Issue No. 64 / Saturday, October 16, 2004
© 2004 by Andreas Ohrt
In this issue:

MIND OVER MEDICINE: Intensely held beliefs, expectations, and fears shape our experiences of healing, often determining whether we will fully and rapidly recover from ailments, or whether our health will decline and even result in death.

MIND-BODY MEDICINE IS NOW SCIENTIFICALLY PROVEN: Individuals with higher levels of well-being have lower cardiovascular risk, lower levels of stress hormones and lower levels of inflammation, which serves as a marker of the immune system. 

HOW BELIEFS CHANGE YOUR HEALTH: "People can live or die on the basis of unconscious messages. We have to become aware of the power of the mind and of beliefs. Words can imprison us or set us free. The body is excellent at self-healing if talked to correctly."

CAN PRAYERS HEAL? Critics express outrage that the federal government, which has contributed $2.3 million in financing over the last four years for prayer research, would spend taxpayer money to study something they say has nothing to do with science.

PSYCHIC DREAMS RESCUE CRASHED TEEN: A 17-year-old girl who survived eight days after her car crashed was found by a family friend who had several vivid dreams about her location.

7 DESTRUCTIVE HABITS OF INCOMPETENT PEOPLE: If you want to have a fantastic life, never engage yourself in these 7 deadly habits of incompetent people.

Mind Over Medicine

By Randall Fitzgerald
Phenomena Senior Editor

Intensely held beliefs, expectations, and fears shape our experiences of healing, often determining whether we will fully and rapidly recover from ailments, or whether our health will decline and even result in death.
After decades of denial and scoffing by the medical establishment, this psycho-physical phenomenon is finally being recognized and documented by mainstream medical science researchers. Just in the past three years a surge of research activity into the relationship between placebos and healing has emerged with results that provide a glimpse at the mind-over-illness potential existing within each of us.

HERE IS A SAMPLING OF THOSE FASCINATING FINDINGS:

--Six patients with Parkinson’s, a degenerative disease whose symptoms include muscle rigidity, tremors, and slowness of movement, received either placebo sugar pills or the drug apomorphine, which releases dopamine into the brain. Dopamine scarcity is thought to cause the symptoms. Patients in this study weren’t informed if they were absorbing the placebo or the drug medication.

In every patient given a placebo, the patient’s brain produced dopamine at a level comparable to that produced in patients who took the medication. Scientists at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, who conducted this study in 2001, speculated that either a ‘non-specific faith’ on the part of placebo patients was responsible for the effects, a kind of mind/matter mechanism unknown to science. Or some type of physiological memory, a Pavlovian response, occurred in which the body responded to an expected reward based on previous experiences with medication.

--That last explanation was seemingly undermined by a subsequent study. A team of medical researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles used a brain imaging technique called quantitative electroencephalography to monitor the brain activity of 51 patients suffering major depression. Over a nine-week period in 2001, these patients were given either a placebo pill or an antidepressant medication.

Nearly half of patients given placebos reported improvements in their mood, a rate almost comparable in number to those given antidepressants who reported mood elevation. But the bigger surprise for scientists came when the brain scans revealed that placebos created a dramatic change in brain activity. “We now know that a placebo is, very definitely, an active treatment condition,” declared Professor Andrew Leuchter, writing in The American Journal of Psychiatry.

MORE BRAIN PLACEBOS

At the University of Turin Medical School in Italy, a group of Parkinson’s patients were given a salt solution placebo and then had the neurons of their brain scanned through surgically implanted electrodes. Their neurons responded in exactly the same way as when they had earlier received a drug prescribed to ease their symptoms by releasing dopamine. “It’s the first time we’ve seen the placebo effect at the single neuron level,” wrote Fabrizio Benedetti in his 2004 paper for Nature Neuroscience. A final study that may offer a key to the placebo effect was presented to the annual Cognitive Neuroscience Society meeting this past May in San Francisco. A team of Stanford University researchers found that people can learn to suppress pain, and possibly lessen depression and other ailments, when a new biofeedback technique shows them the activity in the pain-control region of their own brains.

Using a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner (MRI), eight volunteers were able to see their brain activity, represented as a flame on a screen, in the brain area known to modulate both the intensity and emotional impact of pain. Each volunteer received painful heat on the palm of one hand while attempting to increase or decrease the signal from the brain scanner. All eight volunteers successfully learned to control their own pain intensity after just three 13-minute sessions hooked up to the MRI.

Even after these sessions, the volunteers reported they maintained the ability to alter their brain activity to control pain symptoms. Neither the volunteers nor the scientists who tested them could explain how this was possible.

Taken together, these studies suggest that each of us has our own internal pharmacy, and we can, with enough belief, faith, or training, release these drugs inside ourselves at will to cure ailments and bolster our immune systems. The implications could revolutionize our understanding of medicine and health, an advance in wisdom especially needed during this time in our history when escalating medical costs, and a dependence on medical technology, has mostly robbed us of the ability to exercise choice, fiscal restraint, and self-sufficiency.

Mind-body Medicine is now Scientifically Proven

By Sharon Jayson
USA Today

Positive thinking and a positive attitude may indeed have power. That belief has long been conjecture, but in recent years scientists studying the mind-body connection are finding that an optimistic outlook can improve more than just mental health. Christopher Reeve's death this week, nine years after being paralyzed in a horseback riding accident is, to some researchers, an example of just how Reeve's positive attitude during his post-accident life surely contributed to an improved physical state.

"There is no doubt in my mind his positive attitude extended his life — probably dramatically. The fact that it didn't allow him to recover function of all limbs is besides the point," said Carol Ryff, a psychology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has been studying whether or not high levels of psychological well-being benefit physical health.

"There is a science that is emerging that says a positive attitude isn't just a state of mind," she says. "It also has linkages to what's going on in the brain and in the body."

Ryff has shown that individuals with higher levels of well-being have lower cardiovascular risk, lower levels of stress hormones and lower levels of inflammation, which serves as a marker of the immune system.

Her research on positive mental states is among 44 current grants funded by the National Institutes of Health evaluating optimism. Most research in this area has focused on negative feelings, such as how stress, anxiety and depression affect physical health.

"Science in this area is at the very beginning," Ryff said. "For a long period of time, you couldn't even get funding to do research like this because there was such a preoccupation with illness and dysfunction."

HARD TO MEASURE HAPPINESS

It's clear that stressors produce abnormal changes in the immune system, said Ronald Glaser, director of Ohio State University's Institute for Behavioral Medicine Research. Glaser and his wife, Janice Kiecolt-Glaser, a clinical psychologist also at Ohio State, studied the mind-body connection and found that chronic stress and psychological stress can impede wounds from healing, may impair the effectiveness of vaccines and can weaken the immune system of caregivers.

Kiecolt-Glaser says there is less definitive work on the benefits of a positive outlook because clearly defined scales, such as those used for measuring depression, don't exist for studying happiness. That makes a positive attitude much more difficult to quantify.

"In laboratories, there are lots of easy ways to make people depressed or anxious for a long period of time. It's harder to make people happy," she says. "The whole distress, anxiety, depression part matters more, from everything we know, than positive emotions. It's not as easy to see a positive effect."

"Mind-body medicine is now scientifically proven," says Herbert Benson, a cardiologist and associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School who is considered a pioneer in the field. "There are literally thousands of articles on how the mind and brain affect the body."

Benson, author of 10 books, is founding president of the Mind/Body Medical Institute in Boston, a non-profit organization devoted to studying interactions between mind and body. He says Reeve's focus on improving the plight of others with disabilities, like Michael J. Fox's work with Parkinson's disease, in some ways may help them personally more than they realize.

"When a person can focus on something other than illness, it allows the body to take advantage of our own healing capacity," says Benson. "Hope in something beyond the illness and dedicating oneself to cures for the illness" rather than dwelling on oneself and one's illness "gives purpose to life," and helps prevent the negative effects of stress while medical science does its work.

How Beliefs Change Your Health

By Ruth Ostrow
The Australian

Belief is everything. My friend Anne has scleroderma -- a condition classified as a disease of the auto-immune system and in the rheumatoid family. It effects the connective tissue around the body which can result in people "turning to stone".

A nurse for 20 years and now a psychotherapist, Anne has used both alternative and conventional medicine to cope with the symptoms.

With a positive attitude and a determination to live a full life instead of being dogged by her disease, she looks more vital each time I see her.

"Disease has got nothing to do with how happy or contented we are in life," she told me recently. "My illness challenges me on so many levels and it has helped me to grow so much."

Recently she wasn't so lucky. After a bad winter and a period of prolonged stress, she had a severe attack.

"My hands became contracted and claw-like. I couldn't open them," she said, showing me her fingers, one still hooked over and another bearing the remains of a serious infection.

"This might look bad, but six weeks ago all of my fingers were like this. Not just this one. The tip of one finger was gangrenous which developed as a result of poor circulation. If I had gone into hospital they would have had to amputate. I was in such pain I was ready to do I don't know what. I just didn't want to be here any more."

In desperation, she went to a GP who talked to her about her underlying beliefs. Despite her positive outlook, Anne uncovered some unconscious philosophies not helpful to her healing.

"I guess deep down I've always believed that life is difficult, life is torture. We are supposed to suffer. I heard myself stating my beliefs out loud and suddenly the penny dropped -- I didn't have to believe these things any more. I cried from relief."

"I refused to go to hospital, working instead on changing my core beliefs -- peeling back layers until I hit rock bottom," she said.

"Within a short time my circulation began to improve. The fingers began to move and the gangrenous sores slowly went away. I regained full use of my hands and the pain has stopped completely,"she told me in front of people who had witnessed the miracle.

Last year I interviewed Dan Russell, the founder of the Hypnotherapy Training Centre and Northern School of Tai Chi, in Carlisle on England's Scottish border. Russell is a big advocate of beliefs playing a role in healing.

He spends time in emergency rooms of hospitals around the world teaching doctors how to talk to patients.

Trained in Tibet and Taiwan where he meditated for years and studied martial arts, he says that the way patients are talked to when they go into shock or become ill can actually determine whether they recover or not.

"People can live or die on the basis of unconscious messages. We have to become aware of the power of the mind and of beliefs. Words can imprison us or set us free. The body is excellent at self-healing if talked to correctly," he told me.

Marc Cohen, professor, medical researcher and university lecturer at RMIT University in Melbourne and President of the AIMA (Australasian Integrative Medicine Association), has done his own experiments around beliefs.

He says that he became fascinated with the placebo-effect when he gave a trial group of people a sugar tablet that he called a happy pill, and which he explained would make them feel blissful. Almost everyone in the group thanked him afterwards for the buzz.

He says that the placebo effect is a psychological condition, but tied in closely with biology."We start with a belief, it triggers the biological reaction, which reinforces the belief and makes it reality," he says.

In other words, if we believe something then our brain starts producing the chemicals and hormones needed to cope or reinforce that belief.

I have experimented with sexual fantasy to prove that imagining something can trigger the same hormonal release as the real thing, just as thinking fearful thoughts can trigger a fight-or-flight reaction and the release of adrenalin.

Can Prayers Heal? Critics Say Studies Go Past Science's Reach

By Benedict Carey
New York Times

In 2001, two researchers and a Columbia University fertility expert published a startling finding in a respected medical journal: women undergoing fertility treatment who had been prayed for by Christian groups were twice as likely to have a successful pregnancy as those who had not.

Three years later, after one of the researchers pleaded guilty to conspiracy in an unrelated business fraud, Columbia is investigating the study and the journal reportedly pulled the paper from its Web site.

No evidence of manipulation has yet surfaced, and the study's authors stand behind their data. But the doubts about the study have added to the debate over a deeply controversial area of research: whether prayer can heal illness.

Critics express outrage that the federal government, which has contributed $2.3 million in financing over the last four years for prayer research, would spend taxpayer money to study something they say has nothing to do with science.

"Intercessory prayer presupposes some supernatural intervention that is by definition beyond the reach of science," said Dr. Richard J. McNally, a psychologist at Harvard. "It is just a nonstarter, in my opinion, a total waste of time and money."

Prayer researchers, many themselves believers in prayer's healing powers, say scientists do not need to know how a treatment or intervention works before testing it.

Dr. Richard Nahin, a senior adviser at the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, part of the National Institutes of Health, said in an e-mail message that the studies were meant to answer practical questions, not religious ones.

"We only recently understood how aspirin worked, and the mechanisms of action of various antidepressants and general anesthetics remain under investigation," Dr. Nahin wrote.

He said a recent government study found that 45 percent of adults prayed specifically for health reasons, and suggested that many of them were poor people with limited access to care.

"It is a public health imperative to understand if this prayer offers them any benefit," Dr. Nahin wrote. Some researchers also point out that praying for the relief of other people's suffering is a deeply human response to disease.

THE PLACEBO EFFECT

Since 2000, at least 10 studies of intercessory prayer have been carried out by researchers at institutions including the Mind/Body Medical Institute, a nonprofit clinic near Boston run by a Harvard-trained cardiologist, as well as Duke University and the University of Washington. Government financing of intercessory prayer research began in the mid-1990's and has continued under the Bush administration.

In one continuing study, financed by the National Institutes of Health and called "Placebo Effect in Distant Healing of Wounds," doctors at California Pacific Medical Center, a major hospital in San Francisco, inflict a tiny stab wound on the abdomens of women receiving breast reconstruction surgery, with their consent, and then determine whether the "focused intention" of a variety of healers speeds the wound's healing.

Two large trials of the effects of prayer on coronary health are currently under review at prominent medical journals.

Even those who defend prayer research concede that such studies are difficult. For one thing, no one knows what constitutes a "dose": some studies have tested a few prayers a day by individual healers, while others have had entire congregations pray together. Some have involved evangelical Christians; others have engaged rabbis, Buddhist and New Age healers, or some combination.

Another problem concerns the mechanism by which prayer might be supposed to work. Some researchers contend that prayer's effects - if they exist - have little to do with religion or the existence of God. Instead of divine intervention, they propose things like "subtle energies," "mind-to-mind communication" or "extra dimensions of space-time" - concepts that many scientists dismiss as nonsense. Others suggest that prayer may have a soothing effect that works like a placebo for believers who know they are being prayed for.

Psychic Dreams Rescue Crashed Teen

A 17-year-old girl who survived eight days after her car crashed and tumbled 200 feet down a ravine may have been saved by her own dehydration, which prevented the expansion of a blood clot in her brain, doctors said.

Laura Hatch's family had almost given her up for dead, and sheriff's deputies had all but written her off as a runaway. Then she was found, badly hurt and severely dehydrated, but alive and conscious, in the back seat of her crumpled Toyota Camry.

A volunteer searcher who said she had had several vivid dreams of a wooded area found the wrecked car in the trees Sunday.

On Oct. 6, detectives learned the party had been in a neighborhood east of Lake Washington and searched along her likely route home, Urquhart said. But prospects dimmed as the days passed. "We had already given her up and let her be dead in our hearts," said her mother, Jean Hatch.

During the search, a statewide bulletin was released and advisories were sent to local police agencies. But Urquhart said family and friends indicated "the most likely scenario was that she was a runaway." Hatch's parents organized a volunteer search Saturday, and that night Sha Nohr, the mother of Hatch's friend, said she had dreams of a wooded area and heard the message, "Keep going, keep going."

On Sunday morning, Nohr and her daughter drove to the area where the crash occurred, praying along the way. "I just thought, 'Let her speak out to us," Nohr told The Seattle Times.

Nohr said something drew her to stop and clamber over a concrete barrier and more than 100 feet down a steep, densely vegetated embankment where she barely managed to discern the wrecked car in some trees.

7 Destructive Habits of Incompetent People

WARNING! If you want to have a fantastic life, never engage yourself in these 7 deadly habits that incompetent people do.

NUMBER 1 - They Think, Say, & Do Negative Things.
Yup. They see problems in every opportunity.
They complain that the sun is too hot. They cursed the rain for ruining their plans for the day. They blame the wind for ruining their hair.
They think that everyone is against them. They see the problems but never the solutions.
Every little bit of difficulty is exaggerated to the point of tragedy. They regard failures as catastrophes. They become discouraged easily instead of learning from their mistakes.
They never seem to move forward because they're always afraid to come out of their comfort zones.

NUMBER 2 - They Act Before They Think.
They move based on instinst or impulse. If they see something they like, they buy at once without any second thought. Then they see something better. They regret & curse for not able to take advantage of the bargain.
Then they spend & spend again until nothing's left. They don't think about the future. What they're after is the pleasure they will experience at present.
They don't think about the consequenses. Those who engage in unsafe sex, criminality, and the like are included in this group.

NUMBER 3 - They Talk Much More Than They Listen
They want to be the star of the show. So they always engage in talks that would make them heroes, even to the point of lying.
Oftentimes they are not aware that what they're saying is not sensible anymore.
When other people advise them, they close their ears because they're too proud to admit their mistakes.
In their mind they're always correct. They reject suggestions because that will make them feel inferior.

NUMBER 4 - They Give Up Easily
Successful people treat failures as stepping stones to success.
Incompetent ones call it quits upon recognizing the first signs of failure.
At first, they may be excited to start an endeavor. But then they lose interest fairly quickly, especially when they encounter errors.
Then they go & search for a new one. Same story & same results. Incompetent people don't have the persistence to go on and fulfill their dreams.

NUMBER 5 - They Try to Bring Others Down To Their Level
Incompetent people envy other successful individuals. Instead of working hard to be like them, these incompetent ones spread rumors and try every dirty trick to bring them down.
They could've asked these successful ones nicely. But no, they're too proud. They don't want to ask advise. Moreover, they're too negative to accomplish anything.

NUMBER 6 - They Waste Their Time
They don't know what to do next. They may just be contented on eating, getting drunk, watching TV, or worse, staring at the blank wall with no thoughts whatsoever to improve their lives.
It's perfectly fine to enjoy once in a while. But time should be managed efficiently in order to succeed. There should be a proper balance between work & pleasure.

NUMBER 7 - They Take the Easy Way Out
If there are two roads to choose from, incompetent people would choose the wider road with less rewards than the narrower road with much better rewards at the end.
They don't want any suffering or hardship. They want a good life.
What these people don't know is that what you reap is what you sow. Efforts & action will not go unnoticed.

If only they would be willing to sacrifice a little, they would be much better off.
Successful people made it through trials & error. They never give up. They are willing to do everything necessary to achieve what they aspire for in life.