Now The Drugs Don't Work

If you boil down what your brain does to a single idea ...It is a prediction machine. Everything your brain does, it takes the past, it applies it to the present to predict the future. And it does it in small ways — it’s basically creating a map of how the world works, based on the experiences that happen to it.
— Erik Vance, The Drugs Inside Your Head

^{Photo by Alexander Krivitskiy on Unsplash}

Here's an example of what Carl Jung called "synchronicity".

After writing and publishing my post on the Placebo Effect, I received an email from a podcast I subscribe to called On Being with Krista Tippett. The latest release is an interview with the science writer Erik Vance, who has written a book called Suggestible You: The Curious Science of Your Brain's Ability to Deceive, Transform, and Heal

It's a fascinating listen, as Vance has spent the last few years following up the research being conducted into placebos. As he himself puts it, "it's shocking" — in the sense of how powerful our minds truly are at being able to heal our own bodies. While we know there are limits to what we are capable of, we don't know what those limits are.

The shadow side

While there is something powerful within us already that can 'convince' our bodies to heal themselves, this same power also can produce the opposite effect. The nocebo effect is the power of the human mind to create pain and disease, and it is driven by a very powerful human emotion: fear!

In the podcast, Vance explains we know that this happens, and it's more powerful than the placebo effect; however we can't really study it properly, because it would be highly unethical. Also, pragmatically... how would you find people people to participate in research to to see how you could make their pain worse, for example?

In Taoist medicine, it is presupposed that the state of being whole already exists within the human being; illness exists because we have forgotten or chosen to stop living our lives as if we were. This is then the explanation for the ancient viewpoint on what we moderns call "placebo" — it's not so much giving us something, but taking something away, namely the illusion that we are ill.

Fear on the other hand is what prevents us from recognising that the state of wholeness already exists within us and is available to us at all times.

I wondered about this in the context of natural medicine and my clinical experience of it as a practitioner. Some people just could not (would not) get better, no matter what they tried. They didn't believe or trust their doctors, they didn't believe me, and they didn't believe other therapists. Their mindset was fixed on the fact that their illness was incurable.

There was this one patient I had who was like this. We had a pretty good relationship, and she was a genuinely lovely person, but just couldn't see that she needed to change. So one day I challenged her.

"What if your purpose in life was to learn how to get over this illness?" I asked her.

"What do you mean by that?"

"What if, in the process of getting over this illness, you developed certain skills, traits, or mindsets that also enable you to be successful in other areas of your life? What if this illness was like your wisest teacher?"

We had some good conversations around this, and I saw her shift something in her own language around her condition and herself. While I ended up retiring from the profession, her attitude changed, and there was the beginning of improvement. In fact, she was the inspiration behind my article on chronic illness as the mythical Hero's Journey.

She was obsessed with worry about her illness, and afraid of getting worse or even dying; instead I challenged her to consider what she was afraid of getting better for. Because I saw her fear getting in the way of living the life she wanted to lead.

When it comes to choices about health and wellbeing, making decisions from fear is not going to help us. It's why I'm sick to death about the whole vaccination debate — both sides are making arguments based on fear, and it is their fears which grip them and prevent them from seeing the whole picture.

The human body is a truly remarkable thing. We can certainly heal ourselves, and our trust, faith, and belief in that is what makes the difference

I invite you to consider the question, "where in your life is fear making you sick?"

Take care, y'all 😊🙏🏽☯️