HEALTH NEWS YOU CAN USE-Thinking Well
By Dr. Robert Neposlan
The following is a reprint of an article written in 2008. It’s one of my favorites and will be one of several “Thinking Well” reprints to come in the following months. Enjoy!!
“In order to change the printout of the body, we need to learn to rewrite the software of the mind”— Deepak Chopra M.D.
Have you heard about the book the Secret? In it, author Rhonda Byrne shares her discovery of what she calls a simple “truth” which she says dates back centuries and one that is at the core of some of the most influential philosophies, teachings and religions of the world. In her book she shares this secret or truth, “The Law of Attraction”, and how dominant thoughts become our reality. In the book, she and many contributing experts in their field outline how thoughts when combined with emotion become a very powerful energy that does not stay in some corner of our mind but goes out into the universe and manifest into “things”. And while Rhonda does not really emphasize how our thinking can influence health, I want to suggest here that our thoughts can and do play a role and can manifest into “things” not out there in the universe or the world around us but somewhere closer to home…. inside your body. Thoughts can and do play a role in health and how you function.
A couple of years ago I came across another great book “The Biology of Belief” by a man named Bruce Lipton Ph.D., a former medical school professor and research scientist. In order to understand the results of his research, we need to understand a little about cell biology. Our bodies are composed of trillions of microscopic things called cells. And, like you and I each of these tiny little cells have the equivalent of a brain and organs (organelles) that eat, breathe and excrete. A very thin skin called the cell membrane surrounds each cell. For years research scientists focused on the genes (RNA/DNA) of the cell
assuming that this was the “brain” of the cell. Experiments showed that this was not so. When researchers extracted the nucleus (the genes-RNA/DNA) they found that the cells did not die but in some cases continued to thrive for weeks and months. How was this possible? If the nucleus controll
ed cell function then removing it should have resulted in cellular death. But the cells continued to demonstrate coordinated life sustaining activity (eat, breath excrete). Eventually the cells would die, but only because they were unable to reproduce/regenerate themselves or the proteins needed to sustain function. Dr. Lipton further reveals in great detail the processes by which cells receive information. He actually showed that it was the outer skin layer, the membrane, which controlled cellular function. This was the “brain” of the cell. The membrane was also the cells contact with the outer world, the environment. The implications of this research radically change conventional understanding of life and fully supports the idea that genes and DNA do not control our biology; that instead DNA is controlled by signals from outside the cell (the “environment”), and get this, including the energetic messages emanating from our positive and negative thoughts. This research is being hailed as a breakthrough, showing that our bodies can be changed as we retrain our thinking.
“Whoa.” I realize that for many of you this might be hard to believe. I want to reference the work of another researcher Dr. Candace Pert. Dr Pert is an internationally recognized pharmacologist, research scientist, and speaker who has published over 250 scientific articles. She is also the author of several books including “Molecules of Emotion” and “To Feel Go(o)d”. Dr. Pert demonstrates how patterns of thought set up patterns of emotion, and how patterns of emotion set up patterns of physiological response. She demonstrated how these patterns endlessly replicate themselves unless new patterns of thoughts are established. More specifically, Dr. Pert demonstrated the link between emotions, peptides/proteins (chemical messengers) and every cell in the body. She further revealed how every cell in the body has a receptor site for these ‘peptides”.
In my allergy lectures I explain cell receptors this way….It’s a scientific fact that the trillions of cells which make up our bodies may each have 100,000 or more receptor sites on the cell membrane. Each of these receptor sites is responsible for receiving/transmitting different information/functions. These receptor sites are like parking spaces with VERY specific configurations. ONLY a specific type of messenger (peptide) can fit in each “parking” space. Picture a yellow baseball glove, the only colour ball that this glove can catch is a yellow ball. The yellow ball is a message (from the “environment”) which carries instructions into the cell (maybe to the RNA/DNA). Now picture 100,000 different gloves that extend from the cell wall, each one uniquely specific and each one stimulated by an identically uniquely “coloured ball”. Once the ball reaches the glove, an action is propagated in the cell. Both Drs. Pert and Lipton were able to show how emotions can stimulate these receptors and thereby influence cell function and activity.
Not convinced? Let’s consider for a moment two recognized phenomenon existing in medicine today, the placebo and nocebo effects. The placebo (Latin for “I shall please”) effect is a measurable, observable, or felt improvement in health or behavior not attributable to medication or treatment that has been administered. The opposite of the placebo effect is the nocebo effect…the idea that negative thinking, including hope-deflating messages can damage health.
There are numerous studies dating back to the 1950’s that validate the placebo effect. A man named Henry Beecher conducted an early study on the placebo. He evaluated 15 clinical trials concerned with different diseases and found that a placebo alone satisfactorily relieved 35% of 1082 patients. More recent research performed at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute showed that between 30 – 60% of patients with illnesses ranging from arthritis to depression reported a substantial improvement in their symptoms after receiving a placebo. And closer to home, recently a medical doctor shared with me that a great percentage of drugs being administered today to patients are not being administered for the condition(s) for which they were researched/introduced. What is getting the patient well?
I’d like to conclude from a quote from Dr. Lipton’s book, “Thoughts, the minds energy, directly influence how the physical brain controls the body’s physiology. Thought ‘energy’ can activate or inhibit the cell’s function-producing proteins (p.125). Learning how to harness your mind to promote growth is the secret of life…. Of course the secret is not a secret at all. Teachers like Buddha and Jesus have been telling us the same story for millennia. Now science is pointing in the same direction. It is not our genes but our beliefs that control our lives…Oh ye of little faith!” (p.144)
Until next week,
Think Well!!!
Dr. Rob