While many in the medical profession are aware of the placebo effect, few have considered its implications for self-healing. If positive thinking can pull you out of depression and heal a damaged knee, consider what negative thinking can do in your life.
When the mind, through positive suggestion improves health, it is referred to as the placebo effect. Conversely, when the same mind is engaged in negative suggestions that can damage health, the negative effects are referred to as the nocebo effect.
In medicine, the nocebo effect can be as powerful as the placebo effect, a fact you should keep in mind every time you step into a doctor’s office. By their words and their demeanour, physicians can convey hope-deflating messages to their patients, messages that are, I believe completely unwarranted. One example is the potential power of the statement: ‘You have six months to live.’ If you choose to believe your doctor’s message, you are not likely to have much more time on this Earth.
The Discovery Health Channel’s 2003 programme ‘Placebo: Mind Over Medicine’ is a good compendium of some of medicine’s most interesting cases. One of its more poignant segments featured a Nashville physician, Clifton Meador, who has been reflecting on the potential power of the nocebo effect for 30 years. In 1974 Meador had a patient, Sam Londe, a retired shoe salesman suffering from cancer of the oesophagus, a condition that was at the time considered 100 per cent fatal. Londe was treated for that cancer but everyone in the medical community ‘knew’ that his oesophageal cancer would recur. So it was no surprise when Londe died a few weeks after his diagnosis.
The surprise came after Londe’s death when an autopsy found very little cancer in his body, certainly not enough to kill him. There were a couple of spots in the liver and one in the lung, but there was no trace of the oesophageal cancer that everyone thought had killed him. Meador told the Discovery Health Channel: ‘He died with cancer, but not from cancer.’ What did Londe die of if not oesophageal cancer? Had he died because he believed he was going to die? The case still haunts Meador three decades after Londe’s death: ‘I thought he had cancer. He thought he had cancer. Everybody around him thought he had cancer… did I remove hope in some way?’ Troublesome nocebo cases suggest that physicians, parents and teachers can remove hope by programming you to believe you are powerless.
Our positive and negative beliefs not only impact our health, but also every aspect of our life. Henry Ford was right about the efficiency of assembly lines and he was right about the power of the mind: ‘If you believe you can or if you believe you can’t… you’re right.’ Think about the implications of the man who blithely drank the bacteria that medicine had decided caused cholera. Consider the people who walk across coals without getting burned. If they wobble in the steadfastness of their belief that they can do it, they wind up with burned feet. Your beliefs act like filters on a camera, changing how you see the world. And your biology adapts to those beliefs. When we truly recognise that our beliefs are that powerful, we hold the key to freedom. While we cannot readily change the codes of our genetic blueprints, we can change our minds.
In my lectures I provide two sets of plastic filters, one red and one green. I have the audience pick one colour and then look at a blank screen. I then tell them to yell out whether the image I project next is one that generates love or generates fear. Those in the audience that don the red ‘belief’ filters see an inviting picture of a cottage labelled ‘House of Love’, flowers, a sunny sky and the message ‘I live in Love’. Those wearing the green filters see a threatening dark sky, bats, snakes, a ghost hovering outside a dark, gloomy house and the words ‘I live in fear’. I always get enjoyment out of seeing how the audience responds to the confusion when half yell out ‘I live in love’, and the other half, in equal certainty, yells out ‘I live in fear’ in response to the same image.
Then I ask the audience to change to the opposite coloured filters. My point is that you can choose what to see. You can filter your life with rose-coloured beliefs that will help your body grow or you can use a dark filter that turns everything black and makes your body/mind more susceptible to disease. You can live a life of fear or live a life of love. You have the choice! But I can tell you that if you choose to see a world full of love, your body will respond by growing in health. If you choose to believe that you live in a dark world full of fear, your body’s health will be compromised as you physiologically close yourself down in a protection response.
Learning how to harness your mind to promote growth is the secret of life, which is why I called my book The Biology of Belief. Of course the secret of life 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 belief!
So there is nothing wrong with going through life wearing the proverbial rose-coloured glasses. In fact, those rose-coloured glasses are necessary for your cells to thrive. Positive thoughts are a biological mandate for a happy, healthy life. In the words of Mahatma Gandhi:
Your beliefs become your thoughts
Your thoughts become your words
Your words become your actions
Your actions become your habits
Your habits become your values
Your values become your destiny
From The Biology of Belief, © 2006 by Bruce Lipton.This edition published in 2006 exclusively for Cygnus members by Cygnus Books.
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