When I said that no one can honestly claim to know the cure for breast cancer, I was telling a half-truth. If a patient could promote the healing process from within, that would be the cure for cancer. Healing episodes like Chitra’s come about when a radical shift takes place inside, removing fear and doubt at the same time as it removes the disease. Yet, the exact location of this shift opens up profound mysteries. It defies medical wisdom to answer even the most basic question: Was the shift in Chitra’s mind, in her body, or both? To find out, Western medicine has recently begun to move away from drugs and surgery, the mainstay of every doctor’s practice, toward the amorphous, often perplexing field loosely known as “mind-body medicine.” The move was almost a forced one, because the old reliance on the physical body alone had begun to crumble.
Mind-body medicine makes many doctors extremely uneasy. They feel it is more a concept than a true field. Given a choice between a new idea and a familiar chemical, a doctor will trust the chemical—penicillin, digitalis, aspirin, and Valium do not need any new thinking on the patient’s part (or the doctor’s) to be effective. The problem comes in when the chemical isn’t effective. Recent surveys taken in England and America have shown that as many as 80 percent of patients feel that their underlying complaint, their reason for going to the doctor, was not satisfactorily resolved when they left his office. Classic studies going back to the end of World War II showed that patients left the Yale Medical School hospital sicker than the day they arrived. (These are paralleled by similar studies that showed that patients with psychiatric complaints improved more while they were on the waiting list to see a psychiatrist than after they actually saw him—so the situation isn’t simply one of exchanging a body doctor for a head doctor.)
A miracle cure, then, simply throws into high relief the need to reexamine some of medicine’s basic concepts. Our current logic of healing can be impressive, or at least good enough, as when we apply penicillin to cure an infection, but nature’s logic can be awe-inspiring. Many physicians have stood in wonder witnessing such cures as Chitra’s without having a clue how to explain them; the standard term for them is spontaneous remission, a convenient tag that says little more than that the patient recovered by himself. Spontaneous remissions are quite rare—one study in 1985 estimated that they occur once in every twenty thousand diagnosed cancer cases; some specialists believe they are much rarer (fewer than ten per million), but no one knows for sure.
Recently I spent an evening with a leading oncologist, or cancer specialist, from the Midwest, a doctor who treats thousands of patients every year. I asked him if he knew of any spontaneous remissions. He shrugged and said, “I feel uncomfortable with that term. I have seen tumors completely regress. It’s very rare, but it happens.”
Did these regressions sometimes happen totally by themselves? He admitted that they occasionally did. He thought for a moment and mentioned that certain kinds of melanoma—an extremely lethal skin cancer that kills very quickly—are known to disappear by themselves. He couldn’t explain why this happened. “I don’t stop to think about these rare incidents,” he said. “Treating cancer is a matter of statistics—we go with the numbers. A huge majority of patients respond to certain lines of treatment, and there just isn’t time to find out about the infinitesimal minority who recover for some unknown reason. Besides, it is our experience that many of these regressions are only temporary.”
Did he think complete regressions were rarer than one in a million? No, he answered, not that rare.
Then, as a scientist, didn’t he want to find out the mechanism that lies behind them, even if the odds are one in a million, or one in ten million? Again he shrugged. “Of course there must be a mechanism behind it,” he conceded, “but my practice is not set up to look into that. Let me give you an example: eight years ago, a man came to see me complaining of a painful chest cough. We X-rayed him, and it turned out that he had a large tumor between his lungs. He was admitted to the hospital, we took a biopsy, and the pathologist’s report diagnosed the tumor as oat-cell carcinoma. This is an extremely deadly, very fast-growing malignancy.
“I told my patient that he must have immediate surgery to relieve the pressure that his tumor was creating, followed by radiation and chemotherapy. He was quite disturbed by the prospect of treatment and refused. I completely lost track of him after that. Eight years later, a man came to see me with an enlarged lymph node in his neck. I took a biopsy, and it turned out to be oat-cell carcinoma. Then I realized that it was the same man.
“We took chest X rays, and there was no trace of lung cancer. Normally, 99.99 percent of untreated patients would have died in six months; as many as 90 percent would not live five years even with maximum therapy. I asked him what he had done for the earlier cancer, and he told me he hadn’t done anything—he had just decided he was not going to let himself die of cancer. And he may refuse treatment again with this second cancer.”
By definition, scientific medicine deals in predictable results. Yet, whenever spontaneous remissions appear, their behavior is completely unpredictable. They can occur without the presence of any therapy, or they can accompany conventional cancer treatment. The myriad alternative approaches to cancer available in the United States today may each have distinct merits, but no one has proven that they promote spontaneous remissions any better than standard radiation and chemotherapy, nor are they apparently any worse. How advanced the cancer is seems not to matter, either. Both tiny tumors and extremely large masses of malignancy can disappear, virtually overnight. Because of their rarity and because they happen as if by chance, spontaneous remissions have so far taught us very little either about the cause of cancer or about how an “impossible” cure is achieved.
It seems reasonable to suppose that the body is fighting cancer all the time and winning a huge majority of the battles. Many kinds of cancer can be induced, either in test tubes or in laboratory animals, using toxic substances (carcinogens), fatty diets, radiation, high doses of stress, and viruses, among other things. Since we are subjected to all of these at a furious rate, they must be causing damage inside us. DNA is known to break down under these extreme conditions; usually, however, it knows how to repair itself or to detect the damaged material and discard it.
This means that early cancers are probably being detected and combatted in the body on a regular basis. If you take this process and step it up in intensity, you have the “miracle” of a spontaneous remission. It is no miracle at all, in fact, but a natural process that has yet to be explained, just as curing pneumonia with penicillin would be a miracle if you could not explain it through the germ theory of disease. The point is that the mechanism behind miracle cures is not mystical or random—and it deserves to be investigated.
In ordinary practice, once the miracle is over, the doctor goes back to his routine, including his routine concepts. Even these, however, the stock-in-trade of medical school, have buckled. To give just one example: Since its inception as a field of rational scientific study, medicine has accepted the degeneration of brain function in elderly people as a natural occurrence. This deterioration was thoroughly documented with “hard” findings—as we age, our brains shrink, grow lighter, and lose millions of neurons every year. We have our full complement of neurons by age 2, and by age 30, the number starts to decline. The loss of any single brain cell is permanent, since neurons do not regenerate. On the basis of this well-known fact, brain decline seemed to be scientifically valid; sadly but inevitably, to grow old must lead to memory loss, decreased reasoning ability, impaired intelligence, and related symptoms.
These time-honored assumptions, however, have now been shown to be wrong. Careful study of healthy elderly people—as opposed to the sick, hospitalized ones whom medicine habitually studied—has revealed that 80 percent of healthy Americans, barring psychological distress (such as loneliness, depression, or lack of outside stimulation), suffer no significant memory loss as they age. The ability to retain new information can decline, which is why old people forget phone numbers, names, and the reason for walking into a room; but the ability to remember past events, called long-term memory, actually improves. (One authority on aging quotes Cicero, who declared, “I’ve never heard of an old man who forgot where his money was hidden.”)
In tests where 70-year-olds were matched with 20-year-olds, the older people performed better than the younger in this area of memory. After they practiced the other kind of memory—called short-term memory—for a few minutes every day, the older group could almost match the younger subjects, who were at their prime of mental functioning.
Perhaps the “prime of life” should be extended. The secret, as with almost every other “natural” decline in old age, depends on habits of mind, not the circuitry in the nervous system. As long as a person stays mentally active, he will remain as intelligent as in youth and middle age. People will still lose over one billion neurons throughout their lifetime, at an average rate of 18 million per year, but this loss is compensated for by another structure, the branchlike filaments called dendrites, which connect the nerve cells to one another.
A nerve cell tends to be highly individual in shape, but typically it has a bulbous central section from which thin arms radiate, like an octopus. These arms, or axons, end in a swirl of tiny filaments that looked treelike to the early anatomists, so they named them dendrites after the Greek word for “tree.” Dendrites, which can vary in number from less than a dozen to more than a thousand per cell, serve as contact points, allowing the neuron to send signals to its neighbors. By growing new dendrites, a neuron can open new channels of communication in every direction, like a switchboard sprouting extra lines.
It is not known how a thought is actually formed among brain cells or how the bewilderingly vast number of connections interrelate—millions of dendrites come together at major junction points in the body, such as the solar plexus, not to mention the billions upon billions in the brain itself. But experiments have shown that new dendrites can be grown throughout life, up to advanced old age. The current view is that this new growth easily provides us with the physical structure for unimpaired brain function. In a healthy brain, senility is not physically normal. A rich multiplication of dendrites might even lie behind growing wise in old age, a time when more and more of life is seen in its totality—in other words, more interconnected, just as the nerve cells are more interconnected through their new dendrites.
This example illustrates how radically wrong medicine can be if it insists that matter is superior to mind. To say that a nerve cell creates thoughts may be true, but it is just as true to say that thinking creates nerve cells. In the case of the new dendrites, it is the habit of thinking, remembering, and being mentally active that creates the new tissue. Nor is this an isolated finding. Curiously enough, as soon as the concept of the “new old age” was permissible in the eyes of doctors, our views of many forms of degeneration began to alter.
As long as you exercise, for example, your body’s musculature will not wither, and your strength will be unimpaired for life, although there will be a slow decline in stamina. You can train for a marathon at 65, provided you are in good physical shape and train sensibly. Similarly, your heart changes with age, growing less resilient and pumping less blood per beat, but heart disease and hardening of the arteries, thought absolutely normal with old age a few decades ago, are now seen as avoidable, too, depending on diet and lifestyle. Strokes, another given of old age, have declined by 40 percent just in the last decade, thanks to better control of hypertension and less fat in our diets. A large percentage of “unavoidable” senility has been traced to vitamin deficiency, poor diet, and dehydration. The overall result of these findings is that old age is being drastically reconsidered; a less obvious result is that the whole body, at any stage of life, has to be rethought.
What is happening on every front in medicine is that the healthy body is showing itself to be more resilient and versatile than was hiterto suspected. Whereas medical school teaches that germ A causes disease B and is treated by drug C, nature seems to feel that this is only one option among many. The mental approach to treating cancer, for instance, would have been ridiculed a decade ago. But people do seem able to participate in their cancer treatment, and even to control the course of the disease, by using thoughts. In 1971, Dr. O. Carl Simonton, a radiologist at the University of Texas, met a 61-year-old man with throat cancer. The disease was very far progressed; the patient could hardly swallow, and his weight had dropped to 98 pounds.
Not only was the prognosis extremely poor—the doctors gave him a 5 percent chance of surviving five years after treatment—but the patient was already so weak that it seemed unlikely he would respond well to radiation, which is the standard therapy for this condition. In desperation, but also curious to try a psychological approach, Dr. Simonton suggested that the man enhance his radiation therapy through the use of visualization. He was taught to visualize his cancer as vividly as possible. Then, using any mental picture that appealed to him, he was asked to visualize his immune system as the white blood cells successfully attacked the cancer cells and swept them out of the body, leaving only healthy cells behind.
The man said he envisioned his immune cells as a blizzard of white particles, covering the tumor like snow burying a black rock. Dr. Simonton had him go home and repeat this visualization at intervals throughout the day. The man agreed, and soon his tumor seemed to be shrinking. In a few weeks it was definitely smaller, and his response to radiation was almost free of side effects; after two months, the tumor was gone.
Naturally, Dr. Simonton was surprised and baffled, though elated that the psychological approach had been so powerful. How does a thought defeat a cancer cell? The mechanism was totally unknown—in fact, given the fiendish complexity of the immune system and the nervous system, both of which were obviously involved here, the mechanism might be unknowable. For his part, the patient accepted his cure without undue surprise. He told Dr. Simonton that arthritis in his legs kept him from going stream-fishing as much as he liked. Now that the cancer was gone, why not try visualizing the arthritis away too? Within a few more weeks, that is exactly what happened. The man remained free of both cancer and arthritis for a follow-up period of six years.
This now-famous case is a landmark in mind-body medicine, but unfortunately it is not the whole story. Dr. Simonton’s visualization therapy (it has branched out into a broad mind-body program) does not reliably cure cancer. One of my patients used it with success to cure herself of breast cancer, I believe, although she practiced the technique on her own and not under a doctor’s scrutiny. Long-term statistical studies, however, dispute whether such sporadic results are any better than those of conventional treatment. At present, conventional therapy has a big edge. If a woman with breast cancer, for example, detects the tumor while it is still very small and localized, the chances of curing her (a “cure” means surviving at least three years without a recurrence of the disease) are currently better than 90 percent. In comparison, the number of spontaneous remissions, at the most generous estimate, would be well below 1⁄10 of 1 percent. Until a mental or other alternative therapy outperforms radiation and chemotherapy, it will not become the treatment of choice. Although patients may long for such approaches, most doctors still fear and distrust them.
But even if Dr. Simonton’s patient were one of a kind, he is enough to rock our conception of how the body cures itself, for here is nature finding a way to combat death that no doctor had ever tried—and here also is the dark possibility that what the doctor usually tries is not helping nature but stifling it.
Curious and adventurous doctors have flocked to experiment with mind-body innovations over the last decade, from biofeedback and hypnotism to visualizations and behavior modification. The results across the board have been amorphous and hard to interpret. Psychologist Michael Lerner spent three years conducting an in-depth study of forty clinics offering alternative approaches to cancer, whose methods ranged from herbs and macrobiotics to visualization of positive mental images. He found that these “complementary cancer centers” were sought out by patients who were generally well educated and prosperous, that the doctors running the clinics were also serious and well intentioned, but that nothing close to a cure for cancer had been discovered anywhere he visited.
When he interviewed the patients, a fairly large proportion (40 percent) thought that they had experienced at least a temporary improvement in the quality of their lives. Another 40 percent reported that they experienced actual medical improvements in their condition, lasting from a few days to a number of years. About 10 percent fell at the extreme ends of the spectrum, one group saying that they got nothing from the treatment and the other that they were now partially or wholly recovered from their disease. Generally, the record of alternative approaches is that they give a measure of comfort and relief to patients, but disappointingly, the remission rates are not radically different from those of standard therapy.
There are other problems that run deeper than inconsistent results: the mind-body field continues to be plagued by an inability to rigorously prove its basic tenet, that the mind influences the body toward either health or disease. It seems utterly self-evident that sick people and healthy people enjoy different states of mind, but the causal connection is still elusive. In 1985 a major study of breast cancer conducted at the University of Pennsylvania failed to find any correlation between the mental attitude of patients and their chances of surviving their disease beyond two years. In an editorial accompanying the study, which appeared in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, the whole concept of emotions affecting cancer was denounced. “Our belief in disease as a direct reflection of mental states,” the editorial declared, “is largely folklore.”
In response, letters deluged the journal, most of them from physicians who heatedly disagreed with the editorial’s conclusion. It certainly seems unreasonable to discount mental attitudes as a factor in illness, much less as folklore. Every practicing physician knows that the patient’s will to recover plays a vital part in his treatment. Wedded as they are to “hard” medicine, most doctors nonetheless cannot condone the idea that attitude, belief, and emotions do not play their part. Hippocrates stated at the dawn of Western medicine that “a patient who is mortally sick might yet recover from belief in the goodness of his physician.” Numerous modern studies have corroborated this, by showing that people who trust their doctor and surrender themselves to his care are likelier to recover than those who approach medicine with distrust, fear, and antagonism.
In the wake of the editorial, tempers flared and lines of allegiance were drawn, while the issues became even more confused. Three separate studies of breast-cancer survival rates from the mid-1980s came up with three entirely different results. In one, the women who displayed strong positive attitudes tended to outlive those who were negative, and it did not matter if their diseases were more advanced—positive emotions, it seemed, helped them recover from a late-stage, metastasized cancer, while patients with negative emotions died from small tumors that had been diagnosed relatively early.
A second study, however, found that any strong attitude, if expressed rather than held back, helped in survival of this very deadly disease. While the first finding bolsters common sense—the idea that positivity is better than negativity—the second does much the same from another angle, the idea being that it is better to fight than to give up. Publicity was given to a so-called cancer personality, who bottles up emotions and somehow converts repression into malignant cells. The opposite would be the “strong will to live” type, who can be either positive or negative.
All of this follows a certain logic, except for the study that appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine to begin with, seconded by supporting studies, which found no correlation between any emotional pattern and surviving breast cancer beyond two years. Even as it grew in popularity, becoming one of the most welcome innovations since the Salk vaccine, the concept of mind-body medicine was shaken. Now, a familiar pattern has emerged, in which the public is informed of some elating breakthrough, followed by disappointing clinical results that are generally known only in restricted medical circles.
A classic example was the division of heart-attack patients, more than three-quarters of them middle-aged males, into high-risk Type A personalities and low-risk Type B’s. The Type A personality was supposed to be a hard-driving, compulsive worker, constantly racing deadlines and churning his system with stress hormones, as opposed to the relaxed, tolerant, more balanced Type B. Type A suffered from “the disease of being in a hurry”; therefore, it seemed logical that his heart would eventually rebel, leading to a coronary.
Unfortunately, controlled studies have indicated that this widely accepted division is not so neat. It turns out that most people have some Type A in them and some Type B, and that tolerance for stress varies widely, with certain groups stating that they thrive on it. Finally, a 1988 study found that if a man actually has a heart attack, Type A’s survive better than Type B’s. Their drive to succeed apparently turns into a benefit once the coronary strikes.
The intricacies of the mind-body relation were not to be easily solved. If one asks why a positive mind cannot be easily correlated with good health—it appears to be one of the most obvious facts of life—the answer has to do with what you mean by “mind” in the first place. This is not a philosophical question but a practical one. If a patient comes in with cancer, is his mental state judged by how he feels on the day of the diagnosis, long before, or long afterward? Dr. Lawrence LeShan, author of the pioneering studies from the 1950s correlating emotions to cancer, went back into the childhoods of cancer patients to find the black seed that poisoned their psychology, and he theorized that it lay dormant in the subconscious for years before inducing their disease.
In my own practice, I saw a lung-cancer patient who had lived comfortably with a coin-sized lesion in his lungs for five years. He did not even suspect that it was cancerous, and since he was in his sixties, the lesion was growing quite slowly. However, as soon as I told him that the lesion was consistent with a diagnosis of lung cancer, he became terribly agitated. Within a month he started to cough up blood; within three, he was dead. If his state of mind contributed to this untoward haste, it apparently acted quickly. This patient could live with his tumor, but he couldn’t live with the diagnosis.
Even more basic is this question: Is the “mind” that a doctor is interested in the patient’s overall personality, his subconscious, his attitudes, his deepest beliefs, or something not yet understood and defined by psychology? It may be that the relevant aspect of the mind involved in getting sick or getting well is not even specifically human.
An Ohio University study of heart disease in the 1970s was conducted by feeding quite toxic, high-cholesterol diets to rabbits in order to block their arteries, duplicating the effect that such a diet has on human arteries. Consistent results began to appear in all the rabbit groups except for one, which strangely displayed 60 percent fewer symptoms. Nothing in the rabbits’ physiology could account for their high tolerance to the diet, until it was discovered by accident that the student who was in charge of feeding these particular rabbits liked to fondle and pet them. He would hold each rabbit lovingly for a few minutes before feeding it; astonishingly, this alone seemed to enable the animals to overcome the toxic diet. Repeat experiments, in which one group of rabbits was treated neutrally while the others were loved, came up with similar results. Once again, the mechanism that causes such immunity is quite unknown—it is baffling to think that evolution has built into the rabbit mind an immune response that needs to be triggered by human cuddling.
There is even a possibility, many doctors would contend, that the mind is a fiction, medically speaking. When we think that it is sick, what is really sick is the brain. By this logic, the classical mental disorders—depression, schizophrenia, and psychosis—are actually brain disorders. This logic has obvious inadequacies: it is like saying that car wrecks should be blamed on automobiles. But the brain, being a physical organ that can be weighed and dissected, makes medicine feel more secure than does the mind, which has proved impossible to define after many centuries of introspection and analysis. Doctors are quite happy not to be called upon as philosophers.
The ability of today’s psychotropic, or mind-influencing, drugs to relieve the major symptoms of mental illness, such as depression, mania, anxiety, and hallucinations, is much greater than any treatment available in the past. Chemical psychiatry is likely to vie with its exact opposite, mind-body medicine, as the medical revolution of our time. It has hard clinical results to back it up, including numerous indications that chemical imbalances in the brain are directly linked to mental illness.
Nothing could appear to be more all-encompassing than the fullblown madness of a chronic schizophrenic, who suffers from hallucinatory visions and inner voices, distorted thinking, and often complete physical and mental disorientation. To ask a schizophrenic what day it is can throw him into bewilderment and shivering terror. However, the structural difference between this state of mind and sanity may be traceable to one minute biochemical called dopamine, which is secreted by the brain. The dopamine connection, known for two decades, held that schizophrenics overproduce this chemical, which plays an important role in processing both emotions and perceptions—a hallucination would thus be a perception of the outside world that has gotten scrambled in the brain’s chemical coding.
This hypothesis was further simplified in 1984 when a psychiatrist at the University of Iowa, Dr. Rafiq Waziri, reviewed what was known about the brain chemistry of schizophrenics and narrowed the defect down to an even smaller molecule called serine, a common amino acid found in most protein foods. Serine is thought to be an early link in the manufacture of dopamine. Unable to metabolize serine correctly, the brains of schizophrenics apparently overproduce dopamine to offset the lack—the exact process is still unknown. Could it be that full-blown schizophrenia, considered the most bizarre and complex of mental disorders, depends on how well you digest your food? Earlier findings at M.I.T. have already shown that the brain’s basic chemistry is so variable that it can be modified by a single meal.
Dr. Waziri bolstered support for his theory by taking a group of long-term schizophrenics and feeding them a dietary supplement of glycine, a chemical that serine is supposed to build as part of the dopamine mechanism. Perhaps the extra glycine would bypass the serine defect, Waziri reasoned, and bring dopamine back into balance. In the trial group, a few schizophrenics responded quite dramatically—they were able to stop their medications without having any psychotic episodes. For the first time in years, their thinking was free from both their disease and the mind-numbing drugs used to treat it.
A dietary approach to mental illness would be far more benign than current therapies. The possibility of finding more dietary links is also tantalizing. At least one best-selling diet book has jumped the gun by listing “happy foods” and “sad foods,” on the theory that the amino acids in these foods go directly to the brain and are made into chemicals that produce either positive or negative moods. Milk, chicken, bananas, and leafy greens are among the happy foods, because they stimulate dopamine and two other “positive” brain chemicals. Sugary and fatty foods, on the other hand, are typically sad foods, because they stimulate acetylcholine, a “negative” chemical. Critics say, quite justifiably, that brain chemicals are not so simple—can a schizophrenic’s high dopamine levels be considered positive? Nor does it seem that changing the intake of amino acids leads directly to more of a desired brain chemical, just as the amount of cholesterol in your diet does not directly correlate with the amount in your blood.
If you can eat your way to sanity, or even a better mood, then the basic issues in mind-body medicine become even more confused. Can you trust the mind to cure arthritis and at the same time hold that eating chocolate will make you depressed? This would imply a self-contradiction, that mind is dominant over matter except when matter is dominant over mind. In the current atmosphere of ambiguous findings, the two opposite positions—treat the body through the mind, treat the mind through the body—are equally up in the air.
None of the confusion has been adequately clarified, and as a result, the subjective world of the mind remains a treacherous force, capricious in its ability to heal, equally capricious in its ability to bring illness. Many doctors, because of their materialistic bias, would be thrilled to conclude that chemicals must be the answer to all our mental and physical mysteries.
I don’t think they can be. In my specialty of endocrinology, some of the first chemicals that affect the mind, the endocrine hormones, were discovered. Every day I see patients who display mental symptoms that are traceable to defects in their hormonal balance—the distorted thinking of a diabetic going into a low-blood-sugar reaction, the mood shifts of the menstrual cycle, and even a characteristic depression that is the earliest warning sign of certain cancers (a tumor in the pancreas, for example, may be too small to detect, yet it will release cortisol and other “stress hormones” into the bloodstream, causing the patient to feel depressed).
Despite this, I see too many flaws in the argument that a deeper knowledge of body chemistry is all we need—the body has too many chemicals (literally thousands of them), they are produced in bewilderingly complex patterns, and they come and go too fast, often in fractions of a second. What controls this constant flux? We cannot leave the mind out of the mind-body connection altogether. To say that the body heals itself using only chemicals is like saying that a car shifts gears using only the transmission. Clearly it takes a driver who knows what he is doing. Although medicine has spent several centuries trying to hold on to the idea that the body runs itself alone, like a self-motivated machine, there must be a driver here, too. Otherwise, our body’s chemistry would be a jumble of floating molecules instead of the incredibly ordered and precise machinery that it so obviously is.
In a more naïve age, the driver was thought to be a tiny man, called the homunculus, who sat in the heart and performed all the gear shifts needed to run the body. The homunculus went out in the Renaissance, when anatomists began for the first time to dissect cadavers and verify what was inside them. The homunculus wasn’t found inside the heart (neither was the soul), but that left a huge, glaring gap between the mind and the body. Many scientists since have tried to fill the gap with the brain, saying that the brain’s function is to order and control all other functions in the physiology; but this answer begs the question, because the brain is just another machine. The driver still needs to be there. I will argue that he is, but he has become something much more abstract than the homunculus or even the brain—he is built into the intelligent power that motivates us to live, move, and think.
Can that be proved? The next step for us is to work our way deeper into the body’s inner intelligence, to try to find out what motivates it. The territory of mind-body medicine has no givens and no inflexible rules, which is all to the good. For decades, medicine has known that much disease has a psychosomatic component, yet dealing with that component has been like trying to harness the wind. Inside us there must be a “thinking body” that responds to the mind’s commands, but where could it be and what is it made of?
EXPANDING THE TOPIC
One of the most baffling mysteries touched upon in this chapter—where does a thought come from?—remains just as baffling today. It may surprise you, but there is no evidence that the brain is thinking. In fact, if you assume that the mind arises from the brain, which is the standard working assumption in neuroscience, consciousness is just an inference. Imagine an old-time player piano, the kind that performed music by inserting a paper roll into the mechanism. Punched holes in the paper roll activate the keys, giving the appearance that an invisible pianist is playing the “Maple Leaf Rag” or a Mozart sonata.
No one would propose that the piano roll manufactured itself. There must be a musician whose actual intentions lie behind the “invisible” pianist. We infer his existence without seeing him. The same is true about the mind when you observe the brain. As its quadrillion connections activate, using chemical signals and faint electrical charges, the vast activity of mind—thoughts, feelings, sensations, and images—appears. To claim that this happens automatically seems strange, but it’s the materialist position, while in Quantum Healing I said the opposite: An invisible intelligence, complete with intentions, desires, hopes, dreams, and so on, is at work. The fact that you can’t see this entity, known as the self, doesn’t prove that he doesn’t exist. It only proves that he doesn’t exist if you are a strict materialist, who will accept nothing except physical phenomena.
The bulk of this chapter was devoted to the reality of the mind-body connection, which is unassailable now. Over the past thirty years the network that transmits messages throughout the body has been studied in much greater detail, leaving no doubt that every thought, feeling, mood, and belief crosses the bridge from mental to physical. But these detailed researches into hormones, neurotransmitters, immunomodulators, peptides, and thousands of products expressed by genes has obscured the simplicity of the mind-body connection.
In simple terms, the entire system is a feedback loop, with only two factors to consider, input and output. Input enters the brain, output exits. This is the nexus where every process, mental or physical, meets every other, like trillions of train tracks converging on a train station and then exiting the station to go their separate ways. The reason for simplifying the almost infinite complexity of a living mind and body comes down to practicalities. Each of us wants to know the right and wrong kind of input that will affect us.
Positive Input
Pure food, air, and water
Positive emotions
Strong self-esteem
Low stress, good coping skills in the face of stress
Moderate exercise
Good sleep (eight to nine hours every night)
Loving, supportive relationships
Inner contentment, lack of conflicts and tensions
Satisfying work
Meditation and other contemplative practices
Abstaining from alcohol, tobacco, and recreational drugs
Minimizing the use of prescription drugs
Healing old wounds and self-destructive conditioning from the past
The reason that little or none of these things seem new is that they don’t need to be. After decades of public information about prevention and the rise of the wellness movement, we know a great deal about positive lifestyle changes (this isn’t the same as knowing all we need to know about why these changes work). Input, positive or negative, registers in every cell of the body, down to the expression of your genes (that is, their complex chemical output).
The fly in the ointment is that information isn’t the same as motivation. People may know what’s good for them, but they continue to live otherwise. The most common kinds of negative input remain a mainstay in the lives of people who sincerely want to change, including overuse of alcohol, tobacco, and drugs; eating processed and junk foods; tolerating a high level of stress; going short on sleep; taking little or no exercise. The Gallup organization, which surveys the wellbeing of populations around the world, has a top category known as “thriving.” These are the people who describe themselves as happy, safe, financially secure, and healthy—in short, they are enjoying a level of wellbeing that most Americans would consider a basic minimum. Yet the percentage of people who are thriving around the world is dismally low, often under 10–15 percent, and even in the prosperous developed West, it rarely rises above 33 percent. The fact that the United States continues to consume antidepressants and tranquilizers in record numbers attests to our inner unease, and by some estimates the abuse of prescription painkillers is now a cause of death surpassing the total deaths from illegal substances.
No amount of preaching about these things will work over the long run. Prevention implies a level of fear, and fear is a bad motivator except in short bursts. The body resists being in a state of chronic stress, and worrying about your health is a form of stress. The only successful long-term motivation is inspiration. It, too, can flicker out quickly. But there’s a secure kind of inspiration that comes from valuing yourself with such conviction that you like and enjoy the experience of giving your mind and body positive inputs all the time.
When I wrote Quantum Healing I wanted to give the human side of the mind-body connection, realizing that a term like feedback loop, adopted from computers and information theory, sounds cold and abstract. But the whole game comes down to input-output in the end.
Without dwelling on the negative, let’s say that you’ve had a stressful day. You feel wiped out by five o’clock, so you grab a burger and fries instead of cooking at home. You settle in with a drink or two to unwind. Your workload is heavy, so you catch up by taking some of it home with you, and by bedtime you find your mind is still so active that getting to sleep takes a while. Your alarm clock goes off at the usual time the next morning, but you’ve managed only six hours of sleep. No matter, it’s time to start the whole routine over again. In the back of your mind you promise yourself to do better, a promise you may or may not keep.
Yet as normal as this daily routine has become for millions of people, adapting to it is a challenge for the human body, because as we now realize, each deviation from a positive lifestyle registers at the cellular level. Here’s a summary of what is happening. The consequences of negative input are daunting.
What Negative Input Does
Disturbs overall balance, leading to inflammation.
Moves erratically though the body, obstructed by chronic stress and the toxic debris of negative input from the past.
Reinforces old neural pathways, making it much harder to break bad habits.
Contributes to abnormal cell function, including precancerous anomalies.
Weakens the immune system, impairing resistance to disease.
Contributes to premature aging.
Creates a general sense of dullness, discomfort, and dis-ease, the opposite of wellbeing.
Because Quantum Healing focused on the drama of spontaneous remissions from cancer—so-called miracle cures—the bigger message might not have struck with enough force. So let me state it in unmistakable terms: Input is under your control. Without anticipating cancer or any other disorder, your chief aim every day should be to maximize positive input and minimize negative input.
We are badly in need of a new model for wellbeing. Most people segment their lives into work, leisure, and family. Little time is left for self-care. Yet caring for yourself today is exactly what determines your life for decades to come.
True self-care embraces a person’s entire life. Taking charge of your own wellbeing reaches into every corner because it has to. Your brain processes every experience, physical, mental, and spiritual, as input. Look at the contrast that self-care makes when compared to self-neglect.
10 Keys to Self-Care
1. Making happiness a high priority.
Versus: Coasting along with our present state of happiness and unhappiness.
2. Making sure your life has purpose and meaning.
Versus: Focusing on daily practicalities, even those that seem routine and meaningless.
3. Living according to a higher vision.
Versus: Living for externals like a better job, more money, a bigger house, etc.
4. Expanding your awareness in every decade of life.
Versus: Viewing youth as the peak of life and old age as a dwindling decline.
5. Devoting time and attention to personal growth.
Versus: Staying the same as you always were and feeling proud about it.
6. Following a sensible regimen of good diet and physical activity.
Versus: Eating a diet high in sugar, fat, and calories. Promising yourself to exercise tomorrow, or next week.
7. Allowing your brain to reset by introducing downtime several times a day.
Versus: Working your brain to the point of exhaustion before allowing yourself to take a break.
8. Getting to know your inner world through meditation, contemplation, and self-reflection.
Versus: Avoiding what you really feel. Fearing what you might find if you dared to look inside yourself.
9. Practicing gratitude and appreciation.
Versus: Grabbing as much as you can for yourself. Never forgetting to look out for number one.
10. Learning how to love and be loved.
Versus: Leaving romance behind in the past. Not looking into the deep source of love in yourself.
As you can see, self-care goes far beyond eating our vegetables and signing up for the gym. It amounts to a new model for success and happiness, a model that abundant medical evidence supports. I’ll say more about that as we proceed. There’s a reason for giving these general principles first. In a world where massive attention is given to the next fad diet, the gym-honed body, and the beauty of youth, the truth is that a shift in consciousness produces far greater benefits.
Getting people to turn inward is an important aspect, but they have to know why. What Quantum Healing aimed at was far more radical: seeing yourself in a new way, as a child of the universe. On the basis of that realization, self-care cannot help but begin at the source, where your consciousness merges with cosmic consciousness. You can’t truly value yourself until this happens, and then self-care is like caring for Nature itself.