In Chapter 8, I’ll introduce you to the quantum universe, the unpredictable world of the matter and energy that make up the atoms and molecules of everything in the universe, which turn out to really be more energy (which looks like empty space) than solid matter. The quantum model, which states that all possibilities exist in this present moment, is your key to using the placebo effect for healing, because it gives you permission to choose a new future for yourself and actually observe it into reality. You’ll then understand just how possible it really is to cross the river of change and make the unknown known.
Chapter 9 introduces you to three people from my workshops who have reported some truly remarkable results from using these same techniques to change their health for the better. First, you’ll meet Laurie, who, at age 19, was diagnosed with a rare degenerative bone disease that her doctors told her was incurable. Although the bones in Laurie’s left leg and hip suffered 12 major fractures over several decades, leaving her dependent on crutches for getting around, today she walks perfectly normally, without even needing a cane. Her x-rays show no evidence of any fractures in her bones.
Then I’ll introduce you to Candace, who was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s disease—a serious thyroid condition with a host of complications—during a time in her life when she was resentful and full of rage. Candace’s doctor told her she’d have to take medication for the rest of her life, but she proved him wrong after she eventually was able to turn her condition around. Today, Candace is totally in love with a brand-new life and takes no medication for her thyroid, which blood tests show is completely normal.
Finally, you’ll meet Joann (the woman mentioned in the Preface), a mother of five who was a successful businesswoman and entrepreneur whom many considered a superwoman—before she collapsed quite suddenly and was diagnosed with an advanced form of multiple sclerosis. Joann’s condition went downhill quickly, and she was eventually unable to move her legs. When she first came to my workshops, she made only small changes—until one day when the woman who hadn’t moved her legs in years walked around the room, completely unassisted, after just one hour-long meditation!
Chapter 10 shares more remarkable stories from workshop participants, along with the brain scans that go with them. You’ll meet Michelle, who completely healed herself of Parkinson’s disease, and John, a paraplegic who stood up from his wheelchair after a meditation. You’ll read how Kathy (a CEO living on the fast track) learned to find the present moment and how Bonnie healed herself of fibroids and heavy menstrual bleeding. Finally, you’ll meet Genevieve, who went into such states of bliss in meditation that tears of joy ran down her face, and Maria, whose experience can only be described as having an orgasm in her brain.
I’ll show you the data my team of scientists collected from these people’s brain scans so that you can see the changes we witnessed in real time during the workshops. The best part of all this data is that it proves you don’t have to be a monk or nun, a scholar, a scientist, or a spiritual leader to accomplish similar feats. You don’t need a Ph.D. or a medical degree. The folks in this book are ordinary people like you. After reading this chapter, you’ll understand that what these people did is not magic or even all that miraculous; they simply learned and applied teachable skills. And if you practice the same skills, you’ll be able to make similar changes.
— PART II of the book is all about meditation. It includes Chapter 11, which outlines some simple preparation steps for meditation and goes over specific techniques you’ll find helpful, and Chapter 12, which gives you step-by-step instructions for using the meditation techniques I teach in my workshops—the very same techniques that participants used to produce the remarkable results you’ll have read about earlier in the book.
I’m happy to say that although we don’t have all the answers yet about harnessing the power of the placebo, all sorts of people are actually using these ideas right now to make extraordinary changes in their lives, the kinds of changes that many others consider practically impossible. The techniques I share in this book need not be limited to healing a physical condition; they can also be applied to improving any aspect of your life. My hope is that this book will inspire you to try these techniques, too, and to make possible in your life the same kind of seemingly impossible changes.
Author’s note: While the stories of the individuals in my workshops who experienced healing are true, their names and certain identifying details have been changed in this book to protect their privacy.
Part I
INFORMATION
Chapter One
Is It Possible?
Sam Londe, a retired shoe salesman living outside of St. Louis in the early 1970s, began to have difficulty swallowing.1 He eventually went to see a doctor, who discovered that Londe had metastatic esophageal cancer. In those days, metastatic esophageal cancer was considered incurable; no one had ever survived it. It was a death sentence, and Londe’s doctor delivered the news in an appropriately somber tone.
To give Londe as much time as possible, the doctor recommended surgery to remove the cancerous tissue in the esophagus and in the stomach, where the cancer had spread. Trusting the doctor, Londe agreed and had the surgery. He came through as well as could be expected, but things soon went from bad to worse. A scan of Londe’s liver revealed still more bad news: extensive cancer throughout the liver’s entire left lobe. The doctor told Londe that sadly, at best, he had only months to live.
So Londe and his new wife, both in their 70s, arranged to move 300 miles to Nashville, where Londe’s wife had family. Soon after the move to Tennessee, Londe was admitted to the hospital and assigned to internist Clifton Meador. The first time Dr. Meador walked into Londe’s room, he found a small, unshaven man curled up underneath a mound of covers, looking nearly dead. Londe was gruff and uncommunicative, and the nurses explained that he’d been like that since his admission a few days before.
While Londe had high blood-glucose levels due to diabetes, the rest of his blood chemistry was fairly normal except for slightly higher levels of liver enzymes, which was to be expected of someone with liver cancer. Further medical examination showed nothing more amiss, a blessing considering the patient’s desperate condition. Under his new doctor’s orders, Londe begrudgingly received physical therapy, a fortified liquid diet, and lots of nursing care and attention. After a few days, he grew a little stronger, and his grumpiness started to subside. He began talking to Dr. Meador about his life.
Londe had been married before, and he and his first wife had been true soul mates. They had never been able to have children but otherwise had had a good life. Because they loved boating, when they retired they had bought a house by a large man-made lake. Then late one night, the nearby earthen dam burst, and a wall of water crushed their house and swept it away. Londe miraculously survived by hanging on to some wreckage, but his wife’s body was never found.
“I lost everything I ever cared for,” he told Dr. Meador. “My heart and soul were lost in the flood that night.”
Within six months of his first wife’s death, while still grieving and in the depths of depression, Londe had been diagnosed with esophageal cancer and had had the surgery. It was then that he had met and married his second wife, a kind woman who knew about his terminal illness and agreed to care for him in the time he had left. A few months after they married, they made the move to Nashville, and Dr. Meador already knew the rest of the story.
Once Londe finished the story, the doctor, amazed by what he’d just heard, asked with compassion, “What do you want me to do for you?” The dying man thought for a while.
“I’d like to live through Christmas so I can be with my wife and her family. They’ve been good to me,” he finally answered. “Just help me make it through Christmas. That’s all I want.” Dr. Meador told Londe he would do his best.
By the time Londe was discharged in late October, he was actually in much better shape than when he had arrived. Dr. Meador was surprised but pleased by how well
Londe was doing. The doctor saw his patient about once a month after that, and each time, Londe looked good. But exactly one week after Christmas (on New Year’s Day), Londe’s wife brought him back to the hospital.
Dr. Meador was surprised to find that Londe again looked near death. All he could find was a mild fever and a small patch of pneumonia on Londe’s chest x-ray, although the man didn’t seem to be in any respiratory distress. All of Londe’s blood tests looked good, and the cultures the doctor ordered for him came back negative for any other disease. Dr. Meador prescribed antibiotics and put his patient on oxygen, hoping for the best, but within 24 hours, Sam Londe was dead.
As you might assume, this story is about a typical cancer diagnosis followed by an unfortunate death from a fatal disease, right?
Not so fast.
A funny thing happened when the hospital performed Londe’s autopsy. The man’s liver was, in fact, not filled with cancer; he had only a very tiny nodule of cancer in its left lobe and another very small spot on his lung. The truth is, neither cancer was big enough to kill him. And in fact, the area around his esophagus was totally free of disease as well. The abnormal liver scan taken at the St. Louis hospital had apparently yielded a false positive result.
Sam Londe didn’t die of esophageal cancer, nor did he die of liver cancer. He also didn’t die of the mild case of pneumonia he had when he was readmitted to the hospital. He died, quite simply, because everybody in his immediate environment thought he was dying. His doctor in St. Louis thought Londe was dying, and then Dr. Meador, in Nashville, thought Londe was dying. Londe’s wife and family thought he was dying, too. And, most important, Londe himself thought he was dying. Is it possible that Sam Londe died from thought alone? Is it possible that thought is that powerful? And if so, is this case unique?
Can You Overdose on a Placebo?
Twenty-six-year-old graduate student Fred Mason (not his real name) became depressed when his girlfriend broke up with him.2 He saw an ad for a clinical trial of a new antidepressant medication and decided to enroll. He’d had a bout of depression four years previously, at which time his doctor prescribed the antidepressant amitriptyline (Elavil), but Mason had been forced to stop the medication when he became excessively drowsy and developed numbness. He had felt the drug was too strong for him and now hoped the new drug would have fewer side effects.
After he’d been in the study for about a month, he decided to call his ex-girlfriend. The two of them argued on the phone, and after Mason hung up, he impulsively grabbed his bottle of pills from the trial and swallowed all 29 that were left in the container, attempting suicide. He immediately repented. Running into the hallway of his apartment building, Mason desperately called out for help and then collapsed on the floor. A neighbor heard his cry and found him on the ground.
Writhing, he told his neighbor he’d made a terrible mistake, that he had taken all his pills but didn’t really want to die. When he asked the neighbor to take him to the hospital, she agreed. When Mason got to the emergency room, he was pale and sweating, and his blood pressure was 80/40 with a pulse rate of 140. Breathing rapidly, he kept repeating, “I don’t want to die.”
When the doctors examined him, they found nothing wrong other than his low blood pressure, rapid pulse, and rapid breathing. Even so, he seemed lethargic, and his speech was slurred. The medical team inserted an IV and hooked it up to a saline drip, took samples of Mason’s blood and urine, and asked what drug he’d taken. Mason couldn’t remember the name.
He told the doctors it was an experimental antidepressant drug that was part of a trial. He then handed them the empty bottle, which indeed had information about the clinical trial printed on the label, although not the name of the drug. There was nothing to do but wait for the lab results, monitor his vital signs to make sure he didn’t take a turn for the worse, and hope that the hospital staff could contact the researchers who were conducting the trial.
Four hours later, after the results of the lab tests came back totally normal, a physician who had been part of the clinical drug trial arrived. Checking the code on the label of Mason’s empty pill bottle, the researcher looked into the records for the trial. He announced that Mason had actually been taking a placebo and that the pills he’d swallowed contained no drugs at all. Miraculously, Mason’s blood pressure and pulse returned to normal within a few minutes. And as if by magic, he was no longer excessively drowsy either. Mason had fallen victim to the nocebo: a harmless substance that, thanks to strong expectations, causes harmful effects.
Is it really possible that Mason’s symptoms had been brought on solely because that’s what he’d expected to happen from swallowing a huge handful of antidepressants? Could Mason’s mind, as in the case of Sam Londe, have taken control of his body, driven by expectations of what seemed to be the most probable future scenario, to the extent that he made that scenario real? Could that happen even if that meant his mind would have to take control of functions not normally under conscious control? And if that were possible, could it also be true that if our thoughts can make us sick, we also have the ability to use our thoughts to make us well?
Chronic Depression Magically Lifts
Janis Schonfeld, a 46-year-old interior designer living in California, had suffered with depression since she was a teenager. She’d never sought help with the condition until she saw a newspaper ad in 1997. The UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute was looking for volunteer subjects for a drug trial to test a new antidepressant called venlafaxine (Effexor). Schonfeld, whose depression had escalated to the point where the wife and mother had actually entertained thoughts of suicide, jumped at the chance to be part of the trial.
When Schonfeld arrived at the institute for the first time, a technician hooked her up to an electroencephalograph (EEG) to monitor and record her brain-wave activity for about 45 minutes, and not long after that, Schonfeld left with a bottle of pills from the hospital pharmacy. She knew that roughly half the group of 51 subjects would be getting the drug, and half would receive a placebo, although neither she nor the doctors conducting the study had any idea which group she had been randomly assigned to. In fact, no one would know until the study was over. But at the time, that hardly mattered to Schonfeld. She was excited and hopeful that after decades of battling clinical depression, a condition that would cause her to sometimes suddenly burst into tears for no apparent reason, she might finally be getting help.
Schonfeld agreed to return every week for the entire eight weeks of the study. On each occasion, she’d answer questions about how she was feeling, and several times, she sat through yet another EEG. Not long after she started taking her pills, Schonfeld began feeling dramatically better for the first time in her life. Ironically, she also felt nauseated, but that was good news because she knew that nausea was one of the common side effects of the drug being tested. She thought that she surely must have gotten the active drug if her depression was lifting and she was also experiencing side effects. Even the nurse she spoke to when she returned every week was convinced Schonfeld must be getting the real thing because of the changes she was experiencing.
Finally, at the end of the eight-week study, one of the researchers revealed the shocking truth: Schonfeld, who was no longer suicidal and felt like a new person after taking the pills, had actually been in the placebo group. Schonfeld was floored. She was sure the doctor had made a mistake. She simply didn’t believe that she could have felt so much better after so many years of suffocating depression simply from taking a bottle of sugar pills. And she’d even gotten the side effects! There must have been a mix-up. She asked the doctor to check the records again. He laughed good-naturedly as he assured her that the bottle she had taken home with her, the bottle that had given Schonfeld her life back, indeed contained nothing but placebo pills.
As she sat there in shock, the doctor insisted that just because she hadn’t been getting any real medication, it didn’t mean that she had been imagining her depression or her improvement; it onl
y meant that whatever had made her feel better wasn’t due to Effexor.
And she wasn’t the only one: The study results would soon show that 38 percent of the placebo group felt better, compared to 52 percent of the group who received Effexor. But when the rest of the data came out, it was the researchers’ turn to be surprised: The patients like Schonfeld, who had improved on the placebos, hadn’t just imagined feeling better; they had actually changed their brain-wave patterns. The EEG recordings taken so faithfully over the course of the study showed a significant increase in activity in the prefrontal cortex, which in depressed patients typically has very low activity.3
Thus the placebo effect was not only altering Schonfeld’s mind, but also bringing about real physical changes in her biology. In other words, it wasn’t just in her mind; it was in her brain. She wasn’t just feeling well—she was well. Schonfeld literally had a different brain by the end of the study, without taking any drug or doing anything differently. It was her mind that had changed her body. More than a dozen years later, Schonfeld still felt much improved.
How is it possible that a sugar pill could not only lift the symptoms of deep-seated depression, but also cause bona fide side effects like nausea? And what does it mean that the same inert substance actually has the power to change how brain waves fire, increasing activity in the very part of the brain most affected by depression? Can the subjective mind really create those kinds of measurable objective physiological changes? What’s going on in the mind and in the body that would allow a placebo to so perfectly mimic a real drug in this way? Could the same phenomenal healing effect occur not only with chronic mental illness, but also with a life-threatening condition such as cancer?
You Are the Placebo Page 4