24 Jul The Secret Way to Heal

I’m always looking for another supplement, medicine, or protocol that can optimize my health. Plus, the more I know about healing, the better I can support my clients.  Suppose there was some protocol that cost nothing and yet was effective? There is something like that.

It’s called the placebo effect.

When researchers want to test out a new medicine, treatment, or surgery, they compare it to a fake called a placebo. For example, half the people in a study are given a sugar pill and the other half the real medicine. No one knows who is getting the placebo or the genuine treatment until the study is over. If the medicine has better results than the placebo, then the treatment is considered effective and will be prescribed in the future.

But here’s the freaky thing. The people who take the placebo get better too. Even though there is no known medical effect from the placebo, people heal. Researchers and doctors tend to discount the placebo effect, because they are so focused on medicine, but people are getting better on the placebo and that deserves our attention. The placebo effect should not be a secret.

So maybe I should start looking for a placebo. What if it was possible to harness the placebo effect? Suppose there was a way to purposely use the placebo effect to heal. But let’s think about healing in the first place.

Your body knows how to heal on its own. If you scratched your knee, soon your scratch would heal, and maybe without a scar. Healing happens when you are in a rest-and-recover mode. This mode happens when you activate the parasympathetic nervous system. It’s activated when you are relaxed and at ease. The opposite is the fight-or-flight mode, which happens when you are tense, anxious, or scared. That activates the sympathetic nervous system. Then healing is halted while your body prepares you to run, fight back, or freeze, whether you need to do those things or not.

When you take a placebo, you activate the healing response within the parasympathetic nervous system. When you take real medicine, you also tend to activate the healing response, as well as nudging your body toward healing with the medicine. Much of your healing is actually the result of everything else going on with you, besides the medicine. Medicine can be extremely valuable, but it’s not the only cause of healing.

When you get medicine, an authoritative and highly trained person in a white coat performs a ritual called an examination, and you pay money, or fill out insurance forms, and interact with the office staff. Everyone you know does the same thing when they are sick. All that conveys meaning to you, as in, the doctor has the power to cure you. In ancient times, people found meaning in shamans and their healing rituals. Their patients believed in their power to heal. The authority and healing ritual created meaning in the minds of the patients. So maybe the placebo effect should be called the meaning effect.

The meaning becomes buried deep in the subconscious mind. You are unaware how your deep-seated belief in the doctor and medicine is helping you to heal. The placebo effect is not in your conscious mind, but it is a total and complete belief inside of you that you will heal.

Harnessing the placebo effect

You have to convince yourself unconditionally that you will heal. You have to completely believe and surrender to the concept that you are going to heal. This is difficult because this belief and surrender is not conscious. You can’t say to yourself, I think I can, I think I can, I think I can. Determination like that is great but that’s not how to access your own placebo. But you do have several ways to activate your healing response.

Meditation helps you quiet your skeptical mind, the part that is trying to analyze how it’s possible to heal. You focus on the present, not the past where you felt sick, or the future, where you might still be sick. The quietness and focus on the  present allows the parasympathetic to take over and promote healing. Your quieted mind becomes open.

Visualization involves imagining your healed and healthy self. Your body listens to your mind, as well as your mind listens to your body. If you can be healthy in your imagination, your body can take the hint and start the healing process. Visualizing the emotions as well as the facts is more powerful.

Gratitude is another way to quiet the mind and instill belief in becoming healed. You feel gratitude for having been healed, even though it hasn’t yet happened. Your emotions start telling your body that healing has already happened and then the body can follow suit.

Falling asleep is the time of day when your analytical mind turns off and your subconscious mind turns on. Your analytical mind likes to hang on to your fears about illness and not healing. When it’s turned off, your subconscious mind is more suggestible and open to hopeful, positive emotions. So I like to fall asleep while silently repeating phrases like, I will sleep well tonight, my body is totally detoxing, or, thank you for making me whole, thank you for giving me health–I like to use gratitude too.

Health coaching helps you heal because it supports the entire body, mind, and spirit. The ancient shamans treated the whole self, not just the chemicals in the body that are out of balance as modern medicine tends to do. When the whole self is supported, then healing is supported.

So contact me and let’s see if we can work together. I’m a National Board Certified Health and Wellness Coach, a Functional Medicine Certified Health Coach, and now a teacher of health coaching at Delgado Community College.

Comments: have you ever healed with a placebo?

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Dr. Joe Dispenza You Are the Placebo

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