In our last blog, we discussed the concept of perfect health. We talked about the fact that medical science looks at the body in a very rigid way; as a fixed structure that is naturally subject to disease and aging. It considers cases of self-healing such as spontaneous remissions as freak incidents; outliers from the norm. We also talked about how the body, contrary to this perspective, is plastic in nature and capable of great self-healing under proper conditions. We also briefly touched upon the notion that we are not bodies, but that we are the consciousness that inhabits the body, and that countless studies over the last decade have proven the mind’s ability to influence the body’s healing.
In this blog we will delve deeper into these distinctions, exploring the real reasons why mainstream medical science is incapable of both grasping the nature of healing, as well as is incapable of actually causing real healing.
One major factor that favors holistic healing over modern medicine is the absence of intelligence with which drugs operate in the body. The body’s healing process has immense intelligence which ensures that the right things happen at the right time. The chemicals that the body releases to aid in healing also have no side effects, unlike modern drugs.
Let’s look at the following excerpt from Deepak Chopra’s ‘Quantum Healing’. “Any one of the processes involved in healing a superficial cut – the clotting of the blood, for example – is incredibly complex, so much so that if the mechanism fails, as it does with hemophiliacs, advanced scientific medicine is at a loss to duplicate the impaired function. A doctor can prescribe drugs that replace the missing clotting factor in the blood, but these are temporary, artificial, and have numerous undesirable side effects. The body’s perfect timing will be absent, as well as the superb coordination of a dozen related processes. By comparison, a man-made drug is a stranger in a land where everyone else is blood kin. It can never share the knowledge that everyone else was born with.”
So, it is not chemicals in the body that result in healing, it is the intelligence with which they perform their activities.
Here is another concrete example from the same book. “Hypertension patients are generally told to bring down their elevated blood pressure with diuretics – drugs that take water from the cells and pass it out of the system through urination. This is exactly what the kidneys do all the time as they delicately monitor your blood chemistry to make sure that the balance of water, waste products, and the necessary salts, or electrolytes, is precisely maintained. A diuretic, however, has only one idea in mind, and obsessed with that one idea, it careens through the body, demanding, “Water! Water!”, from every cell it meets. The result is that the fluid tension in the blood vessels is reduced, which is what the doctor wants to happen, but the water level everywhere else is affected at the same time. The brain may be forced to give up some of its water, which under normal conditions it does only in the direst emergency, causing the patient to feel dizzy and drowsy (…) In the view of some endocrinologists, the dehydration induced by diuretics in the presence of alcohol or tranquilizers is the leading cause of death among older Americans.
So, drugs act without judiciousness, they don’t have the intelligence to do things in the right way. They always have side effects, and in some cases as with diuretics for the treatment of hypertension, they can even cause death due to their ‘brute force’ mechanism of action.
Chemotherapy is another example of a poor method of dealing with disease. The goal of chemotherapy is to poison the cells in a body, and since cancer cells grow at an alarming rate, they ingest more of the poison and die off more quickly. But, a typical cancer patient may have around 10 billion cancer cells. Even if their chemotherapy is 99.99% effective, there would still be 1 million survivors, more than enough to start over again. It is simply a brute force method, lacking any real intelligence
Surely, there is a better solution to improving health and dealing with disease? Why can’t we utilize the body’s healing to its highest potential? And, what exactly is that potential?
For answers, we can look to one instance. In 1990, Dr. Dean Ornish proposed that lifestyle changes could cause radical improvements in the body. Starting with a one-year study, Ornish took patients already suffering from coronary artery disease, the primary cause of heart attacks. One group of subjects was followed with normal medical care while others were enlisted in a lifestyle program that consisted of whole foods, stress management, moderate exercise, and social support. The lifestyle group found that the coronary vessels had opened, which was the first time that coronary artery disease had ever been reversed by any means, including drugs.
This is one example, but there are countless others. How do spontaneous cancer remissions occur? Are they freak incidents? Even then, there must be some explanation. One study found that whenever a cancer remission occurred, it was preceded by a radical change in the patient’s awareness. Often they would reconnect with old relationships because they thought they had little time to live, and the relationship would blossom. So, there is a body of evidence to suggest that cancer remissions are not variances from the norm, but occur when someone returns to a better state of awareness.
This state of awareness is not something transcendental, but basic. For man to exist in a state of joy and good mental and emotional health, we now know, is not something extraordinary. Yoga, meditation, and a healthy vegetarian diet have been shown time and again to result in a state of mental wellbeing. And yoga in itself has been shown to reverse many illnesses, including some for which there is no known pharmacological cure, such as diabetes.
It has been shown over time that the mind and emotions of a patient influence their healing. Happy individuals with joyous relationships tend to contract fewer illnesses and live longer.
The land of Okinawa in Japan is known for the long lives of its inhabitants. One common factor is the adoption of a philosophy or way of life called ‘Ikigai’. It propagates finding something to do with one’s life that is fulfilling, useful to society, and that one can excel at. It also prescribes a diet where one eats only till one is about 80% full and no more. A person’s mental state influences their physical health profoundly.
When the body is in homeostasis and functioning normally (we do not call an ordinary person’s function normal in this case. They are overly stressed, eat poorly, and are exposed to all kinds of pollutants from noise to air, violent TV, etc.) its capacity to heal is far more powerful than drugs from modern medical science. You do not need to be a yogi to achieve this state; it is simply something lacking in the modern lifestyle. The body has not only every chemical required to keep it functioning optimally, it also possesses the intelligence to use these chemicals properly and without side-effects. Stay tuned for our next blog where we will go into further detail on what the best practices to adopt are when seeking a life of mental, emotional, and physical health.
