Tag Archive for: In Your Own Hands
Q & A with Dr. B.
The purpose of this website, my book, and the Community Education course I teach at the College of Marin, is to teach people how to live a vibrant, meaningful life through the cultivation of self-empowerment and self-efficacy. In this weekly…
Video: Believing You Are In Good Health Improves Your Health
Misunderstandings can sometimes save lives. In his book Anatomy of an Illness, Norman Cousins describes an incident that happened at UCLA Medical Center about fifty years ago. Cardiologist, Dr. Bernard Lown treated a very sick and dying patient.…
Video: Mind Moves Matter
When Deepak Chopra was a young medical resident, training in endocrinology, he had a patient with widely metastasized liver cancer. As was sometimes the case fifty years ago, doctors would sometimes lie to the patient about the seriousness of…
Video: What You Believe Dramatically Affects Your Health
In a study from Japan, a harmless leaf was rubbed on the forearms of a group of teenage boys who were known to be allergic to an Asian version of poison ivy. The boys were told it was poison ivy. They all broke out in a rash that looked exactly…
Video: Placebos Catalyze Endogenous Drugs
Many of the published case studies in refereed journals describe experiments on medical students. In this one, half the students of a pharmacology class in a medical school were given placebos that appeared in every way to be stimulants and…
Video: You Don’t Have to Believe Everything You Think
A belief is healthy if it catalyzes positive emotion. Negative, self-defeating or self-deprecating beliefs are unhealthy because they catalyze emotional distress and bodily stress, which is very bad for our health and wellbeing. Although negative…
Video: Is Love the Most Powerful Medicine?
In one of the studies, half of a large group of students with the earliest signs of a cold went to Karmu, the healer. The other half were treated at the Harvard Health Service. Most of those treated at Harvard Health developed severe colds.…
Video: Friendly People Have Better Immune Function
In this study, after controlling for potential confounding variables, research psychologists discovered that the most friendly, openhearted people have the lowest rates of cancer and the most optimally functioning immune systems. In other studies,…
Video: Meaningful Relationships Correlate with Less Cancer
In this prospective study at Johns Hopkins, which was carried out for thirty years, the medical students who in medical school were deemed to be most likely to have meaningful relationships throughout life, were found to have far less cancer…