Video: Are Your Thoughts Making You Sick?
In the words of psychooncologist Lawrence LeShan, PhD: “Feelings affect body chemistry, which affects the development or regression of a tumor, just as body chemistry affects feelings.” In other words, what Dr. LeShan was saying was that…
Video: State of Mind Can Improve State of Health
Norman Cousins had been an editor of the Saturday Evening Post and later went on to help UCLA start what, after his death, became known as the Norman Cousins Institute for Psychoneuroimmunology. This became one of the first centers for serious…
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: Mental Attitude and Disease
Dr. William Osler, MD is considered the father of modern medicine. When Johns Hopkins Medical Center was opened in the 1880s, he started the first residency program. Prior to that, physicians’ training ended with the four years of medical…
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…
Self-Limiting Beliefs Limit Happiness
One of my mentors, Dr. Jeanne Achterberg once said: “No thought, no emotion, is without biochemical, electrochemical activity; and the activity leaves no cell untouched.” There is an ancient expression that is often said to someone who worries…
Empowered Patients Make Things Happen
The hundreds of studies I reviewed and explain in my book all point to certain specific behaviors and activities that consistently correlate with wellbeing and better health outcomes. The first is autonomy, which refers to courageously taking…
Getting Properly Diagnosed
This series is about my story of finally getting properly diagnosed with chronic medical conditions for which there are no cures. Upon realizing that medicine is still a long way from being able to cure most chronic conditions, I began searching…