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: Belief Becomes Biology
Norman Cousins helped create the psychoneuroimmunology (PNI) Program at UCLA. He is most known for his book: Anatomy of An Illness, in which he described his personal experiences overcoming a life-threatening illness by increasing his level…
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…
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…
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…
Video: The Mind Overrides Medical Treatment
This is a case study of a woman treated for intractable asthma with what both the doctor and the patient believed was a powerful new, experimental drug. The doctor, in disbelief over the rapid cure using the drug, believed the drug company had…