- Self-Healing: It helps to believe
Until very recently the idea that people could affect the course of illness or disease by deliberately changing their thoughts was not given much credence in scientific discussion. It was well accepted that certain illnesses had a psychological component, that people could get sick because of psychological factors, but not that they could affect the course of problems that were supposedly organic in origin.
The boundary between organic and psychosomatic illnesses is now uncertain. Some argue that there is no such boundary. One reason is the number of challenging studies suggesting clear links between personality factors, stressful life events, and illness. A second reason is the growing recognition of placebo effects in various health treatments. This refers to healing effects not related to the treatment itself. Another reason is research showing that many people can voluntarily control functions of the so-called "Autonomic nervous system” like heart rate, blood pressure and skin temperature.
The people who can achieve the kind of bodily control I'm speaking about are not yogis, or experienced meditators, but ordinary untrained or self-trained individuals. At first they achieve their control by using images, or thoughts, about different kinds of emotional experiences, or through biofeedback, a process which involves the amplification and "feeding back" of natural body responses like heartbeats or skin temperature. Later, many dispense with these strategies apparently switching their systems directly into a different way of functioning.
Some say that cancer is one of the illnesses that can respond to the way that people think. Ainslie Meares, an Australian Psychiatrist argued that cancer often occurs because of a stress-induced breakdown in the functioning of the immune system. His argument is that one of the bodily products of stress is a chemical called Cortisol which has a general arousal function in the body, and which depresses immune functioning. A form of this chemical, Cortisone, is used in transplant operations to prevent rejection of donor organs. It suppresses the immune response so that the transplanted body part is not rejected by the body that has received it. When Cortisol occurs naturally during exposure to chronic stressors of life, it does a similar thing. It reduces the body's ability to attack abnormal cells.
Like Ainslie Meares, Carl and Stephanie Simonton in the U.S.A. used deep relaxation as part of their management strategy for cancer patients, but they also gave a lot of attention to a process they called "visualisation" in which patients were asked to create images in their minds that symbolised their bodies' fight against cancer cells. The Simontons claimed many successes.
An intriguing idea that comes out of such reports is that it may not be enough to simply go through the ritual of achieving calmness. One of the most famous cancer recovery cases in Australia, described by Ainslie Meares, was that of Ian Gawler, whose terminal bone cancer stopped its progress after he began meditating for several hours each day. Gawler himself says the quietness of mind and body he achieved arrested the course of the cancer, stopped it getting worse, but that there was no remission until something else happened. That something else was a change in Gawler's belief about his capacity to affect the cancer. Only when he came to believe in his own capacity for self-healing (partly as a result of meeting an Asian mystic) did the cancer go away.
Of course a change in one’s thinking about a health problem might be encouraged by suggestions given in hypnosis or through the deliberate process of visualising positive change. This latter experience is not just about imagining how we might wnt to be, it is also a way of thinking positively. It is quite clear from the reports of the Simontons that people who are not able to adopt this kind of thinking did not do so well with their cancers. So the conviction, the belief, that the body can heal itself may be a necessary condition for the successful use of meditation or deep relaxation procedures.
A few years ago a young woman staggered into my office looking for help to get over her glandular fever. Her attack had been very serious. She had been hospitalised for three weeks. Her doctor had told her that there was nothing that conventional medicine could do for her and that it would be six to eight months before she could go back to work. However, she believed that with hypnosis her body could heal itself.
The first few times she came to see me she was brought to my office by friends. She was not strong enough to turn the steering wheel of a car. I saw her three times a week at first, and gave her audio tapes of our hypnosis sessions to use at home. She says she listened to the suggestions on the tapes for hours every day.
Within four weeks she was insisting that she was ready to go back to work. Her employers would not allow her to start without written approval from her doctor. The doctor expressed astonishment at her recovery but wrote the letter. Perhaps a profound belief in the procedure we were using helped her to apply the processes required for her body to recover more quickly.
There are many other instances of profound bodily change as a result of hypnosis/meditation/deep relaxation. It seems possible that belief in the possibility of change helped bring it to fruition. Whatever the physical mechanism involved, belief in the procedure seems a necessary prerequisite for complete success.
Perhaps as such procedures become more readily accepted in conventional health delivery systems, the belief in their efficacy, and hence their capacity to improve the quality of life, will increase and make the desired outcome more likely.
More readings will be added to my blog from time to time. Have a quick look now to see the first posting on my blog PSYC1PLUS