-->| A basic premise of mind-body medicine is that chronic stress and other emotional issues contribute to illness and that relaxation techniques and learning positive ways of coping with these issues will improve your health. In this chapter, we examine how stress, suppressed emotions, and related lifestyle choices can contribute to sleep problems. We also explore a number of therapies that can help you change negative thought patterns into more healthful ones, deal with stress in a positive way, and incorporate habits for relaxation into your life. |  The Center for mind-body medicine in Association with The University of Minnesota and Georgetown University School of Medicine. Food as Medicine:
Integrating Nutrition into Clinical Practice and Medical Education. Sponsored by The Wallace Research Foundation and the Hilton Family Foundation. Marriott Bay Point Resort, Panama City Beach, Florida. March 2-8,2003.
18 Hoffer A: Mental Health Regained. Toronto, ON: International Schizophrenia Foundation, 2007. |  We are still in the midst of Era II medicine, of what might be called mind-body medicine. We see only the first glimmers of the dawning of Era III medicine, the hallmark of which is the nonlocal mind." The term nonlocal refers to action at a distance, or how your mind can influence things, people, and events that are spatially separated from you. |  Examples include mind-body medicine, homeopathic medicine, naturopathic medicine, traditional Chinese medicine, herbal remedies, nutritional supplements, chiropractic and osteopathic manipulation, and biofield therapies. These interventions are considered to be complementary medicine when they are used together with conventional medicine (as when meditation is used to reduce a patient's pain following surgery). | | The growing body of evidence for the effectiveness of mind-body medicine had finally pushed it into the medical mainstream.
Over three decades of clinical work, I have demonstrated that the power of the human mind is infinite, that every person possesses extraordinary nobility, and that life is a series of lessons designed to lead us into the direct experience of these two realities.
These are tall claims to be sure, but the methods speak for themselves. Their power cannot be denied. Try them and you will see. | | Strengthening the Body's Own Intelligence
Eastern medicine has long understood what we have rediscovered only in the last decade of research in mind-body medicine: your body has an inherent intelligence; it "knows" how to heal and sustain itself. This is the foundation of all of Eastern medicine. When you cut yourself, your body knows how to heal the cut. Why, then, do some cuts heal more slowly than others? A knee scrape might take a few days to heal one time and a few weeks another. This happens because of differing levels of energy in your body. | | Tell them you're learning the latest techniques in mind-body medicine and want to use them as "guinea pigs." Sense their energy patterns and venture to ask, for example, "Is your left knee bothering you?" Failure is as informative as success in the early stages of practicing these skills, so don't be shy. Practice on strangers without their even knowing it. When I first started, I practiced wherever I went. I would be in a mall, and as I passed shoppers, I would scan them energetically (keeping my observations to myself, of course).
The practice is what's important. | | You've just had a crash course in the latest techniques of mind-body medicine. In this chapter, I'll show you how to bring it all together to structure a plan for achieving your goals and then help you set the tone for a lifetime of health and ultimate wellbeing.
By now, you realize that, although you came to this book because you had concerns about your physical health, healing is about more than "fixing" those problems. It's about being authentic to your story behind the story. | | There is a general rule of thumb that's applied by advanced practitioners of mind-body medicine: if you suffer from a physical illness or injury, about 40 percent of your solution will come from physical means (such as surgery, medication, physical therapy, changes in diet, and increased exercise), and the other 60 percent will come from your mind. You now have the tools you need to activate that other 60 percent of your healthcare solution. | | Science has birthed a new mind-body medicine, and we can no longer deny that such immaterial aspects of ourselves as thoughts, beliefs, hopes, and desires can change the chemistry of our bodies. We can no longer afford to ignore the web of relationships that determine just about everything we are on a physical level.
With this new frame of reference, we can begin to seek an even deeper understanding of our bodies and our health. We are motivated to find the mechanisms, processes, rules, and relationships that define and determine our state of being. |  A terrific book by one of the great pioneers of mind-body medicine.
Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain by Sharon Begley. My friend Sharon Begley, one of the best science writers in America, has written a superb guide to what's possible in the human brain.
Food, Health, and Medicine
For anyone interesting in digging deeper into the forces that shape how we look at medicine, food, and health in this country, here are some books that may forever change the way you see natural medicine, health advice, the U.S. |  Mike: There is this prevention and holistic health component that you mentioned, the mind-body medicine. Then you also have the background and the knowledge to be able to treat patients in acute situations, and save their life through conventional techniques. I need to acknowledge the value to that as well.
Goodman: Absolutely. You feel good when someone comes and unfortunately, they're there with a heart attack because the artery's blocked. But you can go in and put in catheters and little metal tubes called stents, and open up the artery and create blood flow again. |  I did my research in mind-body medicine such as biofeedback, stress management, emotion, personality, and health, not parapsychology and spirituality. Sure, I had loved my parents, and when they died while I was at Yale, I assumed that my Reform Jewish upbringing was the final word: dust to dust, ashes to ashes, period.
Four a.m. that Monday morning in Boca Raton, Linda asked me, with great intensity and seriousness, "Do you think it's possible that my father is still alive?"
Taken aback I replied, "I'm not sure, but would it matter if I told you that I thought it was possible? |  The placebo effect is very powerful, and yet it is merely one application of mind-body medicine. The mind has the power to initiate healing processes in the body, and that's why the placebo effect works. In fact, across the board, the placebo effect works better than prescription drugs, especially when you consider that most drugs work on far fewer than 30 percent of patients.
Yet, conventional medicine dismisses the placebo effect as pseudo-scientific quackery— even as their own studies prove its consistent efficacy across literally tens of thousands of studies. |  Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of Miami. Dr. Ironson runs the Positive Survivors Research Center at the university, and has been awarded several grants from the National Institutes of Health. It is one of the first studies to link particular beliefs with particular changes in the immune system.11
Dr. Ironson measured several indicators of health in HIV patients over the course of a four-year period. One measure was their viral load—the quantity of the AIDS virus in a sample of blood. | | Under a system of health freedom, we would be able to choose natural treatments, including Ayurvedic medicine, Western herbal medicine, Traditional Chinese Medicine, mind-body medicine, energy medicine, or any other system of medicine that we believed would be helpful to us.
The Codex threat
After all, isn't it up to each individual in society to make their own decisions about what they eat, what activities they engage in, and how they wish to plan their own future? |  Advanced medicine makes conventional medicine and Western medicine obsolete, and it includes therapies like phototherapy, sunlight, nutrition, sound therapy, vibrational medicine, electromedicine, mind-body medicine, energy healing, and other similar modalities that were once considered experimental, but are now well-known to be both safe and effective at supporting the health of the patient.
The term "junk science" is used by defenders of conventional medicine to discredit everything outside conventional medicine, regardless of whether or not it is based on sound scientific ground. | | In a review of a recent paper (Russek and Schwartz, 1996a) outlining some dynamic energy systems implications for cardiology, mind-body medicine, and alternative medicine, Puthoff (1996), a physicist, noted that "On this trail we are led inexorably to consider not only hypothesized deep connections between brain and heart, consciousness and cardiovascular activity, but between the whole organism and its environment, including others, by means of patterned energetic mechanisms." Puthoffs selection of the term "inexorably" seems well chosen. | | This is a drugs-and-surgery approach to medicine that largely excludes nutrition, wellness, mind-body medicine, patient education, and other natural therapies.
"Organized medicine" refers to the collection of organizations that promote conventional medicine. This encompasses pharmaceutical companies, the FDA, hospitals, doctors, medical schools, and medical organizations such as the American Medical Association as well as disease organizations like the American Cancer Society and the American Diabetes Association. |  Emmett Miller, MD, is one of the world's foremost experts in mind-body medicine. His relaxation CDs and tapes can help calm you down within minutes. Visit his Web site to sample some very soothing sounds at www. drmiller.com.
Cost: The Down with High Blood Pressure cassette is $13 and the CD is $17. breathe shallowly from your chest, you probably take 16 to 20 breaths per minute, or up to 25,000 breaths per day. Deep, diaphragmatic breathing requires only six to eight breaths a minute, or a maximum of 12,000 breaths per day. | | Meanwhile, Harris Dienstfrey, the editor of Advances: The Journal of Mind-Body Health (recently renamed Advances in mind-body medicine) received a phone call from a writer named William Novak asking whether he knew of any scientists who might have a theory for how a woman named Claire Sylvia could have retrieved stored personal memories from the new heart and lungs she had received. |  A far more practical application of mind-body medicine is found in recruiting the mind to control blood pressure, stress hormones, immune function, healing responses and other measurable markers of health or performance.
Interestingly, your ability to heal yourself, or perform at a high level, or achieve your ambitions, is largely determined by your beliefs. And those beliefs are stored in a kind of neural-net software program running in your head. The good news is that we can change those beliefs, reshaping them to better serve our interests. |  The psychosomatic network: Foundations of mind-body medicine. Alternative Therapies 1998;4(4):30-41.
14. Robbins S. Pathology. Place: Publisher, 1967.
15. Rosenthal S. The Thyroid Sourcebook. Philadelphia, PA: Saunders, 1996.
16. Schecter S. Fighting Radiation and Chemical Pollutants. Pordand, OR: Book Publishing Co., 1997.
17. Shannon S. Diet for the Atomic Age. New York, NY: Crown, 1993.
18. Shomon M. Living Well With Hypothyroidism. New York, NY: Avon, 2000.
19. Surks M. The Thyroid Book. Self-published, 1999.
20. thyroidnews@onelist.com (Online thyroid resources).
21. | | Advances in mind-body medicine 15(4) =295-301.
Schwartz, G. E. 1972. Voluntary Control of Human Cardiovascular Integration and Differentiation Through Feedback and Reward. Science. 174: 90-93.
-. 1979. The Brain as a Health Care System: A Psychobiological
Framework for Biofeedback and Health Psychology. In Heakh Psychology; ed. C. Stone, N. Adler, and F. Cohen. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
-. 1984. Psychobiology of Health: A New Synthesis. In Psychology in
Health: Master Lecture Series Volume III; ed. C.J. Scheirer, and B. L. Hammonds. Washington, DC: APA Books.
-. 1987. |  Western Medicine, Public Health and Holistic Healing
When it comes to our individual health, it seems to me our future could go in any or all of at least three directions: medical business as usual, public health intervention in crisis, and the new mind-body medicine. First we have the prevailing Western model of health care. Medical professionals continue to spin expensive marvels our way with the latest high-tech diagnostic tools, surgeries and pharmaceuticals the world has ever offered. But health care has become unaffordable to an increasing proportion of the U.S. |  These initial insights, along with research on the physiological effects of stress, led mind-body medicine to focus much of its attention on how the body and mind respond to stressful situations, on how those responses affect our health, and on what, if anything, we can do to change our responses to stress.
Four basic questions are asked in assessing mind-body medicine. First, what is stress and what role does it play in illness? Second, what disorders can be influenced by mind-body techniques? Third, which mind-body techniques are available and usable? | | Here are some of the many approaches: mind-body medicine, energy medicine, vibrational medicine, homeopathy, alternative medicine, integrative medicine, holistic healing, East-West medicine, ayruvedic medicine, Chinese medicine, acupuncture, acupressure, herbal medicine, chiropractic, and spiritual healing. Many pioneering individuals promoting these practices include
Deepak Chopra, Larry Dossey, Bernard Siegel, Andrew Weil, Elmer Green, Norman Sheely, and others too numerous to mention here. |  Sharp Institute for Human Potential and mind-body medicine 8010 Frost Street, Suite 300 San Diego, California 92123 (800) 82-SHARP Website: www.sharp.com
The Sharp Institute has three components: patient care at the Center for mind-body medicine, where Ayurvedic and other complementary therapies are offered; courses in mind-body and Ayurvedic medicine for the general public and health-care providers; and research to validate the effectiveness of Ayurvedic therapies.
Recommended Reading
9
Ageless BodyfTimeless Mind. Deepak Chopra, M.D New York:Three Rivers Press, 1998. | | These investigators work in the area known as mind-body medicine, also called behavioral medicine. Behavioral medicine programs have been established at the most prestigious medical centers in the United States and in other countries. Investigators study meditation, hypnosis, biofeedback, and other previously esoteric activities for evidence about how the ancient wisdom concerning links between mind and body can be documented, explained, and applied to assist modern health care.
One of the first spurs toward mind-body medicine was a relatively simple discovery made in a doctor's office. |  Soon after The Relaxation Response appeared, people who had once ridiculed meditation were themselves chanting mantras—and cultivating a deep respect for mind-body medicine. Today, meditation is among the most mainstream of the alternative therapies. And no wonder: Its benefits have been documented in dozens of studies.
"Meditation helps people with a wide range of medical disorders and life challenges," agrees Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D., director of the stress reduction clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center in Worcester. | |
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