There is an old Native American saying, “if you don’t name it, it isn’t”
My mum was a case in point. She got breast cancer while we lived in England in the 1980s. She was 70plus at the time and was a very active woman. The English health system at the time was very good and they operated on her, removed one breast and significantly, probably because she was old and also because as a family we didn’t want her to go through the pain of chemo etc.
But to be honest the whole thing was a blur as cancer was/is such a death sentence. So the hospital on the south west coast of England put my mum on herbal tablets and told her she was fine. And for 5 years she was fine.
She then came home to East Limerick and unfortunately the English hospital sent her file to the Limerick Regional hospital. The cancer surgeon immediately called my mum and sister into his office and brow-beat them for not being on cancer drugs etc. I still at the time had my head in the sand and couldn’t confront any of it. Within 3 months my mum got the cancer back and died from the disease many years later.
So what was it that the British did that made the difference with Bridget Murphy?
The answer I now believe was the placebo effect. She was told by the top surgeon that the herbal pills would totally work and she believed it.
In his book “Cued” Jeff Rediger says:
“During World War two, Henry Beecher, a field surgeon, ran out of morphine for the wounded soldiers he was treating. He didn’t want to have to tell men in excruciating pain that he couldn’t help them. In a remote battlefield tent, he rigged up a saline (water) solution, hooked it up to the suffering patients and told them it was morphine. He figured it might take the edge off a little so they could hold out for the real drug. Their response however astonished him : 40% of the men reported a “significant” decrease in pain”
Placebo (which is where someone thinks what they are getting will cure them), can cause real, measurable physiological changes in the body, including to heart rate, blood pressure, brain chemistry and even diseases of the nervous system.
What if you took this one step further and decided to stay positive about your situation, keep all negative data out of your environment and keep your thoughts positive too.
Tips:
1) Decide to stay positive about life. Don’t look at any news on TV or social media etc for two weeks and see if that changes your perspective on life.
2) If you have some health issues while keeping in place what your doctor says etc. decide to be positive about it and realise that when you discuss your condition with someone else while you may get sympathy you are also discussing illness. So, for a week stop thinking and talking about illness and see what happens
3) when you meet someone who you know is ill, find some aspect of their lives that is positive and celebrate that with them.
4) Come to the Get Back health Clinic and get your spine and nervous system realigned this week and put positive flows into your body.
Yours in Health John Keane Spinologist
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