EPUB Ebooks: Free ebook sample of "You Don't Have To Die When Your Doctor says" by David Elliot

You Don’t Have To Die When Your Doctor Says

You Don’t Have To Die When Your Doctor Says

A practical guide to living with grace and joy in the face of a terminal prognosis.

(…and who doesn’t have a terminal prognosis?)

David Elliot

Whitianga ● Whenuakite

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any mechanical, photographic, or electronic process or in the form of a phonographic recording; nor may it be stored in a retrieval system, transmitted, or otherwise be copied for public or private use—other than for ‘fair use’ as brief quotations embodied in articles or reviews—without prior written permission of the publisher.

The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use of any technique as a form of treatment for physical, emotional, or medical problems without the advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature to help you in your quest for emotional and spiritual well-being. In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, which is your right, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.

Original copyright © 2009 by David Elliot

Published and Distributed in New Zealand by

Primary Press

320 Boatharbour Rd. RD1 Whitianga. NZ

www.survivecancer.info

ISBN 978-0-473-15016-7

Cover design and photography by David Elliot

Author portrait by Stephanie Muir

Preface

This book will not cure you of cancer or a terminal disease; it does not contain any miracle cures, therapies being suppressed by the American Medical Association, cancer curing diets or secrets. What this book does contain is viewpoints that may help you create faith in your own healing ability and inspire you to engage your will and live as fully and for as long as possible. My intention is to challenge you to live with grace and joy in the face of a terminal prognosis, to be the most you can be and/or to die trying.

The information contained within this book has no scientific basis whatsoever and is not intended to be taken in any way as clinically proven or evidence based fact. The viewpoints expressed are created from my own experience of being diagnosed with a ‘terminal’ cancer, from supporting other sufferers and from my experience and training as an Avatar® Master.

If you have been diagnosed with cancer, or any other serious disease or disability or have been given a medical death sentence then you are off the map, beyond the safe shores of science; here there be monsters! But this is also the doorway to belief, faith and personal responsibility.

Avatar®, ReSurfacing®, and Star’s Edge International® are registered trademarks of Star’s Edge, Inc. All rights reserved.

This Book is dedicated to all those who helped me when I could not help myself.

Whitianga and Hahei ambulance staff.

Thames emergency department and ward staff.

Hamilton neurosurgery and oncology staff.

My family and friends.

Thank You.

Contents

The diagnosis

On being told you have cancer

You don’t have to believe a negative prognosis

Choosing what to believe

Are beliefs important for healing?

The power of beliefs in healing

How your beliefs influence your feelings

Examples of people who have survived “fatal” cancers through the power of their belief

How your beliefs and attitudes create experiences

How to take responsibility for your illness and your healing

Placebo and nocebo

The Placebo effect and the self-healing power of the body

How the Placebo effect is involved in every medical interaction

How to harness the power of placebo deliberately

The Nocebo effect and its negative influence

How to recognise Nocebo and protect yourself from it

How to lift the curse of a terminal prognosis

Science is a method

The limitations of the scientific method and why nothing can be proven

How to make up your own mind in the face of ‘scientific’ evidence

Why faith doesn’t have to conform to scientific rules

Can consciousness influence matter?

How to step beyond the scientific paradigm

Some viewpoints on statistics

Why statistical data does not apply to you as an individual

Why statistics cannot determine your fate

The long tail of the cancer survivor curve

Denial and resistance

How to recognise when you are in denial and how to deal with it

Resistance, what is it, why it makes creations persist and how to deal with it

Using relaxation to move through resistance

Fear

What are you afraid or?

Overcoming your fear

Anchoring

Do you want to live?

Creating the will to heal

Assuming responsibility for your negative intentions

Reasons to live

People who live past their use-by-date

Using future goals to keep your self alive

Taking action

Victimology

Victimology and how it keeps us stuck

How to give up being a victim and the power of forgiveness.

Woundology and identification with disease

How we use our illness to our advantage

The pitfalls of creating identity around our disease

How to give up illness identification

Being healthy and healing

Health as mind, body and spirit

Our lost selves

What is healing?

Different models of healing

Listening to the body

The mind-body connection

Understanding the body’s use of metaphor to communicate

Pain, what it means and how we deal with it.

The attitude of gratitude

The health benefits of gratitude

How to practice gratitude

Wanting and choosing

Why you can’t have what you want

The difference between wanting and choosing

Increasing your ability and power to choose

Committing to your choices

Belief and faith

Belief and Faith and living from a place of knowing

How much time do your need to heal?

How to increase certainty in a belief

Meditation and visualisation

Quietening the mind

Easy Meditation and Visualisation techniques that work

Exercise and diet

How to choose exercise and diet regimes that work for you

Choosing with a positive expectation

For caregivers and loved ones

Doing what needs to be done

Honest self-appraisal

Supporting a cancer patient with positive expectation

Everything is all right

Alternative modes of treatment

How to asses alternative modes of healing

How to choose alternative medical practitioners

How to choose your healing path

Friends and loved ones

Forgive those that abandon you

Go easy on those that stay

Why are we suffering from cancer?

A metaphysical view of cancer

Human civilisation as a cancer on the earth

A healing visualisation

Death

Death and what it means to you

Meditations on death to reduce the fear

My survivor story

Being diagnosed

90% chance of being dead in 2 years!

Searching for answers

Getting an upgrade and choosing chemo

Updates

Introduction

You Don’t Have To Die When Your Doctor Says is a book about the power of belief in the context of a serious disease or medical death sentence. In many ways I have written this book for myself, but if you are experiencing a diagnosis of cancer or have been told you only have so long to live then I have also written it for you (and that’s why it’s a fairly brief book!)

I have been living with a medical death sentence since January 2008 when I was diagnosed with glioma multiforme blastoma stage 4 and told I had only a 10% chance of living two years. Writing this book has helped me clarify my beliefs; my belief in myself and in my understanding of the role of belief in healing and the beliefs that underpin both allopathic and alternative treatments. Often I have had to take my own advice. There have been times when I have been feeling sorry for myself or using my situation as an excuse and I have had to remember what I have written and live up to my words.

I have come to realise my diagnosis is not a tragedy and my possible death is also not something to worry about. I have also come to believe I don’t need to conform to mortality statistics. You might find it hard to believe, but most days I don’t worry about having cancer or dying at all.

Throughout the course of this disease I have had to face my mortality and reassess my values. I now know I am loved and supported by my family, my friends, my Avatar sanga, my community and my universe (which includes an undefined sense of God). Grappling with the issues of my death has brought me to a greater appreciation of my life. Before my illness I was still uncommitted, a stranger to faith and still seeking. Now I am found; I have found myself and I have found peace and joy.

If my words can help you through your turbulent times and move you a single step closer to peace and joy then I am satisfied.

Please use this book to explore your beliefs. Throughout the text there are questions for you to consider; please take the time to actually answer them. Even better; get a notebook and write your answers down. It is from your interaction with the text that you will gain the most insight into your own beliefs about your healing. If you only read the text, you might gain some insight into my beliefs but that will not be as helpful as answering the questions and gaining insight into your beliefs. Your beliefs, not mine, are creating your experience. It’s changing your beliefs that will change your experience.

It is not my intention to deter you from any course of medical treatment; I support any choice you make. It is my intention to hold you in the highest regard and acknowledge you as an amazing creative being. You are a manifestation of God, of the creative force of the universe and you have it within you to heal.

Some may say I am being a bit previous, considering myself a survivor when I haven’t yet lived past my predicted use-by date but my viewpoint is that success isn’t a result or a destination; it’s a way of being. I am deciding right now that I am a survivor. Waiting to see if I survive and then celebrating success implies a lack of belief. Every day I draw breath, I am a survivor! Every day I can celebrate the success of being alive. It’s a great way to live.

Chapter 1

The Diagnosis

The mistakes made by doctors are innumerable. They err habitually on the side of optimism as to treatment, of pessimism as to the outcome. Marcel Proust

Any medical story starts with the diagnosis. Granted, there is always something going on prior to that occurrence; some symptoms or emergency which takes you to the doctor or the hospital in the first place, but until the diagnosis is made, all is conjecture, worry and confusion. Then comes the time when you are sitting in your hospital bed in pain and worry, with your loved ones in attendance, and the doctor utters those fateful words: ‘I am sorry….insert your name … but you have…insert your fearful malady…’

This diagnosis is the start of your new life and, inevitably, the first thing you want to know is how long your new life is going to be? So you ask the doctor.

This is a mistake!

Thinking that your doctor is God and can predict your future is a reasonable mistake to make. Doctors can appear Godlike in their apparent abilities to give and take life. They routinely perform miracles and bestow blessings, but still, doctors are as mortal and human as the rest of us. They also make mistakes.

No matter what you are suffering from, no doctor can tell you how long you have to live. They can tell you what they would expect based on their previous experience and they can back up their estimates with clinical data from previous cases but this information is not really about you, it’s about their beliefs about the disease and it’s about other people’s experiences.

To ask the question is to give your authority away and the answer, no matter how compassionately given or factually based is a figurative nail in your coffin.

You might be told you have a few years or it might be a few weeks but whatever the numbers, a medical prediction is the scientific equivalent of the witchdoctor’s curse. The bone has been pointed and if you are to survive, sooner or later, you are going to have to lift this curse.

If you did ask, take it back. If you were told without asking, you don’t need to believe the answer; it’s just the opinion of someone in a white coat.

Exercising your right to choose is an act of human dignity. I’m with the Bible on this one; we have the freedom of choice. Does that mean we choose and then wait to see if God decides to grant us, or not grant us, what we chose? I don’t think so. What sort of choice is that? I believe God (or the universe, however you like to think of it) empowers and supports all our choices. The problem is that we make a lot of our choices automatically and unconsciously, based on old beliefs and assumptions we have forgotten and that are no longer serving us

So now, in the present moment, choose again.

Decide for yourself how long you are going to live. The worst that can happen is that you will be wrong and die before your time, big deal, at least you acted with spirit.

No matter how you were told, receiving the news, even if you already suspected it, is always a shock. We are all going to die. You know this. So why is it such a shock when you get reminded of the inevitable?

You sit there stunned and reeling, numbed by the news that your body is mortal. Then the thinking kicks in and you begin worrying about the future. Questions parade past your awareness: When will I die? How much will I suffer? Will I be a burden on my loved ones? How did this happen to me?

It’s as if you never thought you would ever die at all. All your plans and actions have been based on the belief of your continued existence. You know other people suffer and die but that’s not really the same is it? Other people have terminal diseases, but not you! It just doesn’t feel right. Surely it’s some kind of mistake!

There can be many different reactions to the initial terminal prognosis; we can take the news with resigned acceptance and dignity or with defiant refusal. Denial is to be expected and even relief is not out of the question. Anger, sadness and grief are all possible responses. Quite likely you will experience every possible response as time goes by, repeatedly. There is no right or wrong response to the news; there is just what you feel, but at some point you are going to have to accept your situation and begin to consider what you are going to do about it.

Examining your beliefs, about the prognosis, about the disease and about your ability to heal, would be a good place to start.

Chapter 2

Are Beliefs Important for Healing?

The beliefs you truly hold, the ones you’ve decided to believe, your faith, will cause you to create or attract the experiences which will verify them. Harry Palmer

Many people, including many doctors, will tell you that what you believe will not have any effect on the course of your illness or your likelihood of experiencing a cure. But that’s what they believe. What do you believe? What do you want to believe?

Let’s explore this a little more; what if they are right? Well, you can at least entertain the idea that your beliefs and attitudes will have an effect on your perceptions and experiences even if not your life expectancy. Consider how you felt when you were told that you had cancer or a terminal disease. What caused your response of worry and fear? All that happened was that someone you trusted gave you some information and you believed it to be true. Nothing changed about your condition or your symptoms but suddenly you felt the bottom fall out of your world. This is the power of belief. So changing your belief will, at the very least, change how you feel.

So given that your life expectancy is predicted to be severely reduced, how do you want to feel? For a few moments, focus you attention on the following beliefs:

My condition is incurable.

No one can help me.

It doesn’t matter what I do.

It won’t make a difference what I believe.

I am sick and am going to die.

How do you feel?

Now focus your attention on these beliefs:

I am loved and supported.

There are things I can do to facilitate healing.

What I believe makes a difference.

I have a medical condition but I can heal.

My body manifested this so my body can cure itself.

How do you feel?

Do you want to spend the rest of your days exhausted by fear and despair or inspired by hope and a strong intention to grow in health? Which attitude will be most likely to induce you to research alternative cures or find inspired health practitioners? Which attitude will make you more receptive to the effects of a good diet? Which attitude will boost your immune system? It’s beginning to look as though your beliefs might just have an effect on your chances of survival and quality of life after all.

Bernie Siegel. M.D believes in the power of belief in healing. In his book Love, Medicine and Miracles he writes:

‘To become exceptional in caring for the body, one must take stock of the beliefs one has about it, especially those so ingrained that they are normally unconscious. If a person can turn from predicting illness to anticipating recovery, the foundation of a cure is laid.’

Dr. Siegel goes on to illustrate the power of belief as exemplified by the story of Mr. Wright, a client of psychologist Bruno Klopfer in 1957.

Mr. Wright had far-advanced lymphosarcoma with tumours the size of oranges in his neck, groin, chest and armpits. He had already exhausted all known treatments and was expected to die of his disease. Mr. Wright had not given up hope though and when he heard of a new drug called Krebiozen he begged so hard to be included in the trial that he was given a shot of the new drug even though he didn’t qualify as a study subject. Dr. Klopfer expected Mr. Wright to be dead the following morning but was amazed to find him out of his bed and chatting happily. With continued treatments of Krebiozen Mr. Wright’s tumours melted away within a few days even though the other study subjects showed no such improvements. Mr. Wright was discharged within 10 days. Within months, however, conflicting reports began to appear in the media about the effectiveness of the drug and Mr. Wright relapsed to his original state and returned to hospital depressed and once more near death.

At this point Dr. Klopfer assured Mr. Wright that the bad press was due to the early shipments of the drug deteriorating during transit and promised to treat him with some fresh, extra potent Krebiozen. Mr. Wright’s attitude became once more positive and he responded to the drug again with amazing results, except the injections he received were actually only water. This could have possibly been a happy story except that it seems that Mr. Wright was never told that his miracle cure was really created by his belief in a non existent drug. Sadly after reading further reports on the worthlessness of Krebiozen, Mr Wright was re-admitted to the hospital in extremis, his faith was gone, his last hope vanished, and he succumbed in less than two days.

Deepak Chopra, medical doctor and author, tells a similar story in Quantum Healing. A patient who presented with chest pain. After x-ray and biopsy it was confirmed that the patient had a large tumour between his lungs diagnosed as oat-cell carcinoma, an extremely deadly, very fast growing malignancy. The patient refused treatment and went home but returned again, 8 years later, with a similar growth in his neck. His doctor was amazed to find him alive and with no trace of lung cancer. He considered that, normally, 99.99 percent of untreated patients would have died within six months. When asked what he had done about his previous cancer the patient replied that he had done nothing, just decided he was not going to let himself die from cancer and that he may also refuse treatment with this second cancer.

As a third example of the power of belief I would like to tell you about Lolette Kuby who healed herself of breast cancer. In 1982 Lolette elected to undergo breast enhancement surgery and asked her doctor to check out a lump on her breast, ‘while she was open’. The pathology lab later reported that the lump was tubular cancer of the breast and the doctor recommended immediate mastectomy. Shocked and reeling from the news, Lolette declined the appointment and went home to think about it. Over the next 6 days she spent her time in meditation and reading ‘new thought’ writings on Christian philosophy and self healing. On the fifth day after her diagnosis Lolette had a vision of Jesus who persuaded her to let go of her problems. She then had a vision of God a few days later. She writes:

‘For weeks after the revelation, I felt as though my body was surrounded by a silvery aura and that my face shone like Moses’ face when he descended from Mt. Sinai. When I looked in the mirror, I saw no aura, but I did see a countenance free from fear, one that, for the first time in my life, I truly liked. And I knew that I was healed.’

Lolette’s book; Faith and the Placebo Effect is a compelling argument for the power of belief in self-healing.

Whether or not you believe these examples are true is up to you. Whether you believe they are relevant to your situation is also up to you. Humans are blessed with the capacity to decide what they believe to be true and this capacity determines our reality. Personally, I think it’s worth considering that my beliefs about my condition make a difference and I am happy to believe that people can experience dramatic remissions through their faith or simply because they refuse to die. My diagnosis of having a terminal disease is all the incentive I need to believe that well-being and health can be created through belief (and actions taken in alignment with positive belief).

What do you believe about your illness?

Because we are complex creatures it’s quite likely that you will have lots of beliefs about your illness and about healing. Some of your beliefs could well contradict others. Some may be helpful for healing and some may be impeding. So sorting your beliefs out and having a good look at them could be very revealing.

On a piece of paper or in your journal, list all the beliefs that come to you when you are feeling down, when you feel hopeless and just want to give up. Include beliefs that you know are true, i.e. that you consider to be facts, and beliefs that you know aren’t true but you find yourself thinking them anyway. Include beliefs you are reluctant to express to others or wouldn’t want to admit even to yourself.

Example: This condition is incurable so there is no hope for me.

Now list the beliefs that come to you when you are feeling positive. Include things you know are true and things that you suspect are wishful thinking and perhaps a bit embarrassing.

Example: Others have cured themselves of this condition and so can I.

Now list the beliefs you would like to hold that would help you heal, even if you don’t currently think they are true.

Example: I can change my beliefs and actions to facilitate my cure.

If all this talk of beliefs is annoying you and you are reacting negatively to the suggestion that you are at fault for your illness; please don’t think that I am suggesting that you are totally responsible for the situation you are in.

Most situations are complex and have multiple causes. Some of those causes are things that we can do nothing about, for instance, we may be genetically predisposed to a medical condition or environmental factors may be involved, or we may have suffered an accident. However, if you just focus your attention on those causes that you can do nothing about then you experience the viewpoint of victim with the consequence that there is nothing you can do to improve your life, either qualitatively or quantitatively. If, however, you are prepared to look for causes that you can take some responsibility for, then you have room to move; you no longer have the viewpoint of victim. You can make decisions and take action to improve your existence. All it takes is a lot of self-honesty and the vulnerability to allow that you may have been an active participant in your illness: now you can be an active participant in your healing.

Many health practitioners and psychologists advise against blaming the victim or encouraging people to take responsibility for their diseases. They feel it just leads to feelings of guilt and opportunities for self-recriminations that are not therapeutically healthy. I disagree with this approach because it’s a soft option that avoids the power inherent in taking ownership. To say that you are not in any way responsible for your illness but that your positive attitude can have a positive influence is trying to only have one side of the coin. To discount that your negative attitude can negatively impact upon your health, by implication, discounts the value of your positive attitude.

It is true that beating yourself up and feeling guilty are not health promoting activities but this isn’t what I meant by taking responsibility. Taking responsibility is simply acknowledging that certain thoughts, attitudes and actions that you have held could have contributed to the creation of the illness. If your life pattern is to then descend into self-recrimination and guilt then this is something that also needs addressing, because that pattern in itself could be part of the problem.

A recently published study carried out by a team of psychologists at the University of Pennsylvania reported that having a positive attitude gave no clinical advantage to cancer sufferers in terms of life expectancy. This was a disappointing result for the researchers, who, like many others in the healing profession, believed that a positive attitude does promote survival.

Although initially discouraging, this finding does not surprise me; I know many cancer patients with a positive attitude and outlook but who are unwilling to inspect their beliefs or take any responsibility for their condition or their healing.

Sometimes positivity is a form of pretence and masks what one is really feeling. If a person’s body is wracked with disease and yet their countenance is sunny optimism then they are either a very enlightened being or they are pretending. When there is a misalignment between the body and the consciousness the resultant discord feels false. Conversely, a person who is feeling down and disheartened by the disease of their body actually has the appearance of being more real. Real positive thinking has to rest on a foundation of honesty: one has to acknowledge and own the beliefs and attitudes that could be contributing to the disease or hindering a speedy recovery and then create new, helpful beliefs.

Taking responsibility involves journeying below our habitual, surface states, of being and boldly going into the murky depths of our unconscious beliefs and attitudes and bringing them to light.

Most of what goes on in our minds and consciousness happens below our level of awareness, i.e. we are unconscious of it. When psychologists talk about the subconscious, it’s tempting to believe that it is a certain location or function within our mental landscape, when really it’s just a catch-all term to describe whatever goes on that we are unaware of or unconscious of. The purpose of practices such as meditation, yoga and Avatar etc is to develop the ability of awareness and thus bring into consciousness that which has previously been unconscious. Yogis can consciously regulate and change bodily functions which in untrained individuals are regulated unconsciously, such as blood pressure and temperature, as an act of will. Avatar and meditation practitioners can bring to awareness beliefs, attitudes and automatic responses that have previously been unconscious. The questions and exercises in this book are designed to bring to your awareness beliefs that could be misaligned with a healthy existence so that you can do something about them.

Taking responsibility takes courage and can feel very uncomfortable at times. Taking responsibility requires actions and admissions that are challenging, but it leads to personal power. The bigger sphere of responsibility you can honestly own and accept; the more influence you will have. Whatever you deny responsibility for remains beyond your ability to change or influence.

If you still feel that you want to deny all responsibility for your illness, I empathise with you. I do know it’s hard. However I won’t agree with you. There are plenty of people who will quickly agree that you are not responsible for, and are helpless in the face of your disease, but they are not doing you any favours. I would rather confirm that you are an amazingly powerful creative being able to overcome any obstacle and that you, or some aspect of your higher-self, created this experience and therefore you have the power to stop creating it.

From my own experience, I know that realising, feeling and owning negative beliefs and intentions can be difficult and challenging. When I was first diagnosed I was fortunate to receive lots of loving coaching from my Avatar friends when all I wanted to do was feel sorry for myself and descend into the viewpoint of victim. They helped me to have the courage to examine my own mental blueprint of consciousness. Nearly every day for the first month of my illness they helped me unravel the turmoil of my feelings and reactions and gain a broader viewpoint on what I was experiencing. Using a very simple exercise called ‘releasing fixed attention’ (from ReSurfacing by Harry palmer) I explored through all the resisted layers of feelings: grief, anger, sadness, self pity etc and gained a state of emotional stability and acceptance for my condition. When I became aware of negative belief patterns, they were usually accompanied by unpleasant feelings that I had been resisting for some time, and yes there was also some self-recrimination and tears also.

But once I felt through the feelings, they passed and the negative beliefs integrated, releasing their creative energies (my attention that was invested in believing the negative belief and also the attention that was invested in resisting the belief). Now my intention to live feels more real and is backed up with more of my will, rather than being self-sabotaged by denied doubts, anxious fears and the seductive thought that death could be a better option; a blessed relief from the struggles and disappointments of life. So even if I do die from this cancer, I have benefited from it already through the lessons it has brought me and the rest of my life will be lived with more love and less fear.

Changing beliefs can be as simple as making a decision. If you have a strong will or have spent time in meditation or other spiritual practices, so that you are not overly identified with your mind, then you may find it easy to simply choose to place your faith in a new belief. If, however, you are a confirmed thinker (like I was once) then you will probably find your mind demanding evidence or proof. In this case, consider your evidence for holding negative beliefs. Can you create some doubt about the veracity of the evidence? Can you find some evidence to support a new, more positive, belief? Do whatever it takes to change your mind.

As we go through this book I will show you ways to change your beliefs and present further evidence that will help you let go of the scientific paradigm that is no longer supporting you.

For a more comprehensive workout on beliefs; how they can influence your experience and how you can change your level of certainty in them, you can download the Belief Management mini course from the Avatar website, www.avatarepc.com or, better yet, get in touch with an Avatar master and schedule a free intro session.

Chapter 3

Placebo and Nocebo

The placebo effect is all in the mind. Lolette Kuby

A placebo is defined as an inert substance given to a patient, usually during drug trials, to compare its effects with those of a ‘real’ drug and sometimes for the psychological benefit gained by the patient through believing that he or she is receiving real treatment. The placebo effect is a term that describes the positive therapeutic effect that the placebo can engender in the patient. It’s an effect without a physical cause.

Placebos have been part of the healers’ medical kit ever since there were healers and many modern medical thinkers posit that the placebo was actually the only tool that produced any health benefits prior to the advent of medical science.

In recent times when doctors became more aligned with scientific practice yet still adopted a paternalistic view towards their patients, placebos, in the form of sugar pills, were regularly dispensed as cures and were known to be particularly effective for pain relief.

In the modern era of informed consent and malpractice suits, doctors are not so keen to deliberately misinform and deceive their patients, even for good therapeutic effect, and therefore the placebo is not so deliberately used as a therapy. However, there is no reason to assume that the placebo effect is not still an integral part of every healing interaction between every therapist and their patients, no matter what modality of healing they are employing.

Drugs are prescribed and taken with the expectation, of both the doctor and the patient, that they will produce a therapeutic effect, and if an effect is achieved, it is assumed by everyone involved that the drug was the causative agent when it could of just as easily have been the expectation itself (or a combination of the two). You can exchange the word ‘drug’ in the above statement for any mode of alternative treatment and it will be equally as valid e.g. homeopathic tincture, colour therapy session or magic potion etc. The positive expectation (ie belief) component of any cure is an immeasurable variable which can’t be quantified and studied by science and is often overlooked.

Many medical writers do acknowledge the placebo effect, and quantify it as being around 30% effective in producing cures and pain relief, others claim an effectiveness of up to 80%. Trials of new pharmaceutical drugs are tested against placebos to ensure that they have a therapeutic benefit above the power of belief and suggestion alone. Though the power of belief and suggestion, labelled as ‘the placebo effect’ is seldom studied in its own right. Cynics point out that drug companies, who make their profits through the development of drugs that they can protect with patents, have little incentive to study something that is freely available to all.

A recent study of the placebo effect that was awarded the 2008 Ig Nobel Prize for Medicine carried out by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology demonstrated that expensive fake medicine is more effective than inexpensive fake medicine. Participants in the study were given placebo pills (inactive sugar pills) and informed that they were trialling codeine based analgesics. Half of the participants were informed that the drug had a regular price of $2.50 per pill and half that the price had been discounted to $0.10 per pill. Results showed that in the regular-price group, 85.4% of the participants experienced a mean pain reduction after taking the pill, verses 61.0% in the low-price group. What could have been different between each group? Only the value they ascribed to the medicine and therefore a mental expectation of it’s effectiveness. These beliefs had a direct impact on their experience of relief from pain.

Placebo surgery has also been proven to be effective for individuals suffering from osteoarthritis of the knee. Researchers at the Houston VA Medical Centre and at Baylor College of Medicine came to this conclusion after comparing various knee treatments to placebo surgery on 180 patients with knee pain.

The patients were randomly divided into three groups. One group underwent debridement, in which the damaged or loose cartilage in the knee is surgically removed by an arthroscope; a pencil-thin tube that allows doctors to see inside the knee. The second group received arthoscopic lavage, which flushes out the bad cartilage from the healthier tissue. A third group underwent a placebo surgery. They were sedated by medication while surgeons simulated arthroscopic surgery on their knees by making small incisions on the leg, but not removing any tissue.

During a two-year follow-up, researchers found no differences among the three groups. All patients reported improvement in their symptoms of pain and ability to use their knees. Throughout the two years, patients were unaware whether they had received the ‘real’ or placebo surgery.

However, patients who received actual surgical treatments did not report less pain or better functioning of their knees compared to the placebo group. In fact, periodically during the follow-up, the placebo group reported a better outcome compared to the patients who underwent debridement.

The medical team who performed both the real and placebo surgeries in the study were initially very surprised with the results as they had not imagined that anything done in surgery would be beneficial from a placebo effect.

When asked why patients responded so strongly to the placebo surgery, they said the patients believed they had been helped, which seemed to make a difference in their perception (of the prognosis of their condition).

“This study has important policy implications,” said lead investigator Dr. Nelda P. Wray, “We have shown that the entire driving force behind this billion dollar industry is the placebo effect.”

Reports of this study in newspapers and online journals where invariably headed ‘Knee Surgery Proves No Better Than Placebo’ when they could have just as easily been headed ‘Placebo Knee Operation Proves More Effective Than Real Surgery’ or even ‘Power Of The Mind Proves More Effective Than Surgery!’

The writers of the newspaper and internet reports also concluded that the study indicated that osteoarthritis knee surgery was ineffective and unnecessary and that hospitals should stop performing the operation; placebo operations not being a practical or ethical alternative practice. This conclusion is of no benefit to patients who are suffering from the condition, unless some steps are made to help the patients create their own healing through the informed and practiced use of deliberate belief.

It is acknowledged that placebo is effective in pain relief. The study above indicates that the placebo initiated actual structural change and healing within the body. The placebo recipients experienced a long-term benefit from a painful and debilitation condition, just through believing that they had had surgery. Presumably healing had taken place within their knees that would otherwise not have happened. But is the placebo also effective in conditions that are perceived to be more serious or life threatening? Can the placebo effect cure cancer?

Consider that every new cancer drug that comes to market is extensively trailed against placebos to quantitatively prove that it is more effective than placebo alone. This is a very expensive and time consuming procedure which the drug companies are legally required to do.

To say that a drug is more affective than a placebo is to acknowledge that the placebo is effective to some extent. If placebos did not have a measurable effect at curing cancer (or, in fact, every ailment known to mankind) they would not be used as a yard-stick in every drug trial.

Drug companies know exactly how effective placebos are, but they routinely overlook and downplay the implications with the use of the label ‘placebo effect’. The very use of the label obscures what is actually happening; patients in drug trials spontaneously create cures for cancer because they believe that they have been given a cancer drug.

The Ig Nobel Prize winning study cited above shows that the placebo effect is proportional to the patient’s level of expectation of the effectiveness of the medicine. Given that volunteers in a trial know that they might be receiving an inert placebo and that even if they are receiving the real drug, it is experimental and unproven, then their level of expectation must be relatively low. The power of their belief is not fully engaged, yet still a measurable curative result is achieved.

Drug companies’ challenge is to come up with a chemical compound that is measurably more effective than the placebo and bring it to market in a rush of fanfare and expectation before its effectiveness fades away. Cancer drugs are known to lose effectiveness over time; some patients fail to respond, expectation drops, the medicine looses the glamour of a new wonder drug, doctors stop prescribing it and it spirals down as it looses the power of the placebo.

This suggests to me that the effectiveness of actual medicine is still mostly due to the placebo inherent in every medical interaction. The fact that a medicine is new, it’s hard to get and that it’s very expensive all add to the patient’s expectation of a cure.

People cure themselves through belief; the drugs and medical procedures are a focus for the belief and can be assistive in a chemical sense or can be destructive. Until we develop the ability and faith to create belief in our own healing powers we will continue to be reliant on the magic of pharmaceuticals and high-tech medical procedures to convince us that we can overcome our diseases.

Defenders of the allopathic biomedical model use the placebo effect to explain away other modalities of healing, particularly in the case of Homeopathy. This is a cruel irony as science has no explanation for the placebo effect in the first place so it’s hardly an explanation for any other healing phenomena.

That an inert substance given to a patient who believes it to be an appropriate and effective therapy will cause the patient to experience an improvement in their condition has no scientifically described mechanism. The cause and effect cannot be adequately linked, apart to say that, somehow, the patients’ belief in the efficacy of the medicine must have a positive effect on their healing or experience of pain and other negative symptoms. Interestingly, the power of the placebo is so strong that there are even cases of placebo side effects. A patient, for example, may receive a placebo as part of a clinical trial and consequently develop a rash.

Some medical doctors are beginning to study the placebo effect, and consequently the power of belief and suggestion, as a valid healing technique in its own right. If a patient can be fooled into creating self-healing through their belief in their doctor and his/her medications can they not be encouraged to recognise and employ the power of their belief directly?

Essentially, science has co-opted a non-scientific, naturally occurring phenomenon, i.e. humankinds’ ability to self-generate a healing through positive belief and expectation, and given it a veneer of scientific acceptance by labelling it as an effect.

The deceit involved in prescribing a placebo goes further than just denying a patient the truth about the identity of a pill; it denies the truth of the patients’ ability to heal themselves. If you can get well by taking a sugar pill then you don’t need any drugs, you also don’t need a sugar pill. What you need is faith in your ability to heal.

Lolette Kuby writes;

‘I believe that the medicine of the future will concentrate on triggering placebo effects. Encouraging patients to have faith in their ability to cure themselves will produce more cures than are dreamed of in our present medical philosophy.’

The Nocebo effect is related to the placebo in that it is the negative therapeutic outcome that a patient experiences through negative expectation of either a treatment or a medication. It is the voodoo hex and black magic curse of the witchdoctor as well as the list of possible side effects on your medicine bottle. It is the serious look on the faces of your friends and family and the statistical evidence of mortality rates. It is the dire advertisements urging you to buy life insurance and medical insurance. Anything that leads you to create a negative belief about your future health is a nocebo.

I recently had a personal experience of nocebo. When I first started taking chemotherapy I quickly became very nauseous and vomited repeatedly. I had been prescribed with anti-nausea drugs by my oncologist but didn’t take them until I was already sick and found them not very effective. The vomiting passed after the first day but the nausea stayed with me for the full 40 days of the course of the chemo even when my doctor tried me on a more powerful anti-nausea drug, Zofran. The course of chemo came to an end and my nausea gradually abated until I was feeling relatively normal, then came the time to take another 5 days of chemo, at twice the strength as previously. I had to go into town to collect the chemo from the chemist but I already had some Zofran so I thought to prepare my body by taking the anti-nausea drug before I get the chemo into my system. I took one Zofran pill and then set off to the chemist only to find that the order had been messed up and my chemo wasn’t going to be in until the next day. The trouble was, my nausea was already kicking in, when all I had taken was one anti-nausea pill! I realised that due to my previous experience of feeling sick while taking the drug, I had associated the anti-nausea pill with the feeling of nausea and my belief (association and expectation) caused my body to respond with the old feeling. My belief was stronger than the drug! This was a very helpful discovery to make and has helped me control my nausea without the drug as my treatment has progressed. It is very interesting when you notice that a drug can be a facilitator of ease or disease depending on your expectation.

Being told you have a terminal disease is, in effect, a nocebo, and it can have a deleterious affect on your health in addition to the condition you are already experiencing. Being given a negative prognosis not only defines the reality that you are sick in the present moment but that you will get sicker in the future.

Many people have died in very short-order after receiving a terminal diagnosis and it’s not unreasonable to assume that they were victims of the nocebo effect!

I was recently told the story of a lady who was given a two year life expectancy by her doctor and she went home and marked the date on her calendar; sure enough she died within a week of the projected date. I guess she saved herself from having to live with uncertainty but I wouldn’t recommend this degree of obedience to a doctors’ prediction.

My oncologist is obviously aware of the power of both the placebo and nocebo effects and tries conscientiously to say nothing that could be interpreted as negatively or over-positively predictive about my life expectancy. He has let the cat out of the bag once though when I told him that I was concerned about the long-term effects of having my brain irradiated. His somewhat incredulous reply gave me the impression that long term effects were the least of my worries and getting through the next two years was going to be a pretty good outcome for me!

If you have any negative expectations about your health or longevity, no matter how you came to have them, then you need to do something to reduce their power. Negative expectations lead to negative experiences just as positive expectations lead to cures. The first step is to recognise and own your negative expectations, and then you need to recognise that you decided to believe them in the first place. Even if you have a negative expectation because of a medical study, or because your doctor told you, or because of other factual evidence or experiences, you decided to believe the evidence and you are deciding to project that evidence into the future. Lastly you need to change your mind and believe something better. If you like evidence then look for new evidence that will help you create a positive expectation. If you can believe on faith then create faith. If you can imagine a better outcome then imagine a better outcome. Keep going until your expectations are positive and you can’t imagine why you would entertain anything different; then you will be empowering the placebo effect rather than the nocebo effect.

Rigorous drug trials are designed double-blind; this means that neither the patient nor the researcher will know who is receiving the placebo and who is receiving the drug. This is so that the experiment allows for, and reduces, researcher expectation and bias which are known to have an effect on outcome. If the researcher knows they are giving you a placebo then this might influence the result you experience, or the results they record. This raises the question as to how much other peoples’ beliefs can be a factor in your healing. Will your doctor’s expectation that you only have a few weeks to live have any effect out your survival even if their belief is unexpressed? Will the beliefs of your friends and family have any impact on your experience? Will the beliefs and expectations of fellow sufferers influence you?

The question that you need to consider in the light of the power of the placebo, and especially the nocebo, is ‘How susceptible am I to suggestion and the viewpoint of others?’ You can get a feel for how susceptible you are by considering the following questions:

Do I readily believe what I am told?

Do I want others to believe the same things I do?

Do I make up my own mind or let others make it up for me?

Am I placing my faith in the abilities of my doctor, medical institutions, or the power of medications over the healing ability of my body?

Can I create faith in the healing power of my body?

Can I use the power of the placebo deliberately?

If you think that you are susceptible to the beliefs of others, and we all are to some extent, then there are three possible strategies you can adopt:

You can try to control what others think. This is not a very satisfactory strategy as it’s a lot of hard work and people do resist being controlled, but if you can be persuasive and manipulative enough then you might get others to hold the beliefs that you think will be beneficial to you. Strangely enough, a lot of people adopt this strategy as a regular practice! Advertising, education, government legislation and propaganda are all attempts to control or influence what others think.

You can choose who you will let influence you. If your doctor has no belief in your survival then find another medical practitioner who honestly believes that you have a chance to live. If you are surrounded by people who are negative then associate with people who have faith; hang out with spiritual practitioners or people who have survived serious illness. Read survivor stories on the internet. Read positive books about healing. Immerse yourself in positive belief so that the evidence supports your certainty that you can heal. Meet people from the Unity Church. Talk to Avatar masters.

You can develop your willpower and your belief in your own authority. Ultimately, other people can only influence you if you let them. Make decisions, choose to believe in yourself, learn to meditate, practice yoga or do the Avatar course, whatever it takes.

It’s an interesting phenomenon of our society but we appear to be prepared to believe in, and ascribe power to, absolutely anything imaginable except our own creative power. The placebo and nocebo effects, which are involved in every healing instance, are testament to our awesome self-healing capacity that needs only to be believed in to become an experiential cure.

Questions to consider:

How am I being influenced by nocebos (negative beliefs and expectations)?

How can I avoid or mitigate these nocebo influences?

How can I deliberately benefit from the placebo effect?

How can I maximise my faith in my chosen treatment or therapist?

How can I improve my belief in my body’s ability to heal?

What actions can I take based on an expectation of improving health?

Questions for caregivers and supporters to consider:

Are my expectations of the patient’s health and future supporting their recovery?

Are my words and advice placebo or nocebo in effect?

How can I encourage realistic positive expectation?