Tag Archives: doctors

What Patients and Healthcare Providers Should Know About Placebo Effect

Posted on by

By Georgianna Donadio, MSc, DC, PhD

What Patients and Healthcare Providers Should Know About The Placebo Effect Given the way the health sciences have been taught in nursing and medical schools, it is perfectly understandable for physicians and nurses trained more than 25 years ago to think the placebo effect didn’t make sense and was perhaps a popular explanation for sudden healing – or a “spontaneous remission.” It is a leap for many to understand how a person think or believe something and that simple act of belief could heal them. That’s why the National Institute of Whole Health is using this article to explore what health coaches and nurses should know about our reality and the placebo effect of belief.

Researching Placebo Effect

Up until the last twenty or so years, research scientists did not have a grasp on how the brain and our emotions worked to create our reality. The subject of emotion has been and still is very much “uncharted waters” in behavioral science. However, what is well documented today is how the various brain waves function and portions of the brain control and stimulate thoughts, beliefs and feelings.

The “beta waves” are the brain waves that allow us to focus on the words in this blog and comprehend, in the moment, what is intellectually being communicated. These waves are produced in the frontal lobe, which is the seat of intellectual functioning. Thinking, analyzing, reasoning and so forth occur in this part of the brain.

The “alpha waves” which are the slower brain waves originate in the mid-brain and are the brain waves that allow us access to our unconscious thinking or what some refer to as the soul. All thought processes, be it from the beta wave or alpha wave region of the brain, are actually chemical reactions that produce specific proteins which communicate with our immune cell membranes and other cell membranes of our body.

Thoughts Are Powerful

The specific thoughts we think and the region of the brain they originate in have an identifiable chemistry that has been shown to create dramatic changes in our physical bodies. In Dr. Paul Pearsall’s groundbreaking book “The Hearts Code,” he tells many amazing mind/body stories.

One in particular is a striking example of how powerful thoughts and images are. This story is about a schizophrenic patient who demonstrated completely different disease states depending on the personality she was exhibiting. Ultra sounds, cat-scans, lab tests all confirmed that one of her personalities had a massive cancerous tumor and yet when she went into a different personality state all of her previous pathology disappeared as well.

Our brains are the ultimate manifestors of matter. The chair you are sitting on was a thought before if became that chair. Thoughts are “things” – and thoughts in action are what manifest reality. A previous blog discussed a woman who was cured of her stiffness after the sham surgery. Her mind manifested a different set of thoughts through her hope and expectations for the outcome of the surgery. Her brain waves and proteins created positive chemistry, which communicated with her immune system through its cell membranes. The results – she became healthier and could “stride across the room.”

The idea of mind over matter is a powerful one. This science, and our understanding of its amazing chemistry, is in its infancy stage. In the future we will take the possibility of healing ourselves with thought and imagery for granted just as we now do about people having an organ transplant – which was unheard of not that long ago.

In the meantime, we can all improve our health coaching and nursing success by encouraging our clients and patients to improve their “self-speak,” reinforcing their bodies and minds with positive words, thoughts and images.

 

You may also be interested in these articles:

Doctors Taking Control of Healthcare

Posted on by

Doctors Taking Back Control Of Healthcare

For those us of old enough to remember Marcus Welby, MD and Dr. Kildare, the beloved TV docs we grew up with, we also remember a time when physicians ran healthcare. They set policy, budgets, insurance coverage guidelines and pretty much, back then, “everything healthcare” was directed by the doctors.

The insurance carriers, growing tired of paying for unnecessary surgery, warned the physician groups who ran the show that if they did not clean up the medical abuses taking place, the insurance industry would take away their decision making by enforced second opinions and limit paying for procedures that were being unnecessarily performed. Back in the 1970’s, there were millions of hysterectomies. Of these, 66% were deemed “unnecessary” by what has become the Medical Review Board watchdog.

Now in the U.K., to quote an article from English.news.cn, “The new British coalition government revealed on Friday that it planned to put doctors in charge of funding for frontline services in England’s National Health Service (NHS), in a change hailed as the biggest in 60 years.”

This is big! If this were to be enacted in the U.S., we could see a return of physician driven healthcare that is provided, determined and distributed by the same medical type of physician groups that were unable to police themselves a mere 30 years after the establishment of the American Medical Association and the mainstreaming of the pharmaceutical industry.

Granted, we have in place excellent watchdogs peer review boards and medical review requirements, but this works because of the lack of conflict of interest with the way these structures have been put in place.

The healthcare reform bill has yet to flex its muscles and most of us feel pretty much in the dark about what we can expect. No surprise since an overwhelming majority of politicos who voted on the bill had little to no idea what the bill contained!

The issues we see with today’s healthcare delivery simply reinforce the Whole Health vision of taking control of your body, preventing disease with common sense health hygiene and limiting the use of acute care medicine we as Americans are blessed to have available to us. Every day the news contains articles identifying the long-term use of even over the counter medications and caution us to realize we cannot repeatedly put these chemicals into our bodies and not experience consequences.

Chronic disease, which is the bulk of what is treated in healthcare today, is preventable and cost effective. Let’s create our own healthcare reform with self-directed whole person care – that means taking care of ourselves with consideration to all 5 aspects of health. In advocating this type of care through patient education, we all move toward living well and living long.

For more whole health discussions, listen to Dr. Georgianna Donadio’s radio show Living Above The Drama.