Heal yourself from the inside out
Our immune systems can no longer be taken for granted. In the face of environmental toxins, potential epidemics and superbugs, achieving optimum health has never been more crucial. Now more than ever, our well-being is at a dangerous crossroad.
But there is hope, and the answer lies within us. The Healing Self is the new breakthrough book on self-care by bestselling author, and leader in integrative medicine, Dr Deepak Chopra and pioneering Harvard neuroscientist Prof Rudolph E. Tanzi.
They offer the very latest discoveries for invigorating our immune systems. Combined with new facts about the gut microbiome and lifestyle changes, diet and stress reduction, this is a ground-breaking work to help us stay well for life.
Deepak Chopra, M.D., F.A.C.P., founder of the Chopra Foundation and cofounder of the Chopra Center for Wellbeing, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation. He is the author of a great many books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. Two of his books, Ageless Body, Timeless Mind (1993) and The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success (1995), have been recognized on The Books of the Century “Bestsellers List.” He serves as an Adjunct Professor at Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University; Adjunct Professor at Columbia Business School, Columbia University; Assistant Clinical Professor in the Family and Preventive Medicine Department at the University of California, San Diego; on the Health Sciences faculty at Walt Disney Imagineering; and as Senior Scientist with the Gallup Organization. Time magazine has described Dr. Chopra as “one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century” and credits him as “the poet-prophet of alternative medicine.” The WorldPost and The Huffington Post global Internet survey ranked Dr. Chopra #40 of the most influential thinkers in the world and “#1 in medicine.”
Rudolph E. Tanzi, Ph.D., is a professor of neurology and holder of the Joseph P. and Rose F. Kennedy Endowed Chair in Neurology at Harvard University. He serves as the vice-chair of neurology and director of the Genetics and Aging Research Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Tanzi is a pioneer in studies aimed at identifying genes for neurological disease. He co-discovered all three genes that cause early onset familial Alzheimer’s disease (AD), including the first AD gene, and currently spearheads the Alzheimer’s Genome Project. He is also developing new therapies for treating and preventing AD based on his genetic discoveries. Dr. Tanzi was named to Time magazine’s “100 Most Influential People” for 2015 and to the list of Harvard “100 Most Influential Harvard Alumni.” He has also received the highly prestigious Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award for his pioneering studies of Alzheimer’s disease. He is the coauthor of Super Brain and Super Genes with Dr. Deepak Chopra, has professionally played keyboards with Joe Perry and Aerosmith, and is the host of Super Brain on public television.
Super Brain: Unleashing the explosive power of your mind to maximize health, happiness and spiritual well-being
Super Genes: The hidden key to total well-being
‘The Healing Self is a quantum leap forward in the integration of science, medicine, wisdom and health. As Deepak Chopra and Rudolph Tanzi powerfully show, our first line of healing lies inside us, and the choices we make today are crucial to lifelong wellness.’ Arianna Huffington, Founder and CEO of Thrive Global
‘The Healing Self, as revealed by Chopra and Tanzi, is a natural extension of the immunity and inflammation that can be managed by the concrete approach of these seasoned authors.’ Mehmet Oz, M.D. Professor of Surgery, NYP-Columbia University
‘Stress unequivocally affects the immune system and susceptibility to diseases. In The Healing Self, Chopra and Tanzi provide both a holistic and scientific perspective to understand this complex relationship and promote health.’ Eric J. Topol, M.D. Professor of Molecular Medicine, Scripps Research Institute and author of The Patient Will See You Now
‘Most chronic disorders begin years earlier than the first symptoms. The Healing Self is a great resource in showing readers how to use this knowledge for enhanced immunity, slowing the aging process, and going beyond conventional prevention.’ Dean Ornish, M.D. Founder & President, Preventive Medicine Research Institute Clinical Professor of Medicine, UCSF and author of The Spectrum
‘Deepak Chopra and Rudy Tanzi once again effectively harness their scientific training and passionate commitment to advancing well-being in this accessible, life-changing compendium of cutting-edge tools that will extend your health span and improve your sense of meaning, connection, and flourishing. As inspiring as it is informative, The Healing Self shows us how to use our minds to open our awareness and create daily routines to improve our physical and mental health.’ Daniel J. Siegel, M.D. Clinical Professor, UCLA School of Medicine and New York Times bestselling author of Mind: A Journey to the Heart of Being Human and Aware: The Science and Practice of Presence
To the healer in everyone
Any references to ‘writing in this book’ refer to the original printed version. Readers should write on a separate piece of paper in these instances.
At the end of July 2017, a startling medical story came across television and the Internet. It was a tip-of-the-iceberg story, although few people realized it at the time. There was too much background noise from the usual stream of health risks people were supposed to heed. Among the latest risks: Working more than fifty-five hours a week can be bad for your health. Pregnant women are at higher risk of not getting enough iodine.
These were not tip-of-the-iceberg stories—more like the drone of familiar advice that most people have learned to shrug off. But one item was different. Twenty-four experts on old-age dementia—the greatest health threat around the world—were asked to assess the overall chances for preventing every kind of dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease. Their conclusion, published in the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet: One-third of dementia cases can be prevented. There is currently no drug treatment to cure or prevent dementia, so this was startling news on the face of it.
What was the key to preventing dementia? Lifestyle changes, with a different focus at every stage of life. The experts singled out nine specific factors that accounted for around 35 percent of dementia cases: “To reduce the risk, factors that make a difference include getting an education (staying in school until over the age of fifteen); reducing high blood pressure, obesity, and diabetes; avoiding or treating hearing loss in mid-life; not smoking; getting physical exercise; and reducing depression and social isolation later in life.”
One item from the list was startling: staying in school until at least the age of fifteen. What in the world? A dreaded condition of old age could be reduced by doing something when you are a teenager? For that matter, it was also a little peculiar that addressing hearing loss in middle age was related to a lower risk of dementia. Something new was going on. If you looked close enough, this news story was signaling a trend in medicine that promises to be a major revolution.
Not just in dementia, but across the board researchers are drastically pushing back the timeline of disease and life-threatening disorders like hypertension, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and even mental disorders like depression and schizophrenia. When you catch a winter cold, you notice the symptoms and realize, with annoyance, that you were exposed to the cold virus a few days earlier. The incubation period was short and invisible; only the appearance of symptoms told the tale. But lifestyle disorders aren’t like that. Their incubation period is invisible but very long—years and decades. This simple fact has become more and more critical in medical thinking. Now it looms larger perhaps than any other factor in who gets sick and who stays well.
Instead of focusing on lifestyle disorders when symptoms appear, or advising prevention when high risk has developed, doctors are probing into normal, healthy life twenty to thirty years earlier. A new vision of disease has been emerging, telling us some very good news. If you practice lifelong wellness, beginning as early as childhood, the many threats that attack us from middle age onward can be defeated—the secret is to act before any sign of threat appears.
This is known as “incremental medicine”—the iceberg of which a single story about dementia is the tip. Take the seemingly strange finding about education. Experts estimate that dementia could be reduced by 8 percent globally if kids stayed in school until they were fifteen, one of the biggest single reductions on the list. The reason why traces a long trail. The more educated you are, the more information your brain stores and the better it accesses what you’ve learned. This buildup of information, starting in childhood, leads to something neuroscientists have identified as “cognitive reserve,” a boost to the brain in terms of added connections and pathways between neurons. When you have this boost, the memory loss associated with Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia is countered, because the brain has extra paths to follow if some grow weak or diseased. (We discuss this in more detail in our section on Alzheimer’s at the end of the book.)
As medical logic goes, long trails are changing everyone’s thinking, because they exist in many if not most diseases. Suddenly it’s not about isolated factors like not smoking, losing weight, going to the gym, and worrying about stress. It’s about a continuous style of living where self-care matters every day in every way. Not smoking, losing weight, and going to the gym still have their benefits. But lifelong wellness isn’t the same as lowering your risks for disorder A or B. Only a holistic approach will ultimately work. Wellness is no longer just a valid alternative to regular prevention. It’s the iceberg, the four-hundred-pound gorilla, and the elephant in the room rolled into one. Wellness is the great hope springing up all around us. When the public gains full knowledge of this fact, prevention will never be the same. But to grasp how radically things will change, we have to back away and examine the current situation in health care, where threat increasingly overwhelms hope.
Modern medicine makes so many headlines every day that they blur together, and it becomes nearly impossible to sort out what’s important here and now. It can seem like just being alive is a risk to your health. So let’s simplify things. The most urgent crisis facing human health today comes from something most people take for granted: their immunity. This is the crunch where health and disease clash. Immunity is medically defined as the defense your body mounts against invasive threats, medically known as pathogens. In common parlance these are vaguely lumped together as germs, the host of bacteria and viruses that exists for one purpose, not to make us sick but to promote their DNA. As a biosphere, the Earth is a vast arena in which DNA evolves, and although we feel special, even unique, as human beings, our DNA is only one gene pool among millions.
Immunity is what keeps our genes ahead of survival threats, and it has been brilliantly successful to date. Despite catastrophic events in the history of disease that swamped our DNA like a tsunami—smallpox in the ancient world, bubonic plague in the Middle Ages, AIDS in modern times, just to mention a few terrible examples—our immune system has never faced the level of threat it faces today. Smallpox, plague, and AIDS didn’t annihilate Homo sapiens as a species, nor has any other pathogen, because three factors saved us:
1. None of these diseases is so communicable that every person on Earth could catch it. Either the germ couldn’t survive in the open air or people lived far enough apart that the disease couldn’t survive while crossing the distance between them.
2. Our immune system is capable of improvising new kinds of genetic response very quickly, through a process known as hypermutation. This constitutes an immediate tactic for combating unknown pathogens the moment they enter the body.
3. The rise of modern medicine has come to the rescue with drug and surgical treatments when the body’s immune system can’t fight a disease on its own.
These three powerful agents are all necessary for you to stay healthy, but they may have reached a tipping point. The global competition among millions of strains of DNA has been heating up to alarming levels. Immunity can no longer be taken for granted no matter what part of the world you live in. Our overburdened defense system against disease is steadily crumbling. That’s because of a host of problems that actually go beyond the scary potential for a new epidemic, whether from the Zika virus or avian flu. Those threats grab the headlines, but with far less publicity the whole health-care situation is fraught on multiple fronts.
Why a Tipping Point Is Coming Closer
• Modern travel has drastically reduced the distance between all peoples, making it much easier and faster for new pathogens to spread and find new hosts.
• Viruses and bacteria mutate faster than ever because new human hosts keep multiplying at unheard-of rates of population growth.
• New drugs cannot be developed as fast as potentially hazardous strains of DNA that mutate at the microscopic level of bacteria and viruses.
• While the threat keeps mounting, medical systems are burdened by inertia, income inequality, frightening expense, and massive scientific complexity.
• Prevention has existed for fifty years but has failed to eradicate persistent heart disease, hypertension (high blood pressure), type 2 diabetes, widespread depression and anxiety, and the latest epidemic, obesity.
• An aging population faces a higher incidence of cancer and the threat of dementia, chiefly through Alzheimer’s disease.
• Older people have higher expectations, wanting to be healthy and active well past sixty-five or even eighty-five.
• Turning into a drug-dependent culture has caused a host of problems, including opiate addiction, and even when drastic problems are sidestepped, it’s estimated that the average seventy-year-old takes seven prescription drugs.
• New strains of “superbugs” like MRSA are staying ahead of antibiotics and antivirus medications.
This list is too long and alarming to ignore. Your health is intertwined with every factor on it, and as serious as it would be if the world went past a tipping point, the immediate issue is keeping yourself from going past it.
The secret is to expand the definition of immunity and then to use a rich array of choices with one aim, to supercharge your immunity. According to the standard understanding, your immunity gets stronger basically when you develop a new antibody against this winter’s flu virus, for example, but not when you eat an anti-inflammatory diet. Yet it is now recognized that low-grade chronic inflammation, a condition with almost no overt signs you would generally be able to detect, is linked to more and more disorders, including heart disease and cancer. In an expanded definition, fighting inflammation would be absolutely critical to total immunity.
Total immunity is the measure of holistic health. A crucial aspect was covered in our book Super Genes, where we introduced the concept of DNA as something dynamic, ever changing, and totally responsive to a person’s lifetime of experience. If DNA were frozen, locked up, and unchanging, then supercharging your immunity would be wishful thinking. Such a viewpoint held sway, however, for decades. A new era began as soon as DNA was freed up through a model that showed how totally our gene activity is affected by the world around us. The competition among global strains of DNA suddenly became much more urgent.
We felt that total immunity demanded more. What about the mind and its effect on health? What about behavior, habits, and the contribution of the family? Why should germs be given more importance than other common causes of disease, for example cancer, which is almost always unrelated to invading micro-organisms? To encompass everything, it was necessary to abolish the boundary between mind and body. A leap of imagination was called for. Therefore, we’re introducing a new term, the healing self, that satisfies the real meaning of wholeness. Two roles that are involved every day in keeping us healthy have long been kept separate. The first role is the healer; the second is the one being healed. These two roles are currently played by an outside healer and the patient who depends on him or her. The outside healer doesn’t necessarily mean an MD. The important word here is outside, which puts the burden of care on someone besides you.
The traditional separation of roles isn’t realistic as far as your body is concerned. Immunity is centered on the self. A doctor’s role isn’t to boost your immune response from day to day. Medical care becomes active, for the most part, only when symptoms appear, and by then the immune response has broken down. In the broader picture, the entire healing response has broken down, of which immunity is the centerpiece. There has always been a mismatch between what medicine can do and what the body needs if it wants to protect itself in the global competition of DNA.
The doctor-patient partnership isn’t designed for meeting the competition and winning. But the healing self, by merging healer and healed, can surmount the looming threat. (Important note: We certainly aren’t advising you to ignore or avoid a physician’s care when it is needed.) If you become proactive about your own immunity, the whole situation changes. Looking back at the list of threats we began with, some urgently needed improvements can occur once you learn what it means to adopt the healing self.
Benefits of the Healing Self
• It is noninvasive and involves no reliance on external therapies.
• It maintains natural balance and boosts your immune system through lifestyle choices.
• Lifestyle choices can prevent many forms of cancer and hold promise for preventing Alzheimer’s disease and even reversing symptoms of dementia.
• Successful aging will consist of a long healthspan as well as a long lifespan.
• Drug dependency is staved off because healing occurs before the stage of symptoms begins. The vast majority of drugs are prescribed late in the disease process, a stage you don’t have to reach if you act early enough. This is true for almost every lifestyle disorder, including heart disease and cancer, disorders that create the strongest need for drug treatments.
These are practical outcomes from adopting the dual role—healer and healed—of the healing self. What makes it all possible is raising your awareness. What you aren’t aware of you can’t change. The biggest thing most people aren’t aware of is the very possibility of self-healing. Let’s see how this applies to immunity.
All living things need to repel outside threats to their DNA. Modern medicine recognizes two types of immunity, passive and active. As the term implies, passive immunity is beyond your control, being genetically based. You inherited your mother’s antibodies in the womb, and after you were born other antibodies were transferred in her breast milk. (There are also medical means to pass on antibodies from another person through blood and plasma infusions or even the transfer of another person’s T-cells, but these methods are rarely used and carry high risks.)
The other kind of immunity, active immunity, fights disease organisms (pathogens) directly on the front lines. All living creatures above a certain level have innate, or inborn, immune defenses, including plants, fungi, and multicelled animals. The innate immune system is very general. It can detect that a pathogen is invading the host and then release chemicals to fight back. But active immunity in higher animals, including humans, has evolved far beyond this stage. We have specific immune cells (for example, T-cells and B-cells) that have evolved to a nearly miraculous capacity for responding to invaders.
Myriad times a day the immune response identifies one kind of germ from thousands of possibilities and rushes into action to chemically disable the invader. Specific white cells engulf its remains, and these are quickly flushed out of your body. On the other hand, you can’t help but notice when this precise sequence of events makes mistakes. The result is an allergy, which is the result of mistaking a harmless substance (pollen, cat dander, gluten, etc.) for an enemy, giving rise to a full-blown chemical reaction that is often harmful. This immune response can often be due to bacteria that ride along with the substance into the body. Even pollen has a microbiome! In other cases, the immune system may be activated to attack specific proteins in the body, causing an autoimmune disorder like rheumatoid arthritis or lupus.
Staying alive depends on minimizing such errors. Therefore, every disease your ancestors successfully fought off is stored as the antibodies you inherited, and when you ward off a new illness, like a new strain of flu, you add to this vast memory bank. Although the function of active immunity was discovered as far back as 1921 by the English immunologist Alexander Glenny, its precise mechanisms waited for decades to be understood. The picture is incredibly complex, biologically speaking, yet at least one external method for boosting active immunity is more than two centuries old: vaccination.
As we all learned in school, in the late 1700s the rural English physician Edward Jenner developed the first vaccine—and became known as “the father of immunology”—after he observed that milkmaids generally were immune to smallpox, a disease that had reached epidemic proportions. In France the philosopher Voltaire estimated that 60 percent of the populace contracted smallpox and 20 percent died of it. Jenner’s insight was to take pus from a milkmaid who had contracted a much milder disease, cowpox, and inject it into his patients to transmit the same immunity that the milkmaid had.
Despite the current controversy surrounding vaccinations in some quarters, what Jenner established was proof that active immunity can be boosted. One does not have to wait until the course of evolution, which occurs over tens or hundreds of thousands of years, brings an improvement. The standard recommendations about diet, exercise, good sleep, and maintaining a good weight all benefit a person’s immune status. These standard recommendations appear on Harvard Medical School’s health website (www.health.harvard.edu), with two additions for avoiding infection: remembering to wash your hands frequently and cooking meats thoroughly.
Yet on the question of boosting the immune response itself, the Harvard website is skeptical:
Many products on store shelves claim to boost or support immunity. But the concept of boosting immunity actually makes little sense scientifically. In fact, boosting the number of cells in your body—immune cells or others—is not necessarily a good thing. For example, athletes who engage in “blood doping”—pumping blood into their systems to boost their number of blood cells and enhance their performance—run the risk of strokes.
The Harvard Health Publishing website goes on to say: “But that doesn’t mean the effects of lifestyle on the immune system aren’t intriguing and shouldn’t be studied. Researchers are exploring the effects of diet, exercise, age, psychological stress, and other factors on the immune system response, both in animals and in humans. In the meantime, general healthy-living strategies are a good way to start giving your immune system the upper hand.”
The main reason for this skeptical attitude is that there are so many kinds of cells in the immune system that perform so many functions. But on the contrary side is powerful evidence from the mind-body connection. A variety of psychological states from grief to depression lower people’s immunity, making them more susceptible to getting sick. This deterioration in immunity can’t be seen under a microscope; it doesn’t show up as physical changes in specific cells. There are not many studies that directly connect stress, for example, to physical changes in the immune system, yet the connection between high stress and getting sick has been well documented and is doubted by no one. If we expand our definition of immunity to everything that keeps us healthy, there is even more evidence about how lifestyle disorders like hypertension and heart disease become a greater threat when someone is poor, depressed, lonely, or living without social support.
These findings all point in the same direction. Immunity can be transformed into total immunity, but not by restricting our focus to the immune system, which includes only the physical side. The mind must be given equal importance, which is why self is the key word in the healing self.
Self sounds like something psychological, an invisible entity that you possess but that is unrelated to your body. If you develop an ovarian cyst or high blood pressure, those are problems rooted physically in the body, not the self. But is this really so? How you see yourself today makes a huge difference in what your body will be like tomorrow. Imagine that two strangers knock on your door. Both have surprising propositions.
The first stranger says, “I’m an MD, and I do advanced research on aging. My life’s goal has been to find a pill that will alter the genes that cause aging. I think I’ve found a promising formula, and we need subjects to test it on.”
He holds up a bottle of tiny blue pills.
“The trials start today, and I’d like you to volunteer,” he says. “This is a blind trial. You’ll take these pills twice a day for six months. Half of the subjects will be getting a dummy pill, a placebo. But just think what this could mean, the reversal of aging. Why should we accept that growing old is inevitable when we can unlock the genetic key that will change everything?”
His excitement impresses you, but the second stranger is wearing a faint smile. You ask her if she’s part of the same drug trial.
“No, but I am here to show you how to reverse your age,” she says. “No drugs or placebos are involved. Your age will start to reverse in around five days. After a week you can expect a lot of other beneficial changes. My experiment is short, but effective.” She points to the first stranger. “His drug could have serious side effects. The FDA will have to approve his experimental drug if it shows results, and the approval process costs hundreds of millions of dollars and takes years to complete.” The faint smile returns to her lips. “Of course, the choice is yours.”
Which would you choose? Although we set up the situation as imaginary, in fact it’s very real. Drug companies are constantly testing anti-aging drugs, with the most recent trend involving altering your DNA. There could be breakthroughs that will make a huge difference in human aging, long considered “a one-way street to incapacitation,” to quote Professor Ellen Langer, a Harvard psychologist who has performed remarkable experiments of her own. Yet Langer could easily be the second stranger at your door. Professor Langer has a track record for reversing the signs of aging and extending longevity without drugs. In fact, she bypasses the body altogether and goes straight to the mind.
Langer’s most famous experiment worked as follows. In 1981 eight men in their seventies, who were in good health but showing signs of age, were bused to a former monastery in New Hampshire. When they entered, the men found themselves immersed in the past, specifically the year 1959, listening to the crooning of Perry Como. They dressed in clothes suitable to that year. They watched a black-and-white TV and read newspapers filled with stories about Castro’s takeover in Cuba and the hostile attitude of Nikita Khrushchev, premier of the Soviet Union. For a movie they watched Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder, which came out in 1959, and sports talk focused on bygone figures like Mickey Mantle and Floyd Patterson.
As a control, another group of eight men lived as they normally would but were told to reminisce about the past. The time-capsule environment group were told something very different—they were to act exactly as if it were 1959 and they were twenty years younger. By any reasonable medical standards, the results of the pretend time travel should have been nil. But Langer had done earlier studies at Yale with elderly residents of nursing homes. She discovered that signs of aging, particularly memory loss, could be reversed through the simplest positive reinforcement. Giving someone an incentive to remember, such as small rewards that depended on their test performance, brought back memory that everyone else had assumed was irreversible.
But even Langer didn’t expect the dramatic results of her total-immersion experiment. Before entering the time-capsule environment, the men were tested on various markers of aging, such as grip strength, dexterity, and how well they could hear and see. At the end of the five days, the group that was immersed in the world of their younger selves showed improved flexibility, dexterity, and posture. They also improved on seven out of eight measures, including better vision, a startling finding. They looked younger as assessed by outside judges. These results were significantly better than in the control group, who also showed improvements in the same physical and mental areas through reminiscing about the past—for example, 63 percent of subjects in the time-capsule group scored higher on an intelligence test as compared with 44 percent of the control group.
“What matters here is what actually happened,” Langer explains. “Men who changed their perspective changed their bodies.” Thirty-six years ago Professor Langer was proceeding more or less intuitively. In 2017 we have research that indicates how changing experiences can alter gene expression and train the brain to continue developing new pathways, as we do when we learn new things or change our perspective (more on those breakthroughs in later chapters).
(In 2010, BBC One produced a TV series called The Young Ones, in which six aging celebrities lived together in a setting straight out of 1975. As in Langer’s previous experiment nearly thirty years earlier, the participants seemed to get younger in front of our eyes. One celebrity who arrived barely able to bend over to put on his shoes found new suppleness on the dance floor. In general, everyone progressively began to look younger, from their posture to their facial expressions.)
The reversal of aging is very closely tied to healing, because both have long been considered totally physical and confined to bodily processes that proceed independent of the mind. Langer was among the first to explode these assumptions. It’s easy to get lost in the fascination and mystery of why pretending to live in the past should change a person so quickly. But the most important clue is that the changes were holistic. Doctors are trained to deal with the body one organ, tissue, or even cell at a time. There is no medical rationale for how so many functions can improve at once, especially through playacting. Langer’s results leave the placebo effect in the dust, because the placebo effect depends upon fooling a patient that he is taking a potent drug when all that is administered is a dummy pill.
In the time-travel experiment, no promises were made, no expectations raised. The only medicine involved was a new experience, and that was enough to confound all medical assumptions up to that time.
In one of her earlier experiments, Langer went into a retirement home and again divided her subjects into two groups. Both were given some houseplants for their room. One group was told that they were responsible for keeping the plants alive, and that they could make choices in their own daily schedule. The other group was told that the staff would tend the plants, and in addition they were given no choice in their fixed daily schedule. At the end of eighteen months, twice as many subjects in the first group were still alive compared with the second group.
The entire medical community should have had an “aha” experience when these experiments were performed. Decades later, using new experiences as a means of healing the aging and afflicted has become more feasible. Retirement home residents are given pets to take care of. Alzheimer’s patients have been shown to improve while listening to music. In fact, Rudy and his colleagues have produced an app called SPARK Memories Radio to provide music therapy to Alzheimer’s patients. A caregiver family member enters the birthdate of the patient and any information available about their tastes in music. The app then plays songs that were hits when the patient was between thirteen and twenty-five years old, since this is the music that people generally bond with emotionally for the rest of their lives.
E-mails from users poured into Rudy’s team, recounting how early-stage Alzheimer’s patients became calmer and less agitated, and how late-stage patients who were vegetative suddenly “woke up” again. One family told the story of their afflicted father, who was suffering in the late stages of the disease and had not spoken for months. After hearing five songs from his youth, he suddenly sat up in bed and started telling a story about a red pickup truck and his first girlfriend, providing perhaps too many details! The family was blushing with embarrassment, but they were thrilled to hear him speaking again, so happily and vibrantly. Similarly, one can find YouTube videos of Parkinson’s patients who can barely walk without the support of a nurse suddenly finding their balance and even beginning to dance when music is played. This is the healing power of music or, more precisely, the healing power of our responses to pleasurable memories.
In short, we are entering a golden age for health and healing, largely depending on how each person employs the most common and yet most powerful tools at everyone’s disposal: everyday experience, simple lifestyle choices, and techniques to increase awareness. The notion is actually ancient in origin. The medieval Indian philosopher and sage Adi Shankara declared that people grow old and die because they see other people grow old and die.
Thirty years ago, doctors were suspicious of the mind-body connection, which aroused skepticism because, unlike the heart or a flu virus, the mind is invisible and nonphysical. Today, thanks to decades of research into how the brain communicates with every cell in the body, trying to find a bodily process that isn’t influenced by the mind has become the real challenge. The brain, which was once the emperor of the mind, has been deposed. “Mind” is spread throughout your body. A heart or liver cell doesn’t think in words and sentences, but it sends and receives complex chemical messages all the time. The bloodstream, along with the central nervous system, is an information superhighway teeming with traffic as 50 trillion cells contribute to a united goal: remaining alive, healthy, and thriving. Below is how the pathways of the information superhighway actually look.
To any medical student today or decades ago, the organs in this illustration are the familiar stuff of medical knowledge. But in the future, the added text will become just as standard. An educated physician will need to know everything about the “signaling pathways” that lead from the brain and back again. These pathways are actually what holds your body together. Unless each cell is directed what to do, kept informed about 50 trillion other cells, and plays its part in the body’s holistic balance, there is no body, only a collection of detached independent cells, like the ones that make up a coral reef or a jellyfish.
Decades of research went into validating that the information superhighway is real, and even today more findings are proving how detrimental the separation of mind and body really is. In this book, we will drop the artificial division between body and mind. The proper term should be bodymind, for sound biological reasons. The same brain chemicals known as neurotransmitters—the essential molecules that enable your brain to function—are present everywhere, including your intestines. That discovery, made three decades ago, stunned medical science and helped fuel an intelligence explosion.
Original illustration source courtesy of Blake Gurfein. Illustration by Digital Mapping Specialists.
Suddenly the immune system, which is physically separate from the brain, was understood as part of a vast network of chemical messages throughout the body that rivals the messages sent by the brain—researchers began to refer to the immune system as a floating brain. It doesn’t matter today that the mind-body connection is invisible, because at the molecular level it isn’t. There are enough chemical clues to convince anyone that mood, beliefs, expectations, fears, memories, predispositions, habits, and old conditioning—all centered in the mind—are critical to a person’s health.
Which brings us to the crux of this book. Among the processes that can be influenced by a person’s awareness, healing is one of the most vital. Cells use their own form of chemical consciousness already. The immune response is awake and aware all the time, constantly monitoring itself, staying vigilant for any possible invader or other outside threat. The immune response is as self-sufficient as someone’s heartbeat or breathing. Yet immunity as a built-in response, which every medical student learns as basic knowledge, has a gaping flaw in it. To find the flaw, pause and simply take a deep breath. There’s the flaw, staring everyone in the face. Breathing is an automatic, involuntary function, but you can step in and make it voluntary anytime you want. The same ability extends almost everywhere. You can voluntarily induce the stress response by going to a horror movie. You can alter your metabolism by exercising or changing your diet. Get into a sexual situation and you bring big-time changes to all of the above, and more. The dividing line between what happens automatically and what happens voluntarily isn’t fixed. Choices matter, and thus the healing self comes into play. On its own the body knows how to survive; it’s up to us to teach it how to thrive.
Let’s get real about staying healthy. Everyone wants to stay healthy as long as possible, but we’re confused about how to do this. Conflicting information keeps appearing, backed up by studies that disagree as often as they agree. Eagerly followed fads come and go. Even very basic questions—Is milk good for adults? Do eggs increase cholesterol levels? How is obesity connected to type 2 diabetes? Why are allergies on the rise?—have been thrown into doubt.
We wind up taking the attitude that life is a gamble, and anyone who stays vital and vigorous for seventy or eighty years has been very lucky. The deeper reason we hold this attitude is that we feel the odds are stacked against us. Life isn’t an upward arc. After your prime years, getting sick is inevitable. Every adult is statistically at risk for heart disease and cancer, the two leading causes of death in this country. Most people’s greatest fear, Alzheimer’s disease, apparently strikes at random and is incurable.
The gambling model for staying healthy is taught in medical school, only in a more scientific way. Despite all the marvels of modern medicine, a great deal remains uncertain. A specific cause of disease like a cold virus only makes a certain percentage of people sick, not everyone. Standard treatments all involve some degree of unpredictability, working better for some patients than others, and sometimes not at all. Reducing risks is how prevention is defined. By eating right, exercising regularly, and avoiding toxins like alcohol and tobacco, a person isn’t actually attacking the cause of major disorders like diabetes, coronary artery disease, and cancer. Instead, the odds of getting sick are going up or down. The average person doesn’t realize that these risks apply to big groups as measured by statistics. They don’t predict what will happen to the individual. There will always be someone who does everything right but gets sick anyway, while someone else who has paid almost no attention to their health dodges the bullet.
Even if you’re blessed with good luck, the day will come when the best doctors in the world cannot help you. Through no fault of your own, there will be a breakdown in your health, and the casino will start to gain its advantage. Here’s why.
Seven Reasons Medical Care Stops Working
• The doctor doesn’t know what caused you to get sick.
• There’s no drug or surgery that will resolve the situation.
• The available treatments are too risky, toxic, expensive, or all three.
• The side effects of the treatment outweigh the benefits.
• Your condition is too far advanced to be reversed.
• You’re too old to treat safely or with much hope of recovery.
• Somewhere along the line, a doctor made a mistake.
When any of these breakdowns in medical care occur, whatever happens next is out of your control, and your doctor’s. After three centuries of scientific medicine making huge strides—a legacy the authors deeply respect—it’s becoming obvious that the gambling model for staying healthy needs to be replaced. Too many unacceptable things are happening:
• People are living longer and yet on average suffer eight to ten years of bad health and one to three years of disability at the end.
• Cancer is still approached with grim fatalism despite the fact that up to two-thirds of cancers are preventable.
• An estimated 400,000 people die every year due to medical mistakes.
• The average person feels helpless, confused, and anxious about getting sick and going to the doctor.
These unacceptable things arise when the gambling model takes hold and you throw the dice with your future. The most unacceptable thing of all is losing control. People dread the notion of falling into the hands of doctors and winding up in the hospital. But there is an alternative. The healing self is the choice maker who steps into the arena of everyday life and steers mind and body toward a lasting healing response. A paper cut goes away after a day or two; last winter’s cold is a distant memory. The healing self, on the other hand, is long range. You set out to become whole, which is the only viable strategy for remaining healthy over a lifetime.
It’s amazing how far the human body has evolved to make healing possible. You now have an opportunity to evolve consciously, making choices that will radically upgrade your immunity to disease, slow down and reverse the aging process, and boost the healing response. These goals aren’t achievable by gambling, but they can be achieved when you adopt a new model, the healing self.
In the new model, everything comes down to the process shown in the following diagram:
Disruption → Healing response → Outcome
Disruption = Any health threat: an invading virus or bacteria, a physical wound, a stressful event, distortions at the cellular or genetic level, mental distress, and the like
Healing response = A reaction to the disruption that restores balance in either mind or body
Outcome = A return to the normal, undisrupted state of balance
As you can see, the terminology is very general. Any experience can be a disruption, not necessarily a bacteria or virus. The memory of a past trauma can massively disrupt the body, as can losing your job or simply giving in to the impulse to have a double cheeseburger with fries. Likewise, the body’s response to a disruption involves the entire messaging system of the information superhighway. Whatever returns the body to a normal state of balance counts as healing.
This approach is gaining traction in contemporary medicine as the whole-system approach, about which we will have much to say. Whole system is simply another way to say bodymind. It looks beyond the artificial medical-school divisions into separate organs and the old skepticism about the mind-body connection. When a happy event occurs, such as falling in love, the whole system responds as messages course through the bloodstream, central nervous system, and immune system. When a tragic event occurs like losing a loved one, the response is just as holistic, but the combination of chemicals in the signaling process is very different. What you experience subjectively as love or grief must have a precise configuration in the bodymind. If that didn’t exist, you wouldn’t have the experience.
The whole-system approach isn’t just a bright shiny new model to replace the old ones—it comes closer to reality. Nature doesn’t recognize human-made categories. Body and mind are one domain, and every organ, tissue, and cell works toward the same goal: sustaining life. Yet the sober truth is that our bodies haven’t evolved fast enough to cope with the disruptions we’re forcing on them. The whole-system approach reveals holistic problems as well as holistic solutions. Consider the current epidemic of obesity facing all age levels in America. Just one factor—excessive sugar intake—is a major contributor to obesity, type 2 diabetes, and least suspected of all, heart disease. You can eat sugar today and notice no signs of these creeping disorders, but your pancreas knows that the demand for insulin is too high; your digestive system knows that too many useless calories are being converted to fat; your hypothalamus knows that the quick energy of a sugar high throws your metabolism out of balance.
Powerful as the innate healing response is, it depends on evolution before a major shift can occur, which is far too slow. The only viable strategy is to intervene with conscious choices that the bodymind can absorb and adapt to. A double cheeseburger with fries is known to cause inflammatory markers to appear in blood plasma (the straw-colored liquid that is left in your blood after the solid part, chiefly red blood corpuscles, is removed), along with floating particles of fat. This happens within a few minutes and lasts upward of six hours. During that time, your body is experiencing a disruption. In response, your liver will rev into gear to process the excessive load of fat, and your immune system will attempt to combat the surge of inflammation. The immediate outcome is likely to be very undramatic and seemingly innocuous. But the drip, drip, drip of such disruptions has long-range damaging effects.
If you live your life unconscious of what’s happening to the whole system, you are adhering to the gambling model of health. If you become aware of the downside of a double cheeseburger with fries, you might swear off such an indulgence, and your body will thank you for it. But temptation is constant and giving in takes only a minute, not simply with a cheeseburger but with all kinds of fatty, salty, overly sweet, processed, and junk food.
The only way to get real is to make a major shift into a healing lifestyle, one that isn’t chopped up into small temporary choices—even very healthy ones—but rises to the level where the whole system is cared for.