The Health and Wellness Show - 28 Aug 2015 - The Mind-Body Connection

The Western medical perspective on health views the individual as a series of independent, though interdependent systems. If something is wrong with the brain, modern doctors rarely look outside the brain for answers. But a growing number of researchers are looking at the human as a whole within an environment, inseparable from the physical, social, political and spiritual environment in which s/he lives.

What do emotions have to do with physical ailments? Can emotional turmoil manifest as visible symptoms? Do chronic diseases have specific personality types? All these questions and more will be explored in today's episode of SOTT Talk Radio's Health and Wellness Show. As always, Zoya will join us for her pet health segment.

Join us Fridays at 10 am EST, as we expose the lies and emphasize the truth in our modern world.

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/sottradionetwork/2015/08/28/the-health-and-wellness-show--28-aug-2015--the-mind-body-connection

Thanks everyone, that was a really informative show!

I was wondering when someone gets an opportunity if ya'll could post the links to the sites mentioned as well as the books as they sounded very interesting.

Not sure if all of those were mentioned in the show (i was away from the PC during certain moments), but those are all the links that were posted in the chat.

http://www.amazon.com/Better-Solving-Mystery-Chronic-Disease/dp/1250019400/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1440771669&sr=8-1&keywords=why+can%27t+i+get+better
https://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2015/08/17/psychiatry-erase-the-unique-individual/
http://www.sott.net/article/300101-Music-more-effective-than-drugs-in-relieving-pain-and-anxiety
http://www.sott.net/article/277046-When-the-Body-Says-No-Caring-for-ourselves-while-caring-for-others-Dr-Gabor-Mate
http://www.sott.net/article/247025-Dr-Gabor-Mate-When-the-Body-Says-No-Understanding-the-Stress-Disease-Connection
http://active-healing.blogspot.com/2011/02/specific-affirmations-from-louise-hay.html

Also, thank you for the show.

Thanks for the show people, keep up that will.

Glad everyone enjoyed the show :)

The "massive tome" I talked about that catalogues body parts and their ailments and ties them to emotional patterns (Louise Hay on steroids ) can be found here:
http://www.amazon.com/Messages-Body-Psychological-Meaning-Reference/dp/0977206904/

And I didn't mention it in the show, but an excellent background on homeopathy and its perspective on how they view the layers of the human organism is George Vithoulkas' "The Science of Homeopathy", here:
http://www.amazon.com/Science-Homeopathy-George-Vithoulkas/dp/0802151205/

truth seeker said:

Thanks everyone, that was a really informative show!

I was wondering when someone gets an opportunity if ya'll could post the links to the sites mentioned as well as the books as they sounded very interesting.

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Great to hear you enjoyed the show ;) The following books were mentioned:

You Can Heal Your Life- Louise Hay

Women Who Love Psychopaths: Inside the Relationships of inevitable Harm With Psychopaths, Sociopaths & Narcissists- M.A. Sandra L. Brown

How to Spot a Dangerous Man Before You Get Involved-M.A. Sandra L. Brown

Women Who Run with the Wolves- Clarissa Pinkola Estés

The Healing Power of Illness: Understanding What Your Symptoms Are Telling You- Thorwald Dethlefsen, Dr. Rudiger Dahlke, Rdiger Dahlke

I would add the work of John Sarno to the list on this topic. There have been a number of posts on his work previously.

Thor said:

<snip>

On a somewhat related note, John E. Sarno, M.D. has written a very interesting book called Healing Back Pain, that describes a method to treat many different chronic pain situations. In short the theory is that the subconscious will create a pain at one or more places in your body as a way to distract you from something that you (subconsciously) don't want to deal with. He calls the overall problem Tension Myositis Syndrome and the way it works is that the oxygen supply to muscles, nerves, or ligaments are decreased ever so slightly which results in cramping and resulting pain. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_E._Sarno:

"John E. Sarno (born 1923) is Professor of Clinical Rehabilitation Medicine, New York University School of Medicine, and attending physician at the Howard A. Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine, New York University Medical Center. He graduated from The Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1950. In 1965 he became the Director of the Outpatient Department at the Rusk Institute. He is also the originator of the diagnosis of the controversial psychosomatic condition, tension myositis syndrome (TMS), which has not received serious study from mainstream medicine....

...Sarno's most notable (and controversial) achievement is the development, diagnosis and treatment of TMS, which is not recognized by mainstream medical science. According to Sarno, TMS is a psychosomatic illness causing chronic back, neck, and limb pain which is not relieved by standard medical treatments. He includes other ailments, such as GI problems, dermatological disorders and repetitive-strain injuries as TMS related. Sarno states that he has successfully treated over ten thousand patients at the Rusk Institute by educating them on his beliefs of a psychological and emotional basis to their pain and symptoms.[1] Sarno's theory is, in part, that the pain or GI symptoms are an unconscious "distraction" to aid in the repression of deep unconscious emotional issues. Sarno believes that when patients think about what may be upsetting them in their unconscious they can defeat their minds strategy to repress these powerful emotions in this manner, the symptoms are seen for what they are and the symptoms then serve no purpose, and they go away. Supporters of Sarno's work hypothesize an inherent difficulty in performing the clinical trials needed to prove or disprove the diagnosis, since it is difficult to use clinical trials with psychosomatic illntesses.[2]"

A further discussion of TMS can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tension_myositis_syndrome

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After working with this method for 30+ years Sarno wrote a book called The Divided Mind (http://www.amazon.com/The-Divided-Mind-Epidemic-Disorders/dp/0061174300) that broadens the scope of the method so that it can be applied to other diseases and also goes into how the mind taps into the collective unconscious for what are socially accepted conditions that will enable you to remain in victim mode and not deal with your subconscious psychological issues. I found it very interesting and very relevant to this topic.

I think that this could potentially be linked to the discussion on parasites/critters in the "Autoimmune diseases caused by an infection" thread. My thinking is that we know that there's a two-way connection between the gut, the emotions and the mental activity. This is described by Gabor Mate and others. This can be seen in the Placebo effect where people's thoughts affecting their bodies with healing as a result. So just as the food we eat can affect our emotions and thoughts, the converse is also true; our thoughts can affect our emotions and possibly the environment in the gut and elsewhere in the body. I think this ties in nicely with the Cs comment that some people have more favorable conditions for critters than others.

Linking the Cs comment onthe critter environment with the work of John Sarno, I would hypothesise that working on the mind can change the physical environment of the critters. Possibly even to the extent of killing some or more of them off.

The reason that I strongly believe in the model put forward by John Sarno is that his method brought me back to a normally functioning life. I suffered from debilitating back pain for ten years. Morphine-type pain-killers would only take the top off the pain and I couldn't work for 5 years. It's a long story but in the end, the pain disappeared within half an hour after the decision to let it go was made. immediately prior to this, recovered from a long-term concussion. It had persisted for 18 month with no improvement during the last 12 months. I could read books for about 45 minutes, use a computer for 10-15 minutes, on good days I could ride a bicycle but on others the visual input would be too much, I could spend only 10 minutes with my niece and nephew as their shrill voices would be too much. To sum it up, life was pretty bad. I had seen a neurologist in Denmark who said that the best thing he could do for me was to help me through the public disability pension scheme so I could get some money to live for and that I had better get used to the fact that this was not going to change. The concussion cleared from one day to the next when I was finally able to let go. I can not say exactly how I did it but I think that one contributing factor was that I was very close to a psychological breakdown. I had been lying in bed staring at the ceiling for 23 out of the 24 hours of the day for an entire month and the condition just kept getting worse. This was in a small village in the jungle of Southern India. It got to the point where I could only speak for 2-3 minutes at a time before the symptoms set in with a vengeance and more or less all I could do was to lie curled up in fatal position. At one point it dawned on me that if Sarno's hypothesis was correct, then one part of me (the disciplined conscious side, that adhered to diet and exercise regimens) was warring another side of me (the unconscious that was creating a problem in the body to lead attention away from a psychological issue). As I had been suffering physically for ten years with my back and 1.5 years with the concussion this realisation almost made me loose it. I was weeping for several hours and after that something had changed and a couple of days later, I was able to let go.

In my experience, I had to be pushed pretty close to breaking to be able to let go. A couple of weeks after I had let go of the concussion I was able to also let go of the the back-pain described previously that had ailed me for so long. I have experienced a similar thing in a retreat where we were in silence for one month - at one point something snapped inside the mind. It actually felt like a claw letting go and an immense feeling of relief swept through me that lasted for several days. When this happened I was also close to breaking under the pressure of the retreat but it was like the will to not give up was stronger than the pressure and in the end the thought form that was crushing me let go. Since reading Castaneda I've thought of this as the Predator Mind losing one of its many talons. But there's quite a few to go...

As I can't say exactly what i did to let go this hypothesis is a bit hard to test and therefore validate or discard. However, maybe someone else on the Forum has similar experiences and we can come up with a way of incorporating mental work in the way we approach health.

FWIW.