The 5th-century Greek physician Hippocrates is known as the father of modern medicine. The reason he is remembered so prominently is that he was the first to reject the, at that point common belief, that supernatural phenomena were the cause of illness, instead focusing on the science of medicine, basing his practice on observation and study.
At least, that’s the way the modern medical establishment tells the story…
The truth, however, is something more complex. Consider one of the great doctor’s most renowned quotes:
“Everyone has a doctor in him or her; we just have to help it in its work. The natural healing force within each of us is the greatest force in getting well.”
What’ healing force’ was he talking about? The answer to this question challenges not only our remembrance of Hippocrates, but the very foundations of modern medicine.
The Curious Case of Mr. Wright
In 1957, a curious account appeared in the Journal of Prospective Techniques, telling of a mysterious medical patient known as Mr. Wright.
Mr. Wright was undergoing treatment for an advanced stage of cancer, and the treatment had failed. His neck, chest, armpits, and groin were filled with tumors the size of oranges; his lungs were filled with fluid which had to be drained every day in order for him to breathe. He was, according to his doctor, “febrile, gasping for air, completely bedridden.” He had been given only a few days to live.
It was at this point that Mr. Wright heard about a brand-new miracle drug called Krebiozen, which was in the process of clinical trials. Desperate, he begged his doctor to treat him with it. He was too sick, his doctor said, the clinical trials were for people with three months to live. But Mr. Wright would not relent until finally, his doctor injected him with the experimental drug.
A few days later, it appeared a miracle had taken place. When the doctor came to check on him, Mr. Wright was out of bed for the first time in months, walking around his hospital room. His tumors, in the words of his doctor, had “melted like snowballs on a hot stove.” Unbelievably, within ten days, Mr. Wright was totally cancer-free, so he left the hospital and went home.
Months later, a healthy Mr. Wright sat on his couch flipping through the latest medical journals when he came across something disturbing. Initial results for the clinical trials of Krebiozen were in, and the suggestion was the drug didn’t work. Having seen the drug as his savior, Mr. Wright fell into a deep depression, and almost immediately, his cancer returned.
He returned to his doctor, who could see the broken man Mr. Wright had become. The doctor wanted to help, to at least put Mr. Wright’s mind in a better place for what would surely be his last days on earth, so he concocted a story.
He told Mr. Wright that despite what the journals had said, he knew something they didn’t – that supplies of the drug deteriorated over time, which would have caused their apparent failure in the long-term trials. Better yet, the doctor said, he possessed a brand-new, ultra-pure batch of the drug, which he could inject Mr. Wright with if he wanted.
It was a lie; the doctor injected him with nothing more than distilled water.
Except, then, something the doctor was not expecting happened. Again, Mr. Wright’s cancer miraculously disappeared, and again he returned home a healthy man.
Unfortunately, the doctor’s cover was blown a few months later when the American Medical Association announced that a nationwide Krebiozen study had proven once and for all that the drug was useless.
Again, Mr. Wright fell into despondency, only this time, when the cancer returned, he died two days later.
What had happened here? Why had Mr. Wright twice been cured by something with no cancer-fighting properties, and why, each time he had lost belief, had the cancer returned? For an answer, we might begin in Boston, Massachusetts, and the office of one Henry Beecher.
The “Placebo Effect”
Henry Beecher was born in 1904 in tiny Peck, Kansas, a town of only a few hundred people nestled away in that great expanse of midwestern American prairie. The young Henry was something of a prodigy, and rural beginnings could not stop him from reaching the pinnacle of his chosen field.
In 1926, he received a degree in chemistry from the University of Kansas, before traveling across the country and attending Harvard Medical School in 1928. In 1936, he became the Chief of Anesthesia at Massachusetts General Hospital, despite having no formal education in the field, and in 1941, he was awarded the first endowed chair in anesthesia in the world at Harvard. From the backwaters of Kansas to the hallowed halls of the most prestigious institutions in the country, Henry Beecher had made it.
But then, World War II broke out, and Beecher left Harvard to do his duty, becoming a medic in the army. He was sent to Italy, where in makeshift field hospitals, he treated soldiers mauled and mangled from the battlefield, with missing limbs and burns, bones jutting out through their skin.
The carnage was so great that at one point, Beecher ran completely out of morphine. Rather than tell his patients he couldn’t help them, he began injecting injured soldiers with a saline solution, telling them it was morphine in an attempt to ease their minds. Almost immediately, Beecher began to note something unbelievable. Nearly half of the soldiers he was injecting with the powerless solution reported feeling less pain.
How was this possible?
The question stuck with Beecher for the duration of the war, and as soon as it ended, he returned to Massachusetts, to Harvard, and began research on the question. For almost a decade, he toiled, until, in 1955, he published what would become his seminal work, an article in The Journal of the American Medical Association entitled “The Powerful Placebo.” In the article, he recounted 15 trials he had conducted on different diseases. Astonishingly, Beecher reported that 35% of the patients he’d studied had been relieved by a placebo alone.
And thus, the term “placebo effect” was born.
While Beecher may have coined the term, he certainly didn’t make it up.
The Use of Placebo in Medicine
In the late-1700s, British Physician John Haygarth famously demonstrated the placebo effect, though he did not call it that, in an attempt to disprove one of the health remedies which was popular at the time, one in which an expensive metal rod, sold to the great profit of its creators, was used to allegedly draw disease from the body.
Haygarth used fake wooden rods made to look like their metal counterparts, and, much to his satisfaction, he found that four out of five patients treated with the fake rods reported that their pain improved.
But Haygarth was not exploring a foreign concept. Before the mass-production of medicine, it was a well-established practice amongst doctors who were constantly in short supply of drugs to prescribe pills or ointments which had nothing to do with the patient’s symptoms, or even inert substances like modern sugar pills. In fact, it was Thomas Jefferson who wrote in 1807,
“One of the most successful physicians I have ever known has assured me that he used more bread pills, drops of colored water, powders of hickory ashes than of all other medicines put together. It was certainly a pious fraud.”
But it was not until Henry Beecher published “The Powerful Placebo” that the placebo effect would become a fundamental medical concept, and the subject of countless scientific studies.
Since then, studies have shown placebos to reduce chronic and acute pain, to combat depression, even reduce the symptoms of debilitating diseases like Parkinson’s.
Why does this happen?
Here, one might think back to the way medicine was practiced amongst ancient cultures – with medicine men and women, elaborate rituals, throwing bones, and examining entrails, illness seen as the province of the supernatural. We look back now at these cultures derisively, their practices seen as primitive. Indeed, these are the practices the medical establishment tells us Hippocrates broke from in founding his modern, science-based medicine.
Yet, surely these ancient cultures did not want their people to be ill. Surely if these practices were not working, at least on some level, they would have tried something else. From this, it is fair to surmise that these practices must have worked, in one way or another.
But that’s just it. It might be asked what the difference is between being healed by a medicine man and healed by a sugar pill. Perhaps, in this way, modern knowledge about placebos can impact our understanding of ancient medical practices.
Or perhaps it is the other way around …
The Discovery of Cleve Backster
In the early-1940s, Grover Cleveland “Cleve” Backster, then barely 20 years old, joined the US Army with a specific goal in mind. He did not want to shoot anyone, nor did he want to be an officer; all he wanted to do was study interrogation techniques, specifically hypnosis.
Within only a few years of joining, Backster was teaching his superiors how to use to hypnosis, and how to prevent it being used on them, revealing things they’d never even thought of. It was at that point that Backster caught the eye of the CIA. At only 24, he began to work with them on high-level interrogation techniques.
There, he founded the agency’s first lie detector program, introducing polygraph methods that are still used today. In fact, he became so adept with a polygraph that by 1951, still not yet 30 years old, he had outgrown the CIA. He left the agency and founded his own polygraph company, where he acted as a private-sector consultant to nearly every government agency, appearing numerous times in court and before Congress.
And yet, all of this only served as a precursor to the moment which would change Backster’s life forever…
It was the early hours of the morning on February 2, 1966, and Backster had been up all night working on his latest polygraph innovation. He decided to take a break and lighten the mood by doing something silly, and so, he began to hook up a lie detector to a plant sitting on the desk in front of him which his secretary had bought some weeks earlier.
The way lie detectors work is by measuring pulse, respiration rate, and perspiration – a person’s levels will spike when they are under stress, such as when telling a lie. Backster realized he was going to have to find a way to induce a similar level of stress on the plant.
“I know what I’m gonna do” Backster thought to himself, “I’m gonna burn that leaf.”
Just as the thought crossed his mind, something shocking happened – the polygraph registered a noticeable spike. As Backster described,
“The thought entered my mind to burn the leaf. I didn’t verbalize the idea; I didn’t touch the plant; I didn’t touch the equipment. Yet the plant went wild. The pen jumped right off the top of the chart.”
Mind racing, Backster rushed into another room to grab a book of matches. When he returned, the plant’s readings were still spiking wildly. Backster had an idea. He returned the matches to the other room, and, sure enough, when he returned, the readings had calmed; the polygraph line was quiet.
“The only thing it could have been reacting to,” Backster concluded, “was the mental image.” It seemed that somehow the plant had been able to read his intent.
From that moment, Backster shifted all of his focus to examining this phenomenon. He performed test after test on numerous plants – lettuce, oranges, onions, and so on. The tests only confirmed what he’d theorized in the first place – the plants were reacting to the thoughts of those around them.
Backster published his findings in the Journal of Parapsychology in 1968, introducing in work a brand-new term – “primary perception.” This primary perception, according to Backster, referred to the “fundamental attunement between living things,” that living tissue, down to the level of individual cells, had the ability to sense events and emotions around it.
Unsurprisingly, his findings caused a stir, turning Backster into something of a pop-culture icon. He was interviewed by Johnny Carson and David Frost, Leonard Nimoy did a TV special about him, a best-selling book entitled “The Secret Life of Plants” was written about his work.
But Backster, far from relishing in the spotlight, had already moved on, expanding his theory to tests on chicken eggs, yogurt, and other biological forms. Each time, he found “primary perception”,
he knew what he had to do. He knew it was time to move on to human cells.
Our Cells are Listening
Accordingly, he set up studies in which he took white blood cells from a person’s mouth and hooked them up to a version of a polygraph. Amazingly, Backster found that the cells responded electrochemically to their donors’ emotional states. A Pearl Harbor veteran shown a documentary on Japanese air attacks, a mother receiving a distressed phone call from her daughter, a graduate student flipping through the pages of Playboy Magazine, each of these things caused a spike in the readings of the sampled cells.
It appeared, like with plants and other things, the cells could sense the events and emotions going on around them. The cells were, in effect, listening …
This concept was not the foundation of Bruce Lipton’s work.
Lipton was a professor at the University of Wisconsin’s School of Medicine, a cell biologist who had won awards in the 1970s for an experimental transplantation technique which would be employed as a novel form of genetic engineering. A such, Lipton was well-respected and comfortable.
But in 1982, Lipton had a research breakthrough so dramatic that it changed the direction of his career, and his life.
While conducting research on cells, Lipton came upon the groundbreaking discovery that the outer membrane of a cell was an organic homolog of a computer chip, that is, the equivalent of a brain which was communicating with the environment around it. In other words, cells really were listening, just as Backster had proposed. And if you still don’t believe in the power of our thoughts, you can read our article entitled: Experiments Proving Thoughts Can Change Reality – Mind over Matter.
Your Mind Can Influence Your Genes
Through the 80s and early-90s, Lipton conducted numerous experiments studying how this membrane interacted with the environment around it, and how this environment impacted the behavior and physiology of the cell. He described one of these experiments in detail:
“Stem-cells can become any tissue in the body and we all have millions of them, to replace damaged cells. I’d put one in a petri dish and it would divide every 10-12 hours. After a week I’d have 50,000, all genetically identical. I’d split those into three groups, change the environmental chemistry in each dish – a culture medium with nutrients, the equivalent of blood – and the different dishes would form muscle, bone, fat. So it couldn’t have been genes controlling the fate of those cells, they were all the same. The only difference was environment.”
In short, “the fate of the cell is controlled by the conditions of the environment.”
Lipton took this further. A cell’s natural environment is not a petri dish, but the human body. And the conditions of this environment, the neurochemicals and hormones and regulatory agents which make it up and shape it, are controlled by the brain, released based on thoughts and emotions.
So what did this mean? As Lipton explained,
“As far as we know, we did not pick the genes that we came with. If we do not like the characteristics we have, we cannot change the genes. That leaves us with an unfortunate conclusion: We are victims of our heredity. Meaning, if there is cancer running in your family, well, anticipate that their gene for cancer is going to affect you and you are going to have cancer or cardiovascular disease or diabetes or Alzheimer’s or whatever those so-called hereditary issues are. So, we are powerless in controlling our biology, because the genes control it by turning on and off, and we have no control over them.”
Except, by understanding that your genes are interacting with, and changing because of, the environment around them, and that this environment is controlled by your brain, something truly revolutionary is revealed:
“Becoming aware of the subconscious source of our behavior gives us an opportunity to change our lives by rewriting the programs of limitation or the things that interfere with us. If we change those programs, we are empowered; free to express the wishes and desires of the conscious mind. This is really what the whole new biology is all about. Take us away from, “You are a victim of life,” to introducing the fact that we are the creators of our life. Our consciousness is the source of the great potential of creating heaven on Earth.”
What Lipton was saying was that we possess the ability to turn our genes on and off, to actually change the composition of our bodies, with our minds.
Crucially, Bruce Lipton is not the only scientist who has shown this to be true.
Scientific Studies Proving Your Mind Can Heal Your Body
Return to the idea of placebos. Countless studies have shown that as a painkiller, placebos actually cause our bodies to produce the real endogenous molecules which reduce pain. In short, the mind causes the body to produce its own opioids.
Note a recent study which showed cancer patients involved in mindfulness meditations to have preserved telomere length. Telomeres are a stretch of DNA which caps chromosomes, a bit like the plastic cap on a shoelace. They quickly become deteriorated in people with cancer. Put simply, meditation can actually change your DNA.
Similarly, another study showed people who meditated showed reduced levels of pro-inflammatory genes, which are correlated with faster physical recovery from stressful situations. Again, the mind can actually change a person’s genes.
But in fact, it goes even further than that. In 2014, researchers constructed the first gene network which could actively be controlled by our thoughts. As the study’s head, Martin Fussenegger, described,
“For the first time, we have been able to tap into human brainwaves, transfer them wirelessly to a gene network and regulate the expression of a gene depending on the type of thought.”
Research on this project is ongoing to this day, but the goal is simple – the creation of an implantable device which could be used to target our thoughts in order to combat disease.
But more simply than this, what is clear is that time and time again, the science shows our cells are listening, and by using the mind to change what they hear, we can change what they do. Perhaps this is what Hippocrates meant when he said
“Everyone has a doctor in him or her; we just have to help it in its work. The natural healing force within each of us is the greatest force in getting well.”