500 Words on Thursday | Written by Lee Schneider
It might not make sense why it works. You don’t have to “believe” in it. But it works anyway. This is one of the great mysteries of medicine and probably of life. Oh, you want examples?
Acupuncture is an ancient Chinese medical practice. I’ve tried it. Friends have tried it. Many have had good results. But we don’t know why it works.
I have also been trying qi gong lately, another ancient Chinese practice that involves moving energy around by standing with your arms extended in front of your body or waving them around like a lunatic. This, too, seems to have healing effects. Don’t know why. We’re fighting off flu and colds around here. At the suggestion of my sister, a doctor, we tried something called Apitherapy Honey Elderberry Syrup. It’s basically raw honey, elderberry and some herbs like echinacea. It doesn’t make sense that it would work, but it works incredibly well. This grapey-tasting stuff that tastes agreeably like a liquid lollipop just knocks down a cold.
A friend of mine recently told me a story. He was an engineer for 10 years, and he did Kung Fu. One day he pushed too hard and tore something. He went to an acupuncturist who was Korean. There was a language barrier. My friend figured that the acupuncturist didn’t understand a word about his injury. The guy fixed it anyway.
My friend, being an engineer and used to scientific proofs, had an interesting problem. Acupuncture worked, but could not be explained. So he became a licensed acupuncturist himself, spending three thousand hours to get a masters degree in acupuncture and oriental medicine so he could practice in California.
My friend’s name is Eric Schmidt and he runs an acupuncture clinic here in Santa Monica. 
Being an amateur engineer myself I like to know why things work, so I asked him to explain acupuncture. He gave it a shot, starting by explaining about the fascia, a fibrous tissue that binds blood vessels, nerves, muscles and groups of muscles. ”These fascia work together and they communicate with each other,” Eric told me.
Fascia might be a physical expression of what the Chinese call meridians, often described as energy channels. They connect in ways you might not have considered, and they’re the reason an acupuncturist can treat frontal jaw pain by inserting a needle in the frontal part of your foot.
That’s a 6 on the scale of weird as far as I’m concerned. Shall we go to 8? When an acupuncturist inserts a needle an inch or so into the skin it touches deep nerve centers that connect to a part of the brain involved with activities not wholly under our conscious control, like digestion, respiration, and the sleep cycle. The body reacts powerfully when we stimulate these nerve centers associated with such deep regulatory processes.
“The body is launching a strong response to a trauma that’s never occurred,” Eric explained, and the curious thing is that response can be a healing force. In this way, the acupuncture needle is “tricking” the body into sending energy into a trouble zone. The body can’t tell the difference, or chooses not to perceive the difference, between real trauma and the minor trauma of an acupuncture needle.
If you’ve ever had a dream about falling and woke up breathing hard and in a cold sweat you’ve experienced how something that is “just in the mind” can be so real.
Maybe this is why there may never be a scientific response to the “reason” acupuncture works. Simply by becoming involved in it you are involved in your own healing. You’re not a passive patient, but instead a co-creator of your own wellness. Maybe we shouldn’t ask why it works, but instead, is it effective? For many problems treatable by acupuncture, the answer is a resounding “yes.” That makes the real question: Why don’t more mainstream doctors refer people to acupuncturists?
There’s a lot to be learned from something that we might not understand. But that would go to 10 on the weird scale.
Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema
If your ear gets clogged does it mean that you are trying to avoid hearing something that you don’t want to hear? If you have a cough that won’t quit, could it be that you are “barking” for the world to pay attention?
Everybody knows that illnesses come from “germs” that we “catch.” You fly on a plane with a hundred other people and breathe their exhaust. 
You hang around a kid with green stuff coming out of his nose and soon you have green stuff coming out of your nose. But then, strangely enough, one day you go for a run in the rain, jump on a plane and later stop to wipe a few runny noses of strangers in the airport and come through just fine. What’s going on? Why do illnesses show up at certain times and not at others?
Could be that your mind is playing a role in the illness drama.
The term psychosomatic was coined in 1860 to define a disorder having physical symptoms, but originating from mental or emotional causes. This sounds like the illness I used to stay home from school. The symptoms included sore throat, dizziness and dementia and the cause was usually an upcoming test.
Can the same be said of a “real” illness? Can you heal with a shift in attitude? Consider this: If you think the same thought again and again it becomes a feedback loop in your mind. What if that feedback loop was not limited to your mind? What if you are programming your body as well without realizing it?
Louise Hay, a writer and lecturer, believes we’re programming ourselves to be ill or well. We have a choice. She claims to have cured her own cervical cancer by using affirmations and concluded that the cause of the cancer was her unwillingness to let go of resentment over a tragic childhood.
Hang on, before I lose you here, we need to track back to where Hay originally got her ideas. She read metaphysical essays by 1920s-era authors like Frances Scovel Shinn, who said that positive thinking could change people’s outward world. She also read the founder of the Religious Science movement, Ernest Holmes, who taught that positive thinking could heal the body.
At the time of these writings doctors were still administering whiskey as a painkiller. Medicine has changed a lot since then. But people haven’t evolved much. (Whiskey still works as a painkiller.) It’s intriguing to consider what attitudes Hay says contribute to illness. A sampling:
- Abdominal cramps, she says, are about fear, and “stopping the process.”
- Knee troubles are expressions of pride and ego.
- Post-nasal drip represents “Inner crying. Childish tears. Victim.”
- Stiff neck is the expression of unbending bullheadedness.
She even says that you might catch poison ivy when feeling defenseless and open to attack. My personal “BS” meter hits the red zone on that one, but I have to admit that Hay is giving us a tool to take control of our own wellness. She and others like medical intuitive Dr. Mona Lisa do not offer cures, but they suggest that the ability to heal has a lot to do with the way your mind interacts with your body. Could it be that the metaphysical religious thinkers of the 1920s may have pointed to a healthier future for everyone?
Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema.
It can be a good thing to learn from the past. (“Must remember to look behind when backing up car.”) It can be a good thing to look around the room and mentally rewind everything you see to its source. (“Where did that bag of Tostitos come from and would I want to see how they were made?”) The past is embedded everywhere.
The novelist William Faulkner once said, “The past isn’t dead. It’s not even past.”
But what if the past wasn’t serving you – would you be able to unlearn it? Let’s see.
As part of pre-production for a documentary series we’re working on, I recently went to see a researcher named John D. Riley. At his Zero Point Research lab, I sat in front of a Lifestream Generator, a device pumping out millions of volts of DC electrical energy. 
If you’ve ever seen a Tesla coil, you’ll get an idea of what this is like. He told me that as the energy passed through me I’d experience where I was emotionally blocked. Well, I sure was feeling something around my neck and left shoulder – it jerked up and back, pulled by an unseen force. In that very second, an indelible image burst on the movie screen in my mind. I saw my 40-year-old father pulling my arm as I, at age 10, tried to run away. Was this some of my past somehow embedded in me, now released? Faulkner had it right. The past wasn’t even past. I was carrying some of it around in my shoulder.
Lots of people wanting to heal themselves are looking to reprogram the embedded past. 
Go to a yoga class and see if twisting your torso will release mental crud and create more space. Maybe a hypno-therapist can rewire your mind. Maybe an acupuncturist can get life force flowing in a more balanced pattern. Stored memory is powerful, whether it involves language, images, or even body postures. Manipulating it might be the key to healing on both the macro and micro levels… perhaps right down to the level of individual cells.
That’s the focus of some promising research at Children’s Hospital Boston that suggests we will be able to press reset on a cell’s developmental clock. If disease scarred your heart or damaged your nerves or knocked out your immune system, scientists could reboot. In successful experiments, they’ve already reverted ordinary skin cells to their embryonic state. Called induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells) these cells can become whatever kind of cell required – blood cells, brain cells, lung cells or heart cells. That means the body would have a chance to start over. The cell’s “memory” of being sick would be erased.
Emotionally positive memories play a role in healing, but even negative memories have their usefulness. If you happen to remember that snakes with a triangular head are poisonous, you might think to back away when you see one. Still, the prospect of rewinding time, being able to reprogram ourselves, or rebooting a sick cell makes me believe that we have a shot of taking charge of our past in order to shape the future.
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Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema.
Healing is hard to quantify. Does it mean, “My back has stopped hurting by a factor of 45 percent?” Does it mean, “I don’t wake up at night because of those nightmares of being chased by thousands of cats. I only wake up now because I dream of 50 cats?” Does it simply mean, “I feel better?”
Not all healing involves ripping off the band aid and seeing the healing with your own eyes. It can be invisible.
Some have experienced the invisible kind of healing using a technique called Reiki. Reiki involves moving the hands over the patient or lightly touching them. Afterward people have reported feeling balanced energetically or feeling more centered. But how does it work?
“Medicine doesn’t understand how Reiki works.” said Pamela Miles, founding director of the Institute for the Advancement of Complementary Therapies, when I recently interviewed her about Reiki. I’m working on a project about integrative and complementary therapies. As a science-oriented guy I’ve been curious about these therapies because often science can’t explain how they work but they seem to help people a lot. I’ve seen yoga reduce my stress levels. My mother stopped smoking after acupuncture treatments. There’s a mystery here and I want to know more about it.
“When I place hands on someone it’s like feeling an orchestra in my palms – I feel many different notes and qualities of vibration and it keeps changing,” says Miles.
What is science supposed to do with that? What is she transmitting through her hands? Life force energy? Mind energy? It might involve electromagnetic forces. Using a magnetometer to measure electromagnetism, some researchers claim to have seen the energy of Reiki moving from practitioner to patient. (Others say they have no idea what they’re measuring.) But even more interesting is the belief system involved for Reiki to work: you don’t need one. It works anyway, regardless of your belief system or even lack of one.
Scientists, being the take-measure types they are, have taken a shot at trying to understand the success of Reiki. One study suggested that Reiki can speed the healing of skin wounds. Another at Memorial Sloan Kettering Center in New York City looked at how Reiki and meditation might reduce anxiety, fatigue and pain in cancer patients. During the study, the intensity of those symptoms dropped by half. Results like that have encouraged mainstream health care providers to offer Reiki treatments as part of a hospital program. New York’s Memorial Sloan Kettering, Boston’s Dana Farber/Harvard Cancer Institute and Yale-New Haven Hospital are all in.
Nobody knows why, but Reiki seems to help the body engage in self healing. “With Reiki,” Miles says, “patients get a chance to participate actively in their health care and regain a sense of control.” They become partners in their own care, and that, most doctors would say, is a key reason why this form of invisible healing seems to be so effective. I wonder how science will develop the tools to measure something like that. For me, it’s a mystery worth investigating.
Stay curious and see you next Thursday.
