Written by Lee Schneider
Bruce Lipton was telling me about Newtonian and quantum worldviews. Yeah, you can stop reading now. You have better things to do than know why self-help books won’t always help you or the real reason you think you need glasses. You can keep thinking of yourself as a victim of your hereditary fate and go get coffee. Really. See you here next week, but then you won’t know what the behavior of iron filings in a magnetic field has to do with anybody getting cancer.
Dr. Lipton is a biologist who got into quantum mechanics. That kind of thing is sometimes seen as a sign of instability, but I assure you that Dr. Lipton is quite lucid. Start with his take on Isaac Newton, who described gravity and the rules we use to understand the physical world. Newtonian thought holds that the material world is essentially everything there is. Nothing else matters. Now think about Charles Darwin and “survival of the fittest.” In Dr. Lipton’s view, put those two dominant thinkers together and we get a world where only physical stuff matters, and survival of the fittest means becoming the person who controls most of the physical world. But wait – life is also about the unseen, energy like electromagnetism and mental energy. “While you see and respond to the physical world, it’s the invisible world that is actually the shaper,” Dr. Lipton says. This is the quantum world.
Look at what happens when people read self-help books but never change. The reason, says Dr. Lipton, is because of the function of the conscious vs. the subconscious mind.
The conscious mind is associated with the authentic self and the spirit. The subconscious mind is about habituation. “You learn something and then it’s a habit so you don’t need to relearn it,” Dr. Lipton says. The conscious mind can read the book, take a test on the contents, and pass. But unless you change the habits of the subconscious mind, knowing the contents of the book won’t create change.
Scientists believe the habit-mind is running our everyday life, and according to Dr. Lipton, it is also determining our genetics. At Stanford University School of Medicine his research revealed how environment controlled the behavior and physiology of a cell, changing its genetic structure. That’s the reverse of the established view, which holds that our genetics are “locked” and unchanging. Put it another way, your dad wore glasses, your mom wore glasses, you will wear glasses. Genetics, right? Well, Dr. Lipton says genetics aren’t “fate” – they occur because your cells got the information that that’s the way life is: Everybody in our family wears glasses. If your cells received different information there’d be a different result.
This is getting kind of deep, so here’s a picture of how you can use a cat to prop up your iPad. 
Dr. Lipton wants us to know that we are not victims of our “hereditary fate” but can actually make lasting changes to cellular structure. That’s how our health is shaped by invisible forces.
Remember the high school experiment when you sprinkled iron filings on a piece of paper and put a magnet under the paper? Is the pattern you saw in the filings themselves or in the invisible magnetic field? What’s happening is a physical structure is reflecting an invisible force.
In pharmaceutical medicine, if cells get cancer we try to change their chemistry. But in Dr. Lipton’s view, optimum health means changing your belief system, not just adding chemicals to the body. Your cells, like iron filings, make physical changes when acted upon by unseen forces. Those forces can include environmental toxins, heredity, and consciousness. It means that the science of the physical world doesn’t tell the whole story. You have to consider the quantum world, where the universe starts looking less like a great machine and more like a great thought.
Dr. Lipton will be speaking at the Hay House “I Can Do it” Conference, which begins in San Diego on May 14th and goes on to other cities.
iPad photo courtesy Veronica Belmont via Creative Commons license.
500 Words on Thursday | Written by Lee Schneider
Is there any circumstance when animal experimentation or the use of animals in medical education would be warranted?
“No.”
That brief, to the point, and definitive answer came from John J. Pippin, MD, a cardiologist and senior medical and research advisor for the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM). I was doing a phone interview with him after attending “The Art of Compassion,” an event celebrating PCRM’s 25th anniversary. 
They gave an award to Marilu Henner, a vegan who’s been working to reform the Child Nutrition Act so kids at school can eat something other than chicken fingers. Good cause. But it was another issue – the use of animals in experimentation and education – that really got my attention. I figured that if a surgeon was going to cut me open, he or she better practice on a pig first, right? Actually, wrong. I thought if an experimental medication was to be proven safe and effective on people, it had better first be tested on animals, right? Also wrong.
Only three accredited medical schools in the whole country use animals to teach surgery. According to PCRM, the schools are Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, and the University of Tennessee College of Medicine, Chattanooga campus. Dr. Pippin told me there’s a good reason all the other 150-plus medical schools in the country don’t use animals in surgical education: There are better ways to teach surgery. Surgical simulators and supervised operating room experience work just fine. Harvard and Yale don’t see the need to use (or kill) animals, so why do those three schools still do it?
“They don’t want to use the new methods because they’re comfortable with the old methods. But we all have to change our beliefs when the science changes,” Dr. Pippin told me. A paper published by the New England Journal of Medicine backs him up, asserting that simulators are effective training devices for medical residents.
What about animals who give their lives to test new medication? Bad for the animals, but good thing for people, right? Actually, no.
“The history of cancer research has been a history of curing cancer in the mouse. We have cured mice of cancer for decades – and it simply didn’t work in humans.”
Dr. Richard Klausner, a former director of the National Cancer Institute
Dr. Pippin said that using animals to study human diseases is “an abject failure.” Look at the track record for pharmaceuticals. The former vice-president of genetics at GlaxoSmithKline has said, “The vast majority of drugs – more than 90 per cent – only work in 30 or 50 per cent of the people.”
If pharmaceuticals only work for half the population why do we still need to test them on animals? Bottom line: Money. “If funding is available to do research on animals, they do research on animals,” Dr. Pippin pointed out. The money is there. According to a Freedom of Information Act request initiated by The Chronicle of Higher Education, the National Institutes of Health reported that 42 percent of its research grants involved animals. The NIH budget is $30 billion – 42% of that, some $12 billion, is a lot of animal research funded by taxpayers like you and me. Can you get your tax check to the IRS out of the mailbox? Hmm, too late.
I’d like to know why those three medical schools still use animals for surgical training – so I’m going to ask them and tell you what they say.
Photo credit: Lee Schneider
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?
This week’s Newsweek cover article is a slap at Oprah Winfrey for crazy talk about complementary and integrative medicine. Oprah does cover some fringe stuff that is wacky and sometimes wrong. But I think she’s right to do it. Here’s why.
The history of medicine is smeared with snake oil. It was once believed that drinking oil – not olive oil, but the black stuff that comes out of the ground – had healthy properties. Even today, some swear that drinking apple cider vinegar helps digestion and whacks infections, but it may actually damage tooth enamel and sear the esophagus.
Newsweek slaps Oprah for going out on a slippery snake oil limb, promoting people like Suzanne Somers and her aggressive program of hormone replacement therapy. Somers, 62, takes 60 vitamins and supplements and also gives herself a shot of estrogen directly into her vagina. Newsweek portrays her as laughable, but I agree with Oprah – Somers might be a pioneer. Self-experimenters have often advanced science. 
At the age of 22, Sir Isaac Newton nearly blinded himself by staring at the sun in a mirror because he wanted to study the after-images it left on his retinas. 
Australian physician Barry James Marshall swallowed some foul-smelling bacterial crud to show that Helicobacter pylori caused ulcers. Sir Issac ended up with marks on his eyelids; but Marshall ended up with a 2005 Nobel Prize for linking the bacterial crud, H. pylori, to ulcers. I’m not saying Suzanne Somers is going to surprise us with a treatise on gravity, but she has courage.
“Everyone was against me, but I knew I was right.” — Barry James Marshall
The line between courage and dumbness, however, can be slim. Jenny McCarthy, another frequent Oprah guest, believes that her son Evan contracted autism because he received a measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccination. So far researchers haven’t found a link between vaccinations and autism. We do know, as Newsweek points out, that the vaccinations have saved the lives of thousands of children who otherwise might have died.
Facts like that don’t seem to change McCarthy’s belief. “My science is named Evan, and he’s at home. That’s my science.”
Speaking of belief, look at “The Secret.” Oprah led the charge for it, and it has some good stuff, reminding us that we are all fields of energy in a larger field of energy. But it also stated that all diseases can be cured by the power of thought alone. That’s going too far. Even super-Secret supporter Oprah had to caution a guest on her show who had breast cancer and who was thinking of forgoing surgery against the advice of her doctors. Said Oprah, “I don’t think that you should ignore all of the advantages of medical science, and try to, through your own mind now because you saw a Secret tape, heal yourself.”
Yet Oprah knows people can heal themselves with Qi Gong, meditation, yoga, acupuncture. She’s not afraid to promote this “new” medicine, a medicine that is actually old, embracing the best of East and West.
Newsweek is going backward, contributing to the backlash against new medicine. Oprah is going forward by supporting medical pioneers. While looking into the sun, drinking crud or shooting up in the vagina may not seem so brilliant, breakthroughs come from acts of courage or folly and sometimes both.
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.
