Heal Yourself

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?

Sex and the Lab

Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema.

Taking risks. Going on a hunch. These are not words I’d associate with university or corporate science. In those often male dominated labs everybody seems to be on tenure track or fretting about funding.

Change is coming … and it’s female. According the New York Times, women constitute about half of today’s medical students, 60 percent of the biology majors and 70 percent of the psychology Ph.Ds. Though women remain a minority in the physical sciences and engineering that doesn’t mean there are not female superstars in those fields.

Marissa Mayer, Google’s employee number 20, was the company’s first female engineer and its current VP of Search Products & User Experience. She seems to be doing ok, with a $5 million penthouse atop the Four Seasons in San Francisco. But she has taken some flak for being female, liking clothes, cupcakes and parties.

There’s lots of bias out there. It’s documented in blogs like Living the Scientific Life (Scientist, Interrupted): Women, Science and Writing. A scientist known as Dr. Isis writes another influential science blog and I emailed her to ask about all this. She directed me to some data about women in science: While more than 50% of chemistry bachelors degrees are awarded to women, less than 32% of Ph.D’s and 22% of assistant professorships are. Those careers hit the wall, some believe, because women are expected, pressured, conditioned or driven by biology to become mothers or pursue other non-career-advancing activities.

We know that men come from that planet over there and women come from the other one. The differences start early, with a shot of testosterone for male fetuses that helps them be competitive and assertive, and a shot of oxytocin for females that can help them read people’s emotions. Studies have shown that men are better at spatial relations – like assembling Ikea furniture. Women are better at communicating. They are more likely to trust their intuition.

Shall I argue that these differences carry into adult life and change the way males and females do science? Touchy subject.

Lawrence Summers, past president of Harvard and current head of the White House’s National Economic Council, got himself in hot water a while back for saying that innate differences between men and women may explain why lower proportions of women succeed in math and science careers. He set off a firestorm and later apologized – sort of.

Intuition is at the core of the risk-taking nature of science. Guys like to call intuition “a hunch.” Thomas Edison was famous for hunches. But those making a career of intuition – placing it center stage – are more likely to be women.

Dr. Mona Lisa Schultz has a doctorate in Behavioral Neuroscience from the Boston School of Medicine and is the author of “Awakening Intuition.” Dr. Candace Pert, formerly a section chief at the National Institutes of Health, is looking at the unconscious and its influence on illness, happiness and wellness.

DocuCinema is developing a series about integrative medicine. We’re finding that a majority of the scientists involved are female. Why? They seem more willing than male scientists to invite intuition into the lab. They are the risk takers, making them more likely to be discovery makers. I am going out on a limb with that – just a hunch.