5 Stories That'll Make You Believe in the Power of Your Mind to Heal Your Body

We hear these stories all the time.  Stories of people who heal from cancer when all prognoses predicted they wouldn’t.  Or doctors who find that a patient didn’t actually receive proper treatment - but that the patient simply “believed” they were receiving some cancer-zapping treatment.  And then strangely, their cancer was indeed zapped. We wonder whether these people are anomalies.

What's truly going on?

There's some concrete science to back up the placebo effect.  And since the placebo effect has been observed and is so well-founded, it forms the basis of a belief that our minds can do incredibly great and weird things in healing our bodies.

This article will discuss some of those amazing stories of recovery that suggest that our minds are more powerful than we think. These are simply pieces to a bigger puzzle.

Some of these stories are taken from Dr. Lissa Rankin’s book, “Mind Over Medicine."  She's one of the leading voices in how our minds can do our bodies a great service in our health.

1.    A Tibetan Lama Heals Himself of Gangrene

This is the most recent story that demonstrates the healing power of a certain type of Buddhist meditation.  A man named Phakyab Rinpoche came to America in 2003 with pre-existing ailments: diabetes and Pott’s disease.

Things got worse when the wounds he'd incurred from beatings in a Chinese prison developed into gangrene in his right leg and foot. This man, however, was no ordinary Tibetan man.  He was a protégé of the Dalai Lama himself. So when he came down with this infection and doctors were telling him to amputate, he asked the Dalai Lama what he should do. 

The Dalai Lama suggested something unexpected, and perhaps controversial.  He told Rinpoche to look within himself for healing, to meditate, and then once healed, to teach the world how to do it as well.

I should add a disclaimer: Generally, advice to ignore doctors and pray or wish ailments away most often does not yield good results.

To quote the story:

“Rinpoche started a routine of Tsa Lung meditation, an ancient form of meditation practiced in the Tibetan culture. Rinpoche watched as his leg got worse, soon the ooze from his leg turned black, then after meditating for a few months Rinpoche says the discharge became cloudy. After 9 months the discharge began to run clear. Rinpoche says he took no medicine and his diet was an ordinary one. He would break for meals—when the lama he was living with came home from work, they would have dinner and enjoy conversation—but then he would return to meditating before getting a good night’s sleep at the end of the day. In the morning, he would awake and return to his routine.”

Today he is walking on his leg without problems and his complications from diabetes and tuberculosis are gone as well.  Scientists are currently investigating this man’s brain to observe precisely what happened so that repeat studies can be done.

To read more about him and his life, this article on Huffington Post elaborates.

2. Norman Cousins: The Man Who Laughed Himself to Health

This is a much older story.  It took place even before the scientific community knew of the great physiological benefits that laughter can have on our ability to heal.  A Dr. Fry claims, “In fact, between 100 and 200 laughs a day is equivalent to ten minutes of rowing or jogging.”  

Laughter increases our oxygen intake. This happens to help our immune systems. Laughter releases stress in a productive manner, which many doctors cite as being important for the body in order to initiate its healing mechanisms.  And laughter even creates an increase in activated T cells.

So when Norman Cousins was told in 1964 that he had a mere few months to live, due to a rare disease of the connective tissues, he got to work on laughing it up.  He did three things that were quite controversial back then:

1. He fired his doctors.  
2. He began injections of massive doses of vitamin C since it was thought that his condition was partially aggravated by depleted vitamin C.  
3. He holed himself up in a hotel room for months with a movie projector going through a pile of funny movies, laughing “until his stomach hurt." 

He proceeded to live out his life until he died finally in 1990.  It is true that this is anecdotal.  But this sort of thing also can’t be replicated in a clinical trial because of ethical restraints. Many believe that Norman’s laughter was a big factor in his increased survival rate.

3.  Healed by Dancing, Elvis and Finally Being True to Herself

Published by “Healing Cancer Naturally” in October of 2002, was this girl’s sweet story about her grandmother:

“Many years ago my grandmother on my father's side was in a similar position. Her cancer had spread everywhere and she was given only 3 to 6 months to live.

Knowing her end was near, she found the courage to stand up to my grandfather, who was a very controlling and stern man, and she refused to let him control her any longer. [My grandfather had prohibited music and dancing, and when she learned she was going to die, she defied him, saying that he couldn't tell a dying woman what to do.] They wanted to take off her leg to extend her life. She told them that if she only had less than a year to live, that she wanted her leg during that time, and she walked out of the doctor's office, went to Rich's and bought a record player and lots of Elvis Presley records and went home and danced and danced - something he had strictly forbidden. She went to the old folk’s home and played hymns for them on their old piano, another thing that had been forbidden. My grandmother loved Elvis so much.

Well, she just got better and better and better. She got well. Completely. It all went into remission. She outlived all my other grandparents. She lived for 20 more years, dying finally of a heart attack in the night. I remember once she took a Greyhound bus many miles to visit us to walk me to the record store, a long walk, and buy me an Elvis record. What a beautiful grandmother she was! She taught me about miracles by her own beautiful example.”

4. Injected with “HOPE” 

This  next story comes directly from Dr. Lissa Rankin’s book.  She says she came across many mind-boggling stories that affronted her skeptical, rigorously trained mind. After all, she'd been taught the medical narrative: all physical ailments have solely physical causes.

One story she encountered claimed that a research protocol for a chemotherapy drug called EPOH was getting some marginally positive results. But one oncologist decided to do something different and was seeing wildly successful outcomes and people wanted to know why.

Rumor had it that he switched around the name of the drug protocol when he discussed it with patients. Instead of injecting his patients with EPOH, he injected them with HOPE.

5. Fake Knee Surgery a Success

This story is also from Dr. Lissa Rankin’s book, and I find it quite compelling. She references an article that can be found in the New England Journal of Medicine that features Dr. Bruce Moseley, an orthopedic surgeon renowned for the surgeries he performed on people with debilitating knee pain.

He set out ironically, to prove the effectiveness of his surgery and to do so he set up a controlled study where patients in one group receiving his famous surgery. The other group of patients however underwent an elaborately crafted sham surgery.

The fake surgery patients were deceived and were told they’d get the real deal. They went through all the motions of sedating the patient. Once sedated, three incisions were made in the same location as in the real surgery, and the patient was shown a pre recorded tape of someone else’s surgery on the video monitor. Dr. Moseley even splashed water around to mimic the sound of the usual procedure.

Just as everyone expected; one-third of the patients who received the real surgery experienced resolution of their knee pain. This was a typical result.  But what they weren’t expecting was that those who received the sham surgery yielded the same result!

To read more about the science behind some of these stories, you can buy Dr. Lissa Rankin’s book and find excerpts on her site.