Superhealing: Engaging Your Mind, Body, and Spirit to Create Optimal Health and Well-Being (ARC) Read Online Free PDF Page A

physician who
    is considered the father of medicine, observed that certain personality traits were more common in people with cancer. Identifying these traits led him to devise a course of treatment.15 As the first holistic physician, he considered health to be a state of internal and external harmony with the self and the environment. Many years ago, not long after my experience with Melissa, I was blessed to discover the con-

    Introduction
    7
    cept of holism that Hippocrates promoted, which has enabled me to
    provide my patients with better care. I was surprised to discover that its ancient roots extended around the globe and were present in many cultures.
    While mind-body techniques remained in use in the Far East, in
    places such as India and China, Western scientists threw the baby out with the bathwater a little more than 200 years ago. An unfounded
    belief in the separation of mind, body, and spirit became dominant in our culture because of a political desire for separation of church and state. The body was given to the scientists, the mind and soul to the priests.
    The split happened in the mid-seventeenth century, when René
    Descartes—a lawyer, philosopher, mathematician, and scientist—
    proposed a theory of the innate distinction between mind and body
    that prompted a disregard of the more organic and holistic approach-es of that time. It wasn’t a purely scientific notion, but one that was created in response to an agreement that he had to make with the
    pope to get access to the bodies he needed to study by dissection. 16
    Descartes basical y, and perhaps understandably, cut a deal with
    the Catholic Church that would allow him to continue with his studies and research. He publicly agreed that the body was separate from the mind and the soul. Those realms of our experience were relegat-ed to the domain of the Church so that he could claim the physical realm as his own territory.18 Alas, Descartes’s bargain set the tone and direction of Western science over the next two centuries, which divided the human experience into two distinct and separate spheres of experience. This artificial perspective is the foundation of mainstream medical science as we know it today.
    Because of Descartes’s agreement, mainstream culture, including
    the vast majority of our physicians, remains largely ignorant about 8
    Introduction
    the important role that the mind and the emotions play in the de-
    velopment of disease and in the healing process. Therefore, for most contemporary physicians (like my supervisor during my psychiatric rotation), even the mere thought of considering the emotional
    components of disease while treating patients seems to threaten the scientific approach to medicine. Since the beginning of my medical education, I’ve known I didn’t want to become that kind of doctor.
    Medical discoveries that do not involve drugs or surgery are often ignored or misunderstood by doctors, even when research supporting
    these discoveries is reported in prestigious medical journals.
    In truth, the separation of mind, body, and spirit is not real, although we have long been led to believe that it is—and we have created our treatments accordingly. Remarkable discoveries are being
    made all the time now that prove there is so much more to what we
    are than we can see with our eyes. We don’t even know yet what these discoveries mean, but I believe that in the future these will influence our treatments for all kinds of diseases and conditions.
    Quantum physicists, beginning with John Stewart Bell in 1964,
    have done studies on the phenomenon of nonlocality . In Healing Words, a book that explores the power of prayer to heal (which several studies have supported), Dr. Larry Dossey explained, “If distant objects have once been in contact, a change thereafter in one causes an immediate change in the other—no matter how far apart they are, even if they are separated to opposite ends of the universe.”19 As he pointed