The Worst Is Over

Mind/body medicine, which includes psychoneuroimmunology, neurolinguistics and medical hypnosis, sees the human being as a complex network of energy. In her book The Quantum Self, physicist and philosopher Danah Zohar writes, “The mind/body duality in man is a reflection of the wave/particle duality, which underlies all that is. In this way, human

We are the only known species who dies on schedule: more people die on Monday between 8 and 9 in the morning than at any other time and day of the week. Why is that? Could it have anything to do with the stress of going to work? And how do we explain the data showing how death peaks in Christians the day after Christmas and in Chinese people the da

In his book, Unconditional Life, Dr. Deepak Chopra cites the example of two people riding on the same roller coaster. The rider who is terrified creates stress hormones, which over time will cause his immune system to weaken. The rider who is exhilarated by the roller coaster ride produces a flood of chemicals, among them interferon and interleukin

In the American Journal of Health Promotion, Dr. Wallerstein (1992) makes the case that a sense of powerlessness or “the lack of control over one’s destiny emerges as a broad-based risk factor for disease.”

In fact, the power of the mind to intervene outside the body has been demonstrated in studies of what is known as non-local healing. In his best-selling books (Healing Words, Prayer Is Good Medicine, Reinventing Medicine, and the latest One Mind: How Our Individual Mind is Part of a Greater Consciousness and Why it Matters, an among many others) La

At the University of Heidelberg, Germany, Yugoslav psychologist Ronald Grossarth-Maticek conducted a ten-year study on 1,300 Yugoslavs with no previous medical diagnosis. Based entirely on what he knew of their personalities and emotions, Grossarh-Maticek was able to predict their deaths from cancer (for those with repressed emotions and hopelessne

a person having a heart transplant might be more likely to survive if his emotions were taken into account,

By focusing solely on external causes of disease, such as bacteria and viruses, science dissuaded us from exploring the reasons why one person exposed to a virus might not get sick.

The separation of mind and body, while it can be traced back to the ancient Greeks, is most often laid at the doorstep of the 17th century philosopher Rene Descartes. Since the Roman Catholic Church claimed man as its domain, Descartes and the church struck a deal: science became anatomy, the mechanical functions of the body, divorced from any invo