wisdom from the ages... [matrix of life] [books] [useful hints]
Friends of
Health strongly advocates the use of accurate terms...starting now!
“Whole Person Healing (WPH)” not Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM)
One of the major contributions which the Friends of Health organization can take credit for, is the increasing use of the term “Whole Person Healing.” Most especially it is gratifying to see it being slowly substituted for the wholly inaccurate and misleading term: “Complementary and Alternative Medicine” (CAM).
What the community is dearly about, is “healing.” It is not advocating or selling a particular “medicine.” Moreover we deal with whole persons. We are completely and fundamentally committed to the inseparability of spirit (S), mind (M), and body (B). In any healing interaction, that same S+M+B (whole person) may be healed in the spirit (alone), in the mind, or in the body; and they can be healed via the spirit, via the mind, or via the body.
“Expectation Effect” not Placebo
Another enormous error in modern medicine has been fluttering in the literature for decades. This is the concept and use of the term “placebo.” The medical establishment cannot define it adequately. It has no explanation for it. Very few have any realization, from the reams of data, purporting to prove that this or that performs “better than placebo”—that the worm is not inside the apple, it is the apple.
“Belief” or “expectation” is a universal factor in any healing transaction. The patient or the doctor may believe or expect weakly or strongly that particular intervention may work. Extensive research shows that belief or expectation is a major component of the success of the intervention. Expectation is very important in the most expensive knee surgery or cardiac procedure, and no less so in taking an aspirin. It was well-known millennia before the practices of science invaded the healing arts. The founder of the major Western religion, Jesus, was a healer. He routinely tried to exhort the “patient” and/or his/her friends “to believe.” “Lord, I believe; help thou my unbelief” was the response of one patient.
Fatal Flaw in Medical Scientific Research
The backbone of medical research—the Randomly Controlled Trial (RCT) is fundamentally flawed in more than one dimension: the inability to control for emotional or “belief” state. Ever since the RCT procedure was started using placebos as supposedly totally inert, it was shown that in ANY trial, the so-called “sugar pill,”—the inactive ingredients, placebo pill (whatever)—always did have a substantial effect. But now could it; if it was merely an inert substance. Answer: it carried its own EE value as did the real pills!!!
On the average this was hardly insignificant—always at least 30 or 40%. This also meant that in even the supposedly most highly effective ‘pills,’ about half the effects were due to the expectation effect (EE). Hence the “evidence based medicine” data provide the evidence that the Expectation Effect is not only real, it is substantial, and it is universal.
Early this summer two papers appeared in completely different venues which speak to the universality of the Expectation Effect. EE is found not only in healing but in many other activities. Like: How about sports performance? The Washington Post (06-06-2006) reported a study from the University of Wisconsin that showed that runners who expected to improve their 5k-race running times based on drinking “super oxygenated” water really did so; and by large amounts. The lesson the researchers concluded said “your brain is more capable of boosting your performance than a potion, pill or device.”
Another long report in Alternative Medicine magazine (June 2006) researched several lines of evidence to demonstrate the power of the Expectation Effect. They have all just confirmed our more general axiom in the WPH movement.
Belief is the single most effective “pill” (intervention) in the world.
NEW ATTITUDES TO DEATH—WHICH HELP
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Any
“healthy”
person lives within that fabric that tapestry of
all living systems. Every attitude of —trying to live forever, postponing death at all cost, cryo-extension of life—is asking for certain frustration. Instead, becoming well-informed about death and the enormous literature from many cultures and discussing it freely with friends and relatives, will make future decisions about one’s own death made wiser. The American Healthcare system has been partly bankrupted recently by its failure (whether calculated or not) to come to terms with death. Today the churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples can do more to help our healthcare system than any scientific research. How? By changing the citizen’s attitude to death and dying—allowing them to die with dignity, often at home, surrounded by loved ones. A few pioneers like Elizabeth Kubler Ross helped deal with this problem. The hospice movement is her legacy. And it can go much further. Here is a current testimonial: |
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For some major current voices on attitudes to death/life see the most recent books by WPH pioneers:
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Andrew Weil Healthy Aging: Chapter 1 on “Immortality”; shows what an absurd idea this good of life-prolongation is. |
Jim B. Tucker, M.D. Dr. Tucker is a board-certified child psychiatrist directs research into children’s reports of past-life memories at the U. of Virginia Division of Personality Studies. |
Deepak Chopra Chopra spends half the book on case reports and studies for which by far the most plausible explanation is “re-incarnation” in some form.
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DO NOT OBSESS ABOUT YOUR HEALTH—GET ON WITH DAY TO DAY LIVING
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Ivan Illich, author of Medical Nemesis, was the first to foresee, in 1973, the problems of the U.S. healthcare system.
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In 1997, at a plenary lecture at McCormick Theological Seminary on the current crisis in medicine, Illich titled it: “To Hell with Health.” The talk focused on the major negative effects of worrying about your own health and the American pre-occupation with it, stimulated by all the industries—pharmaceutical, hospital, insurance, etc.—who will continue to gain from “the unexamined death,” and the one absolute, inevitable reality: that of dying.
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