Surgery Healing Quotes

Surgeons can cut out everything except cause.

If the Universe came to an end every time there was some uncertainty about what had happened in it, it would never have got beyond the first picosecond. And many of course don't. It's like a human body, you see. A few cuts and bruises here and there don't hurt it. Not even major surgery if it's done properly. Paradoxes are just the scar tissue. Time and space heal themselves up around them and people simply remember a version of events which makes as much sense as they require it to make.

I didn't expect to recover from my second operation but since I did, I consider that I'm living on borrowed time. Every day that dawns is a gift to me and I take it in that way. I accept it gratefully without looking beyond it. I completely forget my physical suffering and all the unpleasantness of my present condition and I think only of the joy of seeing the sun rise once more and of being able to work a little bit, even under difficult conditions.

Can the purpose of a relationship be to trigger our wounds? In a way, yes, because that is how healing happens; darkness must be exposed before it can be transformed. The purpose of an intimate relationship is not that it be a place where we can hide from our weaknesses, but rather where we can safely let them go. It takes strength of character to truly delve into the mystery of an intimate relationship, because it takes the strength to endure a kind of psychic surgery, an emotional and psychological and even spiritual initiation into the higher Self. Only then can we know an enchantment that lasts.

Cutting out bad habits is far more effective than cutting out organs.

The desire to be loved, to feel loved, is behind every diet, pill, surgery, and lie. It is behind each act of violence and every affair as well as each organized religion and every method of self-help.

It is often thought that medicine is the curative process. It is no such thing; medicine is the surgery of functions, as surgery proper is that of limbs and organs. Neither can do anything but remove obstructions; neither can cure; nature alone cures. Surgery removes the bullet out of the limb, which is an obstruction to cure, but nature heals the wound. So it is with medicine; the function of an organ becomes obstructed; medicine so far as we know, assists nature to remove the obstruction, but does nothing more. And what nursing has to do in either case, is to put the patient in the best condition for nature to act upon him.

Someone once asked Swami Satchidananda, a spiritual teacher, “What are you, a Hindu?” “No,” he replied, “I’m an Undo. I’m trying to teach people how they can undo the patterns that cause damage to their minds and bodies so they can begin to heal.

Imagine you are sitting down in a chair and on a screen before you you are shown a bloody, ripping film of yourself undergoing surgery. The surgery saved your life. It was pivotal in making you you. But you don't remember it. Or do you? Do we understand the events that make us who we are? Do we ever understand the factors that make us do the things we do? When we sleep at night - when we walk across a field and see a tree full of sleeping birds - when we tell small lies to our friends - when we make love - what acts of surgery are happening to our souls - what damage and healing and shock are we going through that we will never be able to fathom? What films are generated that we will never be shown?

Health is normal. The human body is a self-repairing, self-defending, self-healing marvel. Disease is relatively difficult to induce, considering the body's powerful immune system. However, this complicated and delicate machinery can be damaged if fed the wrong fuel during the formative years. ... Healthy living with nutritional excellence throughout life can slow the decline of aging. It can prevent the years and years of suffering in ill health that is so common today as people get older and become dependent on medical treatments, drugs, and surgery. Nutritional excellence is the only real fountain of youth.

Love and intimacy are at the root of what makes us sick and what makes us well, what causes sadness and what brings happiness, what makes us suffer and what leads to healing. … I am not aware of any other factor in medicine—not diet, not smoking, not exercise, not stress, not genetics, not drugs, not surgery—that has a greater impact on our quality of life, incidence of illness, and premature death from all causes.

Mainstream ideas of “healing” deeply believe in ableist ideas that you’re either sick or well, fixed or broken, and that nobody would want to be in a disabled or sick or mad bodymind. Unsurprisingly and unfortunately, these ableist ideas often carry over into healing spaces that call themselves “alternative” or “liberatory.” The healing may be acupuncture and herbs, not pills and surgery, but assumptions in both places abound that disabled and sick folks are sad people longing to be “normal,” that cure is always the goal, and that disabled people are objects who have no knowledge of our bodies. And deep in both the medical-industrial complex and “alternative” forms of healing that have not confronted their ableism is the idea that disabled people can’t be healers.

You have the power to treat your own pain, and you can do it without surgery, drugs, or other invasive interventions.

But that can't work, can it?" Said Richard. "If we do that, then this won't have happened. Don't we generate all sorts of paradoxes?" Reg stirred himself from thought. "No worse than many that exist already," he said. "If the universe came to an end every time there was some uncertainty about what had happened in it, it would never have got beyond the first picosecond. And many of course don't. It's like a human body, you see. A few cuts and bruises here and there don't hurt it. Not even major surgery if its done properly. Paradoxes are just the scar tissue. Time and space heal themselves up around them and people simply remember a version of events which makes as much sense as they require it to make. That isn't to say if you get involved in a paradox a few things won't strike you as being very odd, but if you've got through life without that already happening to you, then I don't know which universe you've been living in, but it isn't this one

By listening to the “unspoken voice” of my body and allowing it to do what it needed to do; by not stopping the shaking, by “tracking” my inner sensations, while also allowing the completion of the defensive and orienting responses; and by feeling the “survival emotions” of rage and terror without becoming overwhelmed, I came through mercifully unscathed, both physically and emotionally. I was not only thankful; I was humbled and grateful to find that I could use my method for my own salvation. While some people are able to recover from such trauma on their own, many individuals do not. Tens of thousands of soldiers are experiencing the extreme stress and horror of war. Then too, there are the devastating occurrences of rape, sexual abuse and assault. Many of us, however, have been overwhelmed by much more “ordinary” events such as surgeries or invasive medical procedures. Orthopedic patients in a recent study, for example, showed a 52% occurrence of being diagnosed with full-on PTSD following surgery. Other traumas include falls, serious illnesses, abandonment, receiving shocking or tragic news, witnessing violence and getting into an auto accident; all can lead to PTSD. These and many other fairly common experiences are all potentially traumatizing. The inability to rebound from such events, or to be helped adequately to recover by professionals, can subject us to PTSD—along with a myriad of physical and emotional symptoms.

To finally surrender ourselves to healing, we have to have three spaces opened up within us - and all at the same time: our opinionated head, our closed-down heart, and our defensive and defended body. That is the summary work of spirituality - and it is indeed work. Yes, it is also the work of “a Power greater than ourselves,” and it will lead to a great luminosity and depth of seeing. That is why true faith is one of the most holistic and free actions a human can perform. It leads to such broad and deep perception that most traditions would just call it “light.” Remember, Jesus said that we also are the light of the world (Matthew 5:14), as well as saying it about himself (John 8:12). Strange that we see light in him but do not imitate him in seeing the same light in ourselves. Such luminous seeing is quite the opposite of the closed-minded, dead-hearted, body-denying thing that much religion has been allowed to become. As you surely have heard before, “Religion is lived by people who are afraid of hell. Spirituality is lived by people who have been through hell and come out enlightened.” The innocuous mental belief systems of much religion are probably the major cause of atheism in the world today, because people see that religion has not generally created people who are that different, more caring, or less prejudiced than other people. In fact, they are often worse because they think they have God on their small side. I wish I did not have to say this, but religion either produces the very best people or the very worst. Jesus makes this point in many settings and stories. Mere mental belief systems split people apart, whereas actual faith puts all our parts (body, heart, and head) on notice and on call. Honestly, it takes major surgery and much of one’s life to get head, heart, and body to put down their defenses, their false programs for happiness, and their many forms of resistance to what is right in front of them. This is the meat and muscle of the whole conversion process.

She pictured Blake and closed her eyes. He lay under the bright surgery lights, tubes in place, beeping monitors, Sorry tattoo. It was as if she stood in the room with him. She poured her energy around him, surrounded him with sparkling, champagne-colored sunlight. Heal him. Strengthen him. Heal him.

The left and right sides of the brain also process the imprints of the past in dramatically different ways.2 The left brain remembers facts, statistics, and the vocabulary of events. We call on it to explain our experiences and put them in order. The right brain stores memories of sound, touch, smell, and the emotions they evoke. It reacts automatically to voices, facial features, and gestures and places experienced in the past. What it recalls feels like intuitive truth—the way things are. Even as we enumerate a loved one’s virtues to a friend, our feelings may be more deeply stirred by how her face recalls the aunt we loved at age four.3 Under ordinary circumstances the two sides of the brain work together more or less smoothly, even in people who might be said to favor one side over the other. However, having one side or the other shut down, even temporarily, or having one side cut off entirely (as sometimes happened in early brain surgery) is disabling. Deactivation of the left hemisphere has a direct impact on the capacity to organize experience into logical sequences and to translate our shifting feelings and perceptions into words. (Broca’s area, which blacks out during flashbacks, is on the left side.) Without sequencing we can’t identify cause and effect, grasp the long-term effects of our actions, or create coherent plans for the future. People who are very upset sometimes say they are “losing their minds.” In technical terms they are experiencing the loss of executive functioning. When something reminds traumatized people of the past, their right brain reacts as if the traumatic event were happening in the present. But because their left brain is not working very well, they may not be aware that they are reexperiencing and reenacting the past—they are just furious, terrified, enraged, ashamed, or frozen. After the emotional storm passes, they may look for something or somebody to blame for it. They behaved the way they did way because you were ten minutes late, or because you burned the potatoes, or because you “never listen to me.” Of course, most of us have done this from time to time, but when we cool down, we hopefully can admit our mistake. Trauma interferes with this kind of awareness, and, over time, our research demonstrated why.

Doctors; all they do is make you worse and take all your money. That's a general statement.

My mind went back to the implements on the cave’s wall, the herbs and tools of healing. Surgery was the word he had used.

Create a healing Spark from what has been detached from the electricity that flows from the wounds.

You should move toward whatever changes, whatever surgeries, whatever renovations or alterations or restorations will create you in the glory you deserve, oh yes you should. And you should do it with your usual style, and you should do it without shame, and when you’re healed up and ready we can go shopping for something fabulous to showcase the many wonders of you.

No matter who you were in sixteenth-century Europe, you could be sure of two things: you would be lucky to reach fifty years of age, and you could expect a life of discomfort and pain. Old age tires the body by thirty-five, Erasmus lamented, but half the population did not live beyond the age of twenty. There were doctors and there was medicine, but there does not seem to have been a great deal of healing. Anyone who could afford to seek a doctor's aid did so eagerly, but the doctor was as likely to maim or kill as to cure. His potions were usually noxious and sometimes fatal—but they could not have been as terrible and traumatic as the contemporary surgical methods. The surgeon and the Inquisitor differed only in their motivation: otherwise, their batteries of knives, saws, and tongs for slicing, piercing, burning, and amputating were barely distinguishable. Without any anesthetic other than strong liquor, an operation was as bad as the torments of hell.

Here's how it works. Your immune system protects you from all kinds of nasty bugs and helps repair tissue that has been damaged by injury or surgery. When a problem develops somewhere, your body does the equivalent of calling 911. The alarm sounds, and the immune system springs into action. The first responders, the white blood cells, travel to the site of the problem. As weapons, some of the cells released a shower of powerful free radicals (called an oxidative burst) that aids in the destruction of invading microorganisms and damaged tissue.

healing of trauma in its many forms. The most common of these forms are automobile and other accidents, serious illness, surgery and other invasive medical and dental procedures, assault, and experiencing or witnessing violence, war, or a myriad of natural disasters.               I

Step 1 (Gather) involves embracing the toxic thought, habit, or trauma (cutting open with the scalpel). Steps 2 and 3 (Reflect and Write) are the processing steps (performing the surgery). Steps 4 and 5 (Recheck and Active Reach) are the reconceptualizing steps (closing up and healing).

After hearing much from his patients about alleged faith-healing, a Minnesota physician named William Nolen spent a year and a half trying to track down the most striking cases. Was there clear medical evidence that the disease was really present before the ‘cure’? If so, had the disease actually disappeared after the cure, or did we just have the healer’s or the patient’s say-so? He uncovered many cases of fraud, including the first exposure in America of ‘psychic surgery’. But he found not one instance of cure of any serious organic (non-psychogenic) disease. There were no cases where gallstones or rheumatoid arthritis, say, were cured, much less cancer or cardiovascular disease. When a child’s spleen is ruptured, Nolen noted, perform a simple surgical operation and the child is completely better. But take that child to a faith-healer and she’s dead in a day.

Simply being in the presence of natural landscapes tends to reduce stress and promote relaxation. Such experiences lower mental fatigue and boost mental clarity while enhancing both work performance and healing. One early study found that surgery patients recovered faster and required less pain medication if their hospital room had a window overlooking a natural setting. Another found similar effects in a prison population: prisoners with windows facing out toward rolling farmland and trees had 24 percent fewer sick call visits than their counterparts with views of an empty interior courtyard.

Just as there is good time and bad time, there is good endurance and bad endurance. When we suffer, is the true self growing or is the false self just enduring pain? If we are on God’s surgery table in grace-giving relationships with our real self, time spent suffering will produce completeness; we will grow up, and we will experience changes that heal.

When looking at the brains of injured patients, Paul Broca (1824–1880) discovered that the left temporal cortex was responsible for speech. When Penfield electrically stimulated the brains of patients undergoing surgery, he confirmed the function of speech was in the left temporal lobe. We know that the motor cortex lies at the front of the brain in a strip along the midline. Sensory processing from the skin lies just to the back of the

Only now, he thought, now that I know I have a father, do I feel his absence: the place where he should have been and was not. Before, I thought everybody was one-armed, like me. Now I feel the surgery. The crunch of bone when it is sundered, the sliced flesh and the tubes of blood cut through, shocking the bloodrun and disturbing the nerves. They dangle and writhe. Singing pain. Waking me with the sound of itself, thrumming when I sleep so deeply it strangles my dreams away. There is nothing for it but to go away from where he is not to where he used to be and might be still. Let the dangle and the writhe see what it is missing; let the pain sing to the dirt where he stepped in the place where he used to be and might be still. I am not going to be healed, or to find the arm that was removed from me. I am going to freshen the pain, point it, so we both know what it is for.

We are healthy, we think, if we do not feel any pain or too much pain, and if we are strong enough to do our work. If we become unhealthy, then we go to a doctor who we hope will “cure” us and restore us to health. By health, in other words, we mean merely the absence of disease. Our health professionals are interested almost exclusively in preventing disease (mainly by destroying germs) and in curing disease (mainly by surgery and by destroying germs). But the concept of health is rooted in the concept of wholeness. To be healthy is to be whole. The word health belongs to a family of words, a listing of which will suggest how far the consideration of health must carry us: heal, whole, wholesome, hale, hallow, holy. And so it is possible to give a definition to health that is positive and far more elaborate than that given to it by most medical doctors and the officers of public health.

As a child I had been taken to see Dr Bradshaw on countless occasions; it was in his surgery that Billy had first discovered Lego. As I was growing up, I also saw Dr Robinson, the marathon runner. Now that I was living back at home, he was again my GP. When Mother bravely told him I was undergoing treatment for MPD/DID as a result of childhood sexual abuse, he buried his head in hands and wept. Child abuse will always re-emerge, no matter how many years go by. We read of cases of people who have come forward after thirty or forty years to say they were abused as children in care homes by wardens, schoolteachers, neighbours, fathers, priests. The Catholic Church in the United States in the last decade has paid out hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation for 'acts of sodomy and depravity towards children', to quote one information-exchange web-site. Why do these ageing people make the abuse public so late in their lives? To seek attention? No, it's because deep down there is a wound they need to bring out into the clean air before it can heal. Many clinicians miss signs of abuse in children because they, as decent people, do not want to find evidence of what Dr Ross suggests is 'a sick society that has grown sicker, and the abuse of children more bizarre'. (Note: this was written in the UK many years before the revelations of Jimmy Savile's widespread abuse, which included some ritual abuse)

So now let’s address the elephant in the room: No real physical, chemical, or therapeutic mechanisms made these changes happen. None of these people had actual surgery, took active medication, or received any real treatment to create these significant alterations in health. The power of their minds so influenced their bodies’ physiology that they became healed. It’s safe to say that their real transformation happened independent of their conscious minds. Their conscious minds may have initiated the course of action, but the real work happened subconsciously, with the subjects remaining totally unaware of how it happened.

Rest too long after an injury and your system powers down, preparing you for a peaceful exit. Fight your way back to your feet, however, and you trigger that magical ON switch that speeds healing hormones to everything you need to get stronger: your bones, brain, organs, ligaments, immune system, even the digestive bacteria in your belly, all get a molecular upgrade from exercise. For that, you can thank your hunter-gatherer ancestors, who evolved to stay alive by staying on the move. Today, movement-as-medicine is a biological truth for survivors of cancer, surgery, strokes, heart attacks, diabetes, brain injuries, depression, you name it.

I don’t like to use this word,” he said, “because I’m a man of science and I don’t believe in it. But what happened to your mother today was a miracle. I never say that, because I hate it when people say it, but I don’t have any other way to explain this.” The bullet that hit my mother in the butt, he said, was a through-and-through. It went in, came out, and didn’t do any real damage. The other bullet went through the back of her head, entering below the skull at the top of her neck. It missed the spinal cord by a hair, missed the medulla oblongata, and traveled through her head just underneath the brain, missing every major vein, artery, and nerve. With the trajectory the bullet was on, it was headed straight for her left eye socket and would have blown out her eye, but at the last second it slowed down, hit her cheekbone instead, shattered her cheekbone, ricocheted off, and came out through her left nostril. On the gurney in the emergency room, the blood had made the wound look much worse than it was. The bullet took off only a tiny flap of skin on the side of her nostril, and it came out clean, with no bullet fragments left inside. She didn’t even need surgery. They stopped the bleeding, stitched her up in back, stitched her up in front, and let her heal. “There was nothing we can do, because there’s nothing we need to do,” the doctor

Therapeutic fasting accelerates the healing process and allows the body to recover from serious disease in a dramatically short period of time. In my practice I have seen fasting eliminate lupus and arthritis, remove chronic skin conditions such as psoriasis and eczema, heal the digestive tract in patients with ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease, and quickly eliminate cardiovascular diseases such as high blood pressure and angina. In these cases the recoveries were permanent: fasting enabled longtime disease sufferers to unchain themselves from their multiple toxic drugs and even eliminate the need for surgery, which was recommended to some of them as their only solution.

the only thing the hero knows about the girl is that she is beautiful. He shows no interest in her intellect or personality—or even her sexuality. The man is either a ruler or has the magic power to awaken her, and all she can do is hope that her physical appearance fits the specifications better than the other girls. In the original Cinderella story, the stepsisters actually cut off parts of their feet to try to fit into the glass slipper. Maybe this marks the origins of the first cosmetic surgery. Besides romanticizing Cinderella’s misery, the story also gives the message that women’s relationships with each other are full of bitter competition and animosity. The adult voice of womanly wisdom in the story, the stepmother, advises all her girls to frantically do whatever it takes to please the prince. This includes groveling, cutting off parts of themselves, and staying powerless. I was heartsick to watch Disney’s “The Little Mermaid” with my three-year-old daughter. The little mermaid agrees to give up her voice for a chance to go up on the “surface” and convince her nobleman to marry her. She is told by her local matron sea witch that she doesn’t need a voice—she needs only to look cute and get him to kiss her. And in the story, it works. These are the means to her one and only end: to buy a rich and respected guy. Women are taught to only listen to an outside patriarchal authority. No wonder there is so much self-doubt and confusion when faced with the question, “What do you want out of your life?” This question alone can be enough to trigger an episode of depression. It often triggers a game of Ping-Pong in a woman’s head. Her imagination throws up a possibility and then her pessimistic shotgun mind shoots it down. The dialog may look something like this: “Maybe I want to go back to school.... No, that would be selfish of me because the kids need me…. Maybe I’ll start a business.... No I hate all that dogeat-dog competition…. Maybe I’ll look for a love relationship…. No, I am not sure I am healed ye….” and on it goes.

What place in the future development of the South ought the Negro college and college-bred man to occupy? That the present social separation and acute race-sensitiveness must eventually yield to the influences of culture, as the South grows civilized, is clear. But such transformation calls for singular wisdom and patience. If, while the healing of this vast sore is progressing, the races are to live for many years side by side, united in economic effort, obeying a common government, sensitive to mutual thought and feeling, yet subtly and silently separate in many matters of deeper human intimacy,—if this unusual and dangerous development is to progress amid peace and order, mutual respect and growing intelligence, it will call for social surgery at once the delicatest and nicest in modern history. It will demand broad-minded, upright men, both white and black, and in its final accomplishment American civilization will triumph. So far as white men are concerned, this fact is to-day being recognized in the South, and a happy renaissance of university education seems imminent. But the very voices that cry hail to this good work are, strange to relate, largely silent or antagonistic to the higher education of the Negro. Strange to relate! for this is certain, no secure civilization can be built in the South with the Negro as an ignorant, turbulent proletariat.

For more than twenty years I have offered a very simple yet powerful ritual to people before their radiation, chemotherapy, or surgery. I suggest they meet together with some of their closest friends and family the day before their procedure. Before this meeting, I suggest they find an ordinary stone, a piece of the earth, big enough to fit in the palm of their hand, and bring it to the meeting with them. The ritual begins by having everyone sit in a circle. In any order they wish to speak, each person tells the story of a time when they too faced a crisis. People may talk about the death of important persons, the loss of jobs or of relationships, or even about their own illnesses. The person who is speaking holds the stone the patient has brought. When they finish telling their story of survival, they take a moment to reflect on the personal quality that they feel helped them come through that difficult time. People will say things such as, 'What brought me through was determination,' 'What brought me through was faith,' 'What brought me through was humor.' When they have named the quality of their strength, they speak directly to the person preparing for surgery or treatment, saying, 'I put determination into this stone for you,' or, 'I put faith into this stone for you.' After everyone has spoken the stone is given back to the patient, who takes it with them to the hospital, to keep nearby and hold in their hand when things get hard. In an environment which is highly technical and sterile, it connects them to the earth and to each other.

Only now, he thought, now that I have a father, do I feel his absence: the place where he should have been and was not. Before, I thought everybody was one-armed, like me. Now I feel the surgery. The crunch of bone when it is sundered, the sliced flesh and the tubes of blood cut through, shocking the bloodrun and disturbing the nerves. They dangle and writhe. Singing pain. Waking me with the sound of itself, thrumming when I sleep so deeply it strangles my dreams away. There is nothing for it but to go away from where he is not to where he used to be and might be still. Let the dangle and the writhe see what is missing; let the pain sing to the dirt where he stepped in the place where he used to be and might be still. I am not going to be healed, or to find the arm that was removed from me. I am going to freshen the paid, point it, so we both know what it is for.

I've just been certified as a shaman, or sha-woman, if you please," Dr. Tuttle said. "You can hop up on the table if you prefer not to stand. You look worse for wear. Is that the expression?" I leaned carefully against the bookshelf. "What do you use the massage table for?" I heard myself ask. "Mystical recalibrations, mostly. I use copper dowels to locate lugubriations in the subtle body field. It's an ancient form of healing—locating and then surgically removing cancerous energies." "I see." "And by surgery I mean metaphysical. Like magnet sucking. I can show you the magnet machine if you're interested. Small enough to fit in a handbag. Costs a pretty penny, although it's very useful. Very. Not so much for insomniacs, but for compulsive gamblers and Peeping Toms—adrenaline junkies, in other words. New York City is full of those types, so I foresee myself getting busier this year. But don't worry. I'm not abandoning my psychiatric clients. There are only a few of you anyway. Hence my new certification. Costly, but worth it. Sit on it," she insisted, so I did, grappling with the edge of the cool pleather of the massage table to hoist myself up. My legs swung like a kid's at the doctor's.

So certain were experts that neonates felt no pain that through the mid-1980s major surgeries on newborn babies were sometimes performed without anesthesia. These included major cardiovascular procedures requiring prying open rib cages, puncturing lungs, and tying off major arteries. Though provided with no pharmacologic agents to blunt the pain that cracking ribs or cutting through the sternum might have induced, babies were given powerful agents to induce paralysis—ensuring an immobile (and undoubtedly terrified) patient on whom to operate. Jill Lawson’s remarkable story of her premature son, Jeffrey, and his unanesthetized heart surgery provides a heartbreaking account of such a procedure. After Jeffrey’s death in 1985, Lawson’s campaign to educate the medical profession about the need to treat pain in the young literally changed the field. And likely led to improved awareness of pain in animals, too. bA technique called clicker training pairs a metallic tick-tock! with a food treat every time the animal performs a desired behavior. Eventually the animal comes to associate the sound of the clicker with the feel-good neurochemical rewards of the food. When the treat is discontinued, the animal will continue doing the behavior, because

The evening was a string of miserable minutes strung together in tiny clusters. Three minutes for a man shot through the shoulder; Ellis put first a finger in the entry wound and then another in the exit and when his fingers touched, he decided the man was only lightly injured and didn’t need a surgeon. Three minutes to set a broken wrist and splint it with a strip of cowhide and a piece of wood from a sycamore tree. Two minutes to tourniquet a leg, then extract a piece of wire deep in the meat of it. A minute to peek under a pink, saturated bandage several inches below a slender belly button; he saw thin, red water leaking from a hole and smelled urine, knew the ball had breached the bladder. It would either heal or it wouldn’t, but nothing to do about it so he set the soul aside, a case not to be operated upon. He turned a man’s head looking for the source of a trickle of blood and had ten terrible minutes trying to stop torrential bleeding from under his clavicle; frantic moments during which he could get neither a finger nor a clamp around the pulsating source. All bleeding stops eventually though, and the case did not violate the rule. He took two minutes to settle his own breathing, then four minutes sewing a torn scalp, and half a minute saying a prayer over a fat, cigar-shaped dead man. After awhile, he had the impression he wasn’t seeing men, but parts—an exploded chest, a blood swolled thigh, a busted jaw with its teeth spat to the wind or swallowed. It was more than a man could take and a lot less than there was to be seen.

Patients may not know how to measure clinical outcomes, and they may not understand the technical know-how that a doctor must have in order to perform a complex heart surgery or neurosurgery, but they can form clear judgments about their experience. They know whether their rooms are clean and whether people are polite to them. They recognize differences in the quality of the food and in how an organization looks and feels. They know whether they feel cared for. Most of all, they can tell whether they’ve had a healing experience—or whether being in a hospital has only impeded their healing.

Medication, surgery, and medical tests are all focused on disease, not on health. Prevention is the act of moving away from the disease. Proactivity in health is seeking a high level of wellness and acting in a way that will create that reality in your life.

U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, MD. When he was 40 years old, two separate neurological clinics diagnosed him as having incurable back pain, which radiated down his leg. His pain, however, was completely relieved by prolotherapy, which was basically unknown to modern medicine at the time. Because of his own healing, he used prolotherapy for the remaining 20 years that he practiced medicine. "Although patients may have had back pain for several years, one to four prolotherapy treatments is often enough to relieve their pain," Dr. Darrow says. "If there is improvement after four treatments, the injections will be continued, usually to a maximum of eight times." One of Dr. Darrow's patients,

I was a surgeon. I was at the top of my game. Fast-tracking it to become chief of surgery. After the accident, I lost it all. I have a faint tremor in my hand that will not ever heal and be steady enough for me to perform surgery. So this…career change would give me a chance to reclaim some of what I’ve lost.

stretches mean to get rid of. Scars naturally contract toward their own center, pulling the surrounding tissues with them. If these tissues include a nerve or joint, the result is pain and restricted movement. That's one reason why surgery often fails to resolve pain and can even make it worse. Surgery should always be your last option.

I finally found a place near the North Railroad Station, a workers' district. It was a bombed out building, barely repaired. We moved in. Father came from Dorohoi, we were again together. It took quite a while to get Mother in better shape. She needed a skin graft, a new procedure at that time. It was innovative surgery. For a long time she had difficulty eating, since the lip had not healed properly. I remember with great gratitude the kindly Jewish surgeon, Dr. Brochovici, a man of real compassion and of great capability. In all this hardship, we had some luck.

Just as the discoveries of medication and surgery led to therapies to relieve a staggering number of conditions, so does the discovery of neuroplasticity. The reader will find cases, many very detailed, that may be relevant to someone who has, or cares for someone who has experienced, chronic pain, stroke, traumatic brain injury, brain damage, Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, autism, attention deficit disorder, a learning disorder (including dyslexia), a sensory processing disorder, a developmental delay, a part of the brain missing, Down syndrome, or certain kinds of blindness, among others.

This is what lead to the boom in the sale of tourmaline rings, all over the world, because this stone is known to help with migraines, menstrual pains, faster healing after surgeries and even aid with an improvement of chi, the life energy.

A study of heart patients in 6 separate hospitals sought to determine whether prayers from strangers would have any effect on a person's recovery (1). After carefully following the recovery of 1,800 heart surgery patients for 30 days after the surgery, researchers found absolutely no link between prayer and recovery. However, there was a significant difference between those who were aware of the fact that they were being prayed for and those who did not know. Those who knew ended up suffering more complications, possibly due to the additional stress it caused. Being told that a high number of people are praying for your recovery might increase how severe you would perceive your illness to be and thus negatively affect your recovery. To date, there have been no reputable scientific studies showing any clear link between prayer and healing.

He shook his head and said, “No, He just went up,” pointing his index finger to the ceiling of the room.

Like chemotherapy, ECT is a toxic treatment for a crippling disease. Like any surgery requiring anesthesia, it carries risks. And like the electric paddles that cardiologists use to shock a fibrillating heart back into rhythm, ECT is not a cure but can offer relief and even remission.

There is a pain that means things are coming apart. But then, sometimes there is a pain that means that things might be able to come back together. Surgery can be as painful as stabbing, but it leads to healing. I knew I was beginning to heal.

expectations, in fact, are so powerful that placebos (fake treatments like sugar pills, saline injections, and sham surgery) cause bald men to grow hair, high blood pressure to drop, ulcers to heal, dopamine levels to increase, and even tumors to shrink. And although pharmaceutical companies would rather keep this on the down low, placebos relieve symptoms on par with real medication. In other words, it’s our beliefs that do the healing.

We waited what seemed like forever in the emergency room, but I was eventually admitted. The news was not good. X-rays showed a break; plus, I’d torn all three ligaments. It couldn’t have been any worse. The doctor said I would be in a cast for at least three months, and after that I would need physical therapy to get my strength back. He wanted to do surgery, but Dad always says, “The last thing you ever want ‘em to do is cut on you,” so we turned down the surgery. The doctor warned me that I might not be able to walk right again, but I decided to take my chances and try to heal on my own. I was discharged with painkillers, crutches, and a cast and hobbled to the car. As I rested over the next few days, reality began to set in. If I couldn’t jump or run or maybe not even walk, I wouldn’t be able to practice basketball. If I couldn’t practice, I wasn’t going to be able to play on the team my junior or senior years. If I couldn’t play basketball, I wasn’t going to get scouted by colleges, and I wasn’t going to earn a scholarship. My basketball career was over. Maybe it had all been a pipe dream, but it had been on my heart for so many years. In a split second, my life changed completely. My basketball dreams were crushed. I no longer had anything to work for. No more practices, scrimmages, or games. No more drills at home or three-point-shot marathons until dark. My freak accident not only destroyed my ankle, it destroyed my identity and everything for which I lived and breathed. I was going to have to reinvent myself. And that’s when everything started to go bad.

using copper peptides topically or via injection or IV to enhance your body’s ability to heal. •​If you want to pull out all the stops or have major injuries that need healing, look into available stem cell treatments. These aren’t cheap, but they’re often similar to the price of surgery without many of the risks.

Never forget that all-important, essential, large, heaping spoonful of luck. What one is to become is largely predetermined by forces beyond our control. We don’t choose who our parents will be. We can’t dictate when and if one of them will leave us or die. We can’t shape the values that are evidenced by the grown-ups around us. Yet all of these may have profound effects on our character, and in the end, that character may dictate our destiny. So I do not hold that we make our own destiny. We ride it. Wherever it’ll lead us, to wherever we are supposed to end up.

Under ordinary circumstances the two sides of the brain work together more or less smoothly, even in people who might be said to favor one side over the other. However, having one side or the other shut down, even temporarily, or having one side cut off entirely (as sometimes happened in early brain surgery) is disabling.

Researchers routinely used Black subjects. In 1845, Alabama’s J. Marion Sims horrifically started experimenting on the vaginas of eleven enslaved women for a procedure to heal a complication of childbirth called vesicovaginal fistula. The procedures were “not painful enough to justify the trouble” of anesthesia, he said. It was a racist idea to justify his cruelty, not something Sims truly knew from his experiments. “Lucy’s agony was extreme,” Sims later noted in his memoir. After a marathon of surgeries into the early 1850s—one woman, Anarcha, suffered under his knife thirty times—Sims perfected the procedure for curing the fistula. Anesthesia in hand, Sims started healing White victims, moved to New York, built the first woman’s hospital, and fathered American gynecology. A massive bronze and granite monument dedicated to him—the first US statue depicting a physician—now sits at Fifth Avenue and 103rd Street, across from the Academy of Medicine.

The Scalpel and the Soul: Encounters with Surgery, the Supernatural and the Healing Power of Hope.

what about scars?” Edward asked. “What about broken bones? Your creations don’t show any signs of surgery.” “A happy accident of my banishment. The island’s isolation means there is almost no disease here. A body can heal in a matter of days if there is no risk of infection. Quite remarkable. I daresay many of my attempts in London failed solely from the polluted city air.

Right now, there are only two hospitals in the world that offer the Gerson Therapy, though there are countless centers that have integrated its nutrition and detox plan into their kitchens and protocols. One is located in Mexico. The other is in Hungary. Why only two? The reasons for this are…very complicated. When it comes to cancer, physicians in North America are legally obligated to recommend chemo, surgery, radiation, or sometimes gene therapy or immunotherapy.

One solution, suggested by Pasteur and implemented by Lister, was antisepsis. This strategy was to prevent microorganisms from gaining access to the wound by destroying them. Lister proposed this solution in his work “On the Antiseptic Principle in the Practice of Surgery” of 1867. Patients, Lister noted, usually died after surgery not from their original ailment or the postoperative healing process, but rather from infections contracted as “collateral damage” during the surgery. This was iatrogenesis, or what Lister called “hospitalism.

I held him to my breast, arms tight around the broad, shaking shoulders, and my own tears fell on his hair, making small dark patches in the ruddy waves. I pressed my cheek against the top of his head, and murmured small incoherent things to him as though he were Brianna. I thought to myself that perhaps it was like surgery—even when an operation is done to repair existing damage, the healing still is painful.

A skilled surgeon knows that cuts have to be made in order to operate, but the skilled surgeon also knows that the cuts are temporary and will heal. The end result of the operation is worth the initial pain, and the patient should heal to a better state than they were in before the surgery.

Traditionally, the chakras and their corresponding auric layers are shown in certain colors, such as the root red, sacral black, solar plexus yellow, heart white, throat violet, third eye indigo, and crown purple, and it is common to be mindful of these colors when dealing with a different chakra. Most students see some of these colors during a Reiki tuning, most commonly purple or orange. The energy, or ki, carried in through the chakras, is transmitted through a huge number of meridians and nadis around the body, which are something like blood arteries and veins. The first two are larger, the latter smaller, and some old charts show 72,000 of them. A treatment like acupuncture would not even be thinkable without detailed knowledge of their location. You need to be fairly confident about the right placement when doing open-heart surgery without anesthesia, helped only by a few long needles! The chakra function and its relation to mind, body, and spirit are explained in many good books. Many Reiki courses also incorporate aspects of it–after all, it's important to become more aware of the subtleties of our existence on Earth. And yet we are faced with a shock when it comes to Reiki: this information is not a precondition for its use. It's interesting and helpful–but not necessary. The practitioner will be guided by Reiki. It's just difficult to position your hands falsely! Even if it is difficult to get close to the actual difficulty site for some reason, Reiki will still get there, as thousands of Reiki users have learned.

All of the benefits of bariatric surgery are also seen during fasting. Simply put, bariatric surgery is surgically enforced fasting

With CNs, it is all about them, but they know how to appear like it isn’t. For example, they despise taking care of you when you are sick or recovering from surgery or an injury. They won’t tell you that, but you feel it. They let you know through passive-aggressive ways. To family and friends, they will tell stories of how much they feel for you and appear to be taking exceptional care of you. They will come across as humble and will be sure to paint a picture of being a great caretaker. People around you will think how lucky you are to have someone so tender and loving by your side. The CN might even do things that look like they are taking care of you, but you will feel their resentment and will find yourself feeling alone and unsupported even though they are doing things that appear to be helpful.

If the low back pain is accompanied by pain in the leg, or sciatica, there is even greater concern and apprehension, for this raises the possibility of the herniated disc and the possibility of surgery. In this media-dominated age, very few people have not heard of herniated discs, and the idea arouses great anxiety, resulting in greater pain. If, in the course of medical investigation, imaging studies show a herniation, the apprehension is multiplied even further. And if there should be feelings of numbness or tingling in the leg or foot and/or weakness, all of which can occur with TMS, because of burgeoning fear, the conditions for a very protracted episode of pain are defined. As will be discussed later, herniated discs are rarely the cause of the pain (see here). There is not a great deal one can do to speed the resolution of such an episode. If the person is fortunate enough to know what is going on, that this is only a muscle spasm and there is nothing structurally wrong, the attack will be short-lived.

You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face - Eleanor Roosevelt

There was a Temple of Asclepius in Greece which was one of the most beautiful in the country, and it was there that sick people came from all over. They were told to lie down on pallets on a great veranda, called the abaton, outside of the temple. The priests would walk in bearing bowls of fire, and the patients were commanded to sleep. There were serpents—a species of large yellowish snake—that were given free run of the temple grounds. The patients were told that when they went to sleep in the temple they would dream, and in their dreams Asclepius would appear to them in the form of a serpent. So, that’s the way they were healed: they were healed by dreaming. Now, science and technology—all of our medical advances—notwithstanding, I think that was a superior way to be healed—by a whole lot—than by going in and having, say, open heart surgery. The Greeks healed by dreaming! We’ve never reached those heights in medicine since. There are many testimonials by patients, carved into the stellae, these stone pillars, attributing their cures to this experience of being touched by the serpents in their dreams.

This is emotional surgery, and as with any surgery, the wounds must be cleaned out before they heal, and it takes time for the pain to go away. But the pain is a sign that the healing process has started.

For example, having been in the rare position of working in the fields of both healing and management, I could not help but notice that the batting average in the war on cancer and the batting average in the struggle to heal chronically troubled institutions are remarkably similar, with cancer perhaps a little ahead. I have been struck by how families, corporations, and other kinds of institutions are constantly trying to cure their own chronic ills through amputations, “strong medicine,” transfusions, and other forms of surgery only to find that, even when successful for the moment, the excised tumor returns several years later in “cells” that never knew the “cells” that left. “New blood” rarely thwarts malignant processes, anywhere. Indeed, with both cancer and institutions, malignant cells that appear to be dead can often revive if they receive new nourishment. Or, to put the problem another way, when we say something has gone into remission, where do we think it has gone?

subsequently had bariatric surgery but that after she’d lost ninety-six pounds she’d become suicidal. It had taken five psychiatric hospitalizations and three courses of electroshock to control her suicidality. Felitti points out that obesity, which is considered a major public health problem, may in fact be a personal solution for many.

Dr. H. K. Beecher is the name of one of the first serious students of pain in the United States. In 1946, he published an article in the Annals of Surgery titled “Pain in Men Wounded in Battle” (Vol. 123, p. 96). For years it was widely quoted because of its most interesting observation. But now Dr. Beecher is passing into obscurity, for what he had to say is no longer acceptable to students of pain. Dr. Beecher questioned 215 seriously wounded soldiers at various locations in the European theater during World War II shortly after they had been wounded and found that 75 percent of them had so little pain that they had no need for morphine. Reflecting that strong emotion can block pain, Dr. Beecher went on to speculate: “In this connection it is important to consider the position of the soldier: His wound suddenly releases him from an exceedingly dangerous environment, one filled with fatigue, discomfort, anxiety, fear and real danger of death, and gives him a ticket to the safety of the hospital. His troubles are over, or he thinks they are.” This observation is reinforced by a report of the United States surgeon general during World War II, noted in Martin Gilbert’s book The Second World War: A Complete History (New York: Henry Holt, 1989), that in order to avoid psychiatric breakdown, infantrymen had to be relieved of duty every so often. The report said, “A wound or injury is regarded not as a misfortune, but a blessing.

So you won’t mend her, right?” Dain asks softly so he can’t be heard outside the curtain. “I’m just asking that the healers do their work and let nature take the time it needs. No magic. She doesn’t stand a chance if she goes back in there in a cast or has to defend herself while her shoulder heals from reconstruction surgery. The last one took her four months. This is our chance to get her out of the Riders Quadrant while she’s still breathing.

So what happened to Pauletich? It’s a question that scientists will continue to puzzle over for years to come. Certainly his experience is among the longest placebo responses ever recorded. Perhaps all he needed was a reason to get more exercise or just break the funk he was in. But what if the suggestion that he’d undergone a new, miraculous surgery somehow changed the functioning of his brain? And what if this extended placebo response over the course of two years helped rewire his brain in some permanent way? What if expectation was the trigger that allowed his brain to identify a problem and fix it on its own?

He had brought his bone saw in its leather case. And his white linen smock, the one he used to save his clothes when he had dirty work in store, and would have Li Chang wash and bleach after. An amputation would be the dirtiest work there was. He remembered the smocks the surgeons wore, layer on layer of red, dried blood darker under fresh red splashes, with the occasional white splinter of bone. Joshua prayed as he rode, prayed hard and desperately, prayed that the smock in his bag would be clean and white when he turned homeward.

He staggered and might have toppled sideways if Clara had not been there, grabbing his arm and steadying him. He turned toward her and saw her read, and then reflect, the anguish in his face. Her grip on his arm went from support to a more frantic clutch. She said under her breath, “You can get through this.” And after a long, shaky breath: “I’ll get you through it.” But her hand was trembling on his arm.

He kept eating, with a stubborn determination like something in a dream, until he heard the door open and close again. There was still some soup in the bowl. He set it on the floor for Major, let his head fall into his hands, and sobbed like a broken-hearted child. Or like a young man, barely more than a boy, waking up with only half a leg.

Studies suggest that placebo pills have the power to give patients as much as 10 percent more mobility, while a sham surgery can provide up to 25 percent more mobility. In other words, surgery is psychologically more powerful than a pill. A common joke among researchers is that the greatest advance in Parkinson’s medicine over the past decade has been the sham surgery.

Meet Dr. Timothy Dembowski, an esteemed chiropractor and clinic director from Atlanta, GA. With a genuine passion for helping people and promoting natural healing, he takes pride in offering alternatives to drugs and surgery. Beyond his professional pursuits, Dr. Dembowski is an avid sports fan, an outdoor enthusiast, and a devoted family man. His adventurous spirit has taken him to various corners of the world, including stunning destinations like St. John's Virgin Island and St. Bart's.

As a result, I would not try to copy the left heal motion of Jack Nicklaus.  If your body flexibility does not allow you to make a full rotation on your backswing without raising your left heal, then by all means, raise your left heal a little.  If you make this small adjustment, be careful not to allow your heal raise to change your spine angle.  What I mean by this clarification is you cannot allow raising your left heal to force your left shoulder higher in relation to your right shoulder.  This changes the angle of your spine during the swing, which is absolutely something you want to avoid.  Not only do you want to avoid changing your spine angle from a ball striking consistency stand point, you also want to avoid changing your spine angle to keep yourself from injuring your back.  Your body has no trouble rotating around the axis the spine creates.  If you start changing this spine angle as you swing, you begin to put pressure on different parts of your spine.  The changing angle redirects the motion around your spine from a circular motion that is free of compression to a motion driving the force of your rotation into compressing your discs.  Do yourself and your body a favor, and do not try and change your spine angle throughout your swing.  Golf should be enjoyed and be pain-free.  Tiger Woods is the most glaring example of this problem.  Tiger always dropped his head as he rotated into his downswing.  Effectively, Tiger was changing his spine angle during the second part of his swing.  Over time, this changing spine angle and the force with which Tiger rotated into his golf shots created a tremendous amount of pressure on his back.  Four back surgeries later, he has been forced to change his swing to keep his spine angle neutral.  Fortunately, if you are using your body to create the rotational movement of your swing and your arms to create the vertical motion of your swing, you will not need to think about your spine angle.

the motivational metamorphosis for most of us is more like a series of seemingly endless surgeries on a patient with massive orthopedic deformities. God carefully assesses, breaks, cuts away, implants, and reshapes why we do what we do—in repeated and lifelong resolve. Jesus is determined to help and heal us so that we will walk with integrity, intentionality, and Christ-centered endurance.

Excuse me? Who here had the bright idea of healing a gunshot wound with the bullet still in it?” All eyes turned to another doctor that had stepped into the hallway. Toriel narrowed her eyes. “That was my doing. You must be Doctor Akron. Doctor Ross mentioned you might stop by.” “I'll bet. Listen to me. What you did put that girl's life in danger. You left contaminated shrapnel in an open wound and sealed it up without even trying to sterilize it.” “I... I am not familiar with the details of human medical treatment-” “Exactly! You have no business making those kinds of calls! All you did was make things worse! Even with the X-Rays we had to perform exploratory surgery to find all of those bullet fragm-” Hal Greene suddenly pushed past the queen and stood face to face with Dr. Akron. “Hi there doctor! You sound cranky, you could use some fresh air!” Before anyone could respond, Hal grabbed the doctor's shoulder, knelt down, pulled, and twisted in one seamless movement that left the doctor in a fireman's carry across his shoulders. “What in the- PUT ME DOWN THIS INSTANT!” “I can't put you down here, you silly billy! The fresh air is outside the building! Let's go! DAH NAH NAAAAAH DAH NAH NAHHHH....” Every person in the hallway watched in confusion as Hal carried the angry doctor on his shoulders, running down the hallway, into the lobby, and presumably outside the building. “...WAS THAT THE ROCKY THEME HE WAS TRYING TO SING?” Papyrus scratched his skull in confusion. “Yeah.” Justin shrugged. “Hal loves underdog stories.

Study after study showed that green spaces shifted the autonomic nervous system from fight-or-flight to rest-and-digest. Consequently, moods, blood pressure, heart rate, and breathing patterns improved, and stress hormone levels decreased. Short doses of nature, including mere photographs of nature, sharpened performance. Other studies showed they increased feelings of generosity and social connectedness. The presence of houseplants in hospital rooms lessened pain and hastened recovery from surgery. Studies of functional brain scans showed regions associated with empathy and love lighting up when exposed to nature scenes, while urban scenes and sounds lit up regions associated with fear and anxiety. I added my next entry to the How to Get Off the Couch list: 4. Get a daily dose of nature.

Early-stage lung cancer is still treated with surgery, which is still regarded the "gold standard." Patients with localized disease have the highest chance of being cured if the tumor and surrounding lung tissue are removed.

In short, anything that promotes a sense of isolation leads to chronic stress and, often, to illnesses like heart disease. Conversely, anything that leads to real intimacy and feelings of connection can be healing in the real sense of the word: to bring together, to make whole.

So we look at a state of the brain in response to a trigger, and in my personal work, this area, cingulate 25, becomes the nexus of the problem. How the rest of the brain responds to a trigger, as a function of your early life experience, your genes, and your temperament, indicates that what the brain is showing us is not the illness, but what the brain is trying to do to restore balance. We can enhance that through different teachings or different kinds of treatment. Consider the metaphor of heart disease. We all know that you shouldn’t smoke and that high cholesterol is a bad risk factor. You should exercise; you shouldn’t eat too many cheeseburgers. But at the point when you have the heart attack, it’s really easy to make the diagnosis that your heart muscle has died. At that point, you are no longer dealing with probabilities. Instead, a specialized test is done to determine the nature of your problem and to match it to the appropriate treatment. For example, if you have one heart vessel clogged, you need to have that single heart vessel opened. Somebody else, who has five heart vessels blocked, will need a different kind of treatment. The heart itself is telling us how it should be treated. Of course, you would like to promise to exercise more and eat fewer cheeseburgers—but only after you survive and have had whatever surgery you need. In cardiology, there is no problem with doing a test to identify how to optimize the short-term and longer-term return to health. We have to take the same approach to the brain, since we are reaching a point where knowing the signal in the brain is potentially very helpful. The state of the brain is really the response, not the cause. It is giving us a signal as to how we might optimize its return to normality. That’s a set of experiments that we are now trying to do. Jack Kornfield: A similar diagnostic process is needed both in meditation teaching and in insight therapy. When people come in to see a teacher, they present specific and unique difficulties, traumas, problems with circumstances in their life, or struggles with their mind and personality. Skillful teaching requires a subtle evaluative process to sense what particular intervention out of the many practices will be most helpful to a given individual. For example, for people with powerful self-critical and judgmental thoughts, a necessary part of meditation instruction will be teaching them how to work with these thoughts. If we don’t attend to this problem, they can do all kinds of other practices, but those self-critical patterns will keep repeating, “You’re not doing it right,” and as a consequence, the other practices they are engaging in may be quite ineffective. Jan Chozen Bays: I want to suggest that we study an intervention that I call media fasting. As I said, we’re not designed as an organism to take in the suffering of the whole world.

So we look at a state of the brain in response to a trigger, and in my personal work, this area, cingulate 25, becomes the nexus of the problem. How the rest of the brain responds to a trigger, as a function of your early life experience, your genes, and your temperament, indicates that what the brain is showing us is not the illness, but what the brain is trying to do to restore balance. We can enhance that through different teachings or different kinds of treatment. Consider the metaphor of heart disease. We all know that you shouldn’t smoke and that high cholesterol is a bad risk factor. You should exercise; you shouldn’t eat too many cheeseburgers. But at the point when you have the heart attack, it’s really easy to make the diagnosis that your heart muscle has died. At that point, you are no longer dealing with probabilities. Instead, a specialized test is done to determine the nature of your problem and to match it to the appropriate treatment. For example, if you have one heart vessel clogged, you need to have that single heart vessel opened. Somebody else, who has five heart vessels blocked, will need a different kind of treatment. The heart itself is telling us how it should be treated. Of course, you would like to promise to exercise more and eat fewer cheeseburgers—but only after you survive and have had whatever surgery you need. In cardiology, there is no problem with doing a test to identify how to optimize the short-term and longer-term return to health. We have to take the same approach to the brain, since we are reaching a point where knowing the signal in the brain is potentially very helpful. The state of the brain is really the response, not the cause. It is giving us a signal as to how we might optimize its return to normality. That’s a set of experiments that we are now trying to do.

Do not be surprised if you fall every day and do not surrender. Stand your ground bravely. And you may be sure that your guardian angel will respect your endurance. A fresh, warm wound is easier to heal than those that are old, neglected, and festering, and that need extensive treatment, surgery, bandaging, and cauterization.

Chlorophyll: builds a high red blood cell count helps prevent cancer provides iron to organs makes the body more alkaline counteracts toxins eaten improves anemic conditions cleans and deodorizes bowel tissues helps purify the liver aids hepatitis improvement regulates menstruation aids hemophilia condition improves milk production helps sores heal faster eliminates body odors resists bacteria in wounds cleans tooth and gum structure in pyorrhea eliminates bad breath relieves sore throat makes an excellent oral surgery gargle benefits inflamed tonsils soothes ulcer tissues soothes painful hemorrhoids and piles aids catarrhal discharges revitalizes vascular system in the legs improves varicose veins reduces pain caused by inflammation improves vision

More than twenty-years-ago I had a dream that opened my eyes to a new reality. I was recovering from surgery which removed five uterine fibroid tumors. Excruciating pain and limited mobility kept me in bed with recurring thoughts about how I had lived my life up to this point. I dosed off to sleep, and found myself in a beautiful garden, having a conversation with an invisible caretaker. It became clear to me that the voice which spoke poetically but emphatically about the healing plants, herbs and trees in the garden was the voice of The Creator.

Conventional medicine, to date, has been definitively based on the linear and materialistic point of view of the upward causation model. This has resulted in a model of healing where the only legitimate therapies are pharmaceuticals, surgery,

My grandson, Rizq, is of age, which is celebrated in Muslim tradition by his circumcision. The day of his surgery I will be throwing him a Rite of Passage celebration party. I wish for you to provide him with some male sensual and sexual education. "Would you be willing to take on this task of being his mentors? I have asked Gaston and Jacques to educate him in heterosexual lovemaking." Andy looked at me for a response. I nodded so he replied, "We will assist this young man to the best of our ability. Thank you for trusting in us to take on this mentorship role. We are most grateful and honored." "Well, that is wonderful. I’d like Rizq to have a few sexual experiences before his circumcision, and then again after he has healed from his surgery. That way he will better understand the different sensations, before and after circumcision,” he replied.

In 1845, Alabama’s J. Marion Sims horrifically started experimenting on the vaginas of eleven enslaved women for a procedure to heal a complication of childbirth called vesicovaginal fistula. The procedures were “not painful enough to justify the trouble” of anesthesia, he said. It was a racist idea to justify his cruelty, not something Sims truly knew from his experiments. “Lucy’s agony was extreme,” Sims later noted in his memoir. After a marathon of surgeries into the early 1850s—one woman, Anarcha, suffered under his knife thirty times—Sims perfected the procedure for curing the fistula. Anesthesia in hand, Sims started healing White victims, moved to New York, built the first woman’s hospital, and fathered American gynecology. A massive bronze and granite monument dedicated to him—the first US statue depicting a physician—now sits at Fifth Avenue and 103rd Street, across from the Academy of Medicine.19

There’s a ritualization to some of these recovery modalities that shouldn’t be overlooked. In a recent editorial, Jonas Bloch Thorlund from the University of South Denmark deconstructed why arthroscopic surgery for meniscal tears remains popular, despite compelling evidence that these procedures are essentially placebos, no better than sham surgery.11 Thorlund notes that surgery represents a ritualistic activity that fosters expectations, much like the way shamans do. There’s the journey to a healing place (the hospital), anointment with a purifying liquid (the presurgical skin prep), and an encounter with the masked healer. As I read this description, I felt a glimmer of recognition, thinking about my experiences visiting recovery centers. In each case, you’re greeted by an empathetic caregiver who walks you through a series of rituals that require various forms of preparation and waiting. It makes me wonder how much power resides in the simple act of putting your trust in a healer and taking part in the ritual on offer.