Superhealing: Engaging Your Mind, Body, and Spirit to Create Optimal Health and Well-Being (ARC) (2 page)

so quickly that your digestive acids don’t have time to dissolve

them.

• Each of your kidneys contains at least a million individual

filters. Every sixty seconds, these filters purify more than

two pints of blood.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many more

remarkable facts to discover that only a huge library could contain them. Your body has an extraordinary capacity to repair many of its own organs and tissues when they’re damaged by either trauma or

disease. For example, when you cut your hand, your body immedi-

ately launches a complex response to repair the wound and ward off possible infections that could be caused by invading organisms.

Along with other processes involved in this response, your skin

cel s instantaneously begin to divide and grow to fill the wound and restore the integrity of your skin. The cel s adjacent to the wound are automatical y stimulated to multiply. The DNA in the nucleus

of each skin cell is reproduced with the help of some of the most

remarkable chemical processes known to exist.

As your cel s begin to multiply, your blood supply is enhanced

to adapt to the unique characteristics of your wound. Your blood

provides the chemicals that are required to help the skin cel s grow: vitamins, minerals, and amino acids (the building blocks of protein).

Then, once your skin cel s have filled in the formerly wounded area, the replication effort is turned off in the cel s, one by one, so that the skin cel s don’t keep on replicating beyond what is needed—thus,

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they avoid causing the creation of a skin tumor. Your body’s cel s know exactly when to grow and exactly when to turn off, so that

when all is said and done, you’re left with a perfect, or nearly perfect, replacement for the skin you lost when you were wounded.

Because your body contains such powerful mechanisms of bio-

chemistry and energetic transformation that promote self-healing

on a molecular level, all the aforementioned types of processes are capable of happening without your conscious awareness or involvement. Your body’s ability to heal itself is so very powerful; in fact, you couldn’t stop yourself from healing that cut if you wanted to!

You can interfere with the process and slow it down, but your body will automatical y do everything within its innate power to repair your wounded tissue.

You can’t stop any of your body’s other automatic functions,

either. This makes it even more interesting that, as contempo-

rary research has shown, your conscious involvement can and

will enhance, support, and promote your body’s innate healing

processes, leading to
superhealing.

Superhealing phenomena are what we are going to explore in this

book.

WHY ARE WE ONLY JUST

NOW FINDING THIS OUT?

Our bodies are natural y designed to express optimal health and

well-being, yet most of us simply haven’t been taught to engage this natural healing capacity to the best of our abilities. This is partly due to cultural forces, such as an absence in the West of a tradition of mental, emotional, and spiritual practices like meditation. In addition, there is the considerable political influence of the pharmaceutical and xiv

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insurance industries and the predominant focus of conventional medicine on the use of drugs, surgery, and technology. It is hard to break the bonds of medical tradition.

In a 2000 medical journal article, Dr. David Sobel, wrote, “Mind/

body medical interventions are often held to a higher standard of

evidence than are traditional ones, and must justify themselves not only by improved health outcomes and quality of care, but also on

the basis of cost alone. Both medical and mind/body health inter-

ventions should be judged by a similar set of criteria, and the beliefs and biases that delay the use of psychosocial interventions need to be challenged.”1

An ounce of prevention truly is worth a pound of cure, for so

many reasons. Since prevention spares us the pain and suffering associated with illness, which can be debilitating and impede our lives and happiness, the comparatively few dol ars it costs to implement preventive measures are far more valuable than the thousands of dol-lars required to treat a disease. In my opinion, the field of medicine is off center, and the influences of the pharmaceutical and insurance industries keep us from having access to the information we need to make the best lifestyle choices for ourselves.

Part of the reason I wrote
Superhealing
is to give you access to this vital, life-giving information. This book might challenge

your beliefs. You will discover that you don’t have to get sick,

that your genes aren’t fixed, and that your family’s medical his-

tory isn’t your destiny. It is how you live that plays the most

significant role in your health; far more important than your

access to medical treatment.

As you may already know, people are sicker today than ever be-

fore. This is ironic and tragic, considering the breathtaking advances in diagnostic technology and medications in the last few decades. In

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the twenty-first century, we Americans are developing chronic dis-

eases at alarming rates and at younger ages. Adult-onset diabetes, or type 2 diabetes, was formerly unheard of in people under forty-five, but now it is a common occurrence among teenagers and even children as young as ten.2 More young children now have fatty deposits in their arteries similar to the condition of people decades older.3

Poor nutrition is fueling an obesity pandemic, and the cancers of old age—breast, prostate, and colon—now regularly occur in men and

women in their twenties.4

Furthermore, we are seeing alarming rates of adverse drug inter-

actions, medical accidents, and harm caused by embracing a tech-

nological approach to health care that appears to have run amuck.5

Medical costs, which are the leading cause of bankruptcy in the

United States, are skyrocketing, and no relief is yet in sight.6 It is therefore essential for you to take your health into your own hands.

Right now is the perfect time for you to learn some simple but

powerful health-giving solutions that arouse your body’s capac-

ity for healing and regeneration. With our new comprehension of

phytonutrients (plant nutrients), the biochemistry of emotion, and epigenetics (environmental and emotional effects on genes)—all evidence of the role of the mind and spirit in the health of the body—

there is so much that you can do to create optimal health and wellbeing.

WHY I WROTE THIS BOOK

I’ve written
Superhealing
because I am committed to helping you learn how to correct imbalances while they are still relatively easily resolved, so you can maintain good health and prevent the development of unnecessary diseases. I also want to show you how to acti-

vate the healing response on every level of your being—mind, body, xvi

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and spirit—so that they work together to reverse more advanced

disease processes. As a physician, I feel privileged to have had the opportunity to witness the manifestation and expression on several occasions of the tremendous innate healing ability that everyone

possesses. Its presence is awesome and powerful, and any descrip-

tion of it is merely a shadow of the experience itself. Nonetheless, it is real.

I’ve seen cancers deemed terminal suddenly disappear from bod-

ies racked with pain and anguish. I’ve seen the dead
return to life, their bodies remarkably unaffected by their death experiences. I’ve watched little children—premature babies too tiny to exist on their own outside an incubator—survive against insurmountable odds.

These and other similar experiences have convinced me of the ur-

gent need for the transformation of our philosophy of and approach to health and healing. These miracles of health and healing need to be available to as many people as possible—they need to be available to
you
—and they are, when superhealing is engaged.

During my first year in medical school, I was amazed by how the

body works. I remember reading Arthur Guyton’s
Textbook of Medical Physiology
and discovering the way that hormones are released and act throughout the entire body, like a symphony of intricate

chemical molecules. While watching a movie on the functioning

of the heart, I was awestruck. Can you imagine how powerful this

relatively small muscle is to provide your entire body with the blood flow it needs to sustain life? It pumps an average of seventy beats per minute, 100,000 times a day, 35 million times a year, and 2.5 billion times in an average lifetime. Witnessing these profound displays of the life force made me wonder how the spirit interacts with the body.

What intelligence is guiding it?

I went to medical school because I believed that I’d be taught how

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doctors help their patients to improve their health. Buzzer, please—

bzzzzzzz.
That didn’t happen, and I’m sure you can imagine that I was deeply disappointed. In my heart I knew that something very

important was missing in my education. I never heard one lecture

on how to create health during my seven years in medical school and residency training. Nutrition was treated like a passing thought. The glaring absence of health-promoting information in the curriculum

was a painful reminder to me of the critical missing link. Medical school was all about managing the symptoms of disease.

Why isn’t the training of doctors focused on health? That’s a re-

al y good, complex question, and the answer can be summarized as

follows: Business forces took hold of medical education more than

a century ago, and since then the focus has been on pharmaceutical drugs, surgery, and technology. That’s just how the allopathic (Western) medical system is set up. Conventional medicine has certainly made amazing strides in certain areas, especial y in diagnosis, disease identification, drug development, and the treatment of acute diseases, such as infections and traumatic injuries. That’s all important stuff. But I didn’t learn what I knew in my heart I needed to know.

My strong desire to discover how I could help people—not only

to reverse their symptoms but also to create true health and well-

being—started me on a remarkable journey thirty years ago that has continued ever since. More and more of my colleagues have begun

to take the same journey. A whole movement to integrate wellness

practices into the medical repertoire and shift our emphasis to prevention is underway. Researchers have identified the significant roles that the mind and spirit play in sustaining our health and well-being, and others have validated the efficacy of relatively simple natural healing techniques. We now know that working on improving our

health through the body alone is like sailing a sailboat with three xviii

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masts with only one open. Healing becomes superhealing when all

three sails are unfurled and catching the wind.

Throughout my three decades of practicing holistic medicine, I’ve

often found myself in the position of answering the health questions of my family, colleagues, coworkers, and friends helped them to find simple solutions that remarkably improved their health and changed their lives, even though they were afraid to tell their doctors how they achieved the results. I have worked in hospitals and in private practice and have served as a public health advocate. My professional approach to medicine is holistic and integrative, and it includes a broad range of therapies that engage and empower my patients,

from nutritional supplements and tai chi to volunteering, listening to music, and engaging in meditation and prayer.

I am a graduate of Brown University and Duke University School

of Medicine, and I completed my residency training at the University of Chicago’s Hospitals and Clinics.

I love to read, write, and express myself creatively in a variety of ways. But more important and meaningful to me than any of my

achievements and credentials is my passion to help people live in

good health and with tremendous well-being.

I believe your health is your greatest wealth, and your life, like the lives of others, is a precious gift. It is a blessing to be alive and to experience the joy that only thriving vitality can bring.

WHAT IS SUPERHEALING?

Superhealing is your innate ability to engage and accelerate your

body’s powerful natural health capacities through active participation in their expression. That means involving your mind, your body, and your spirit to restore the balance that is necessary to open the floodgates of healing that are not under your conscious control. This

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approach may require that you draw upon a broad range of clinical y proven techniques, tools, and processes that speak to your needs and personal preferences. The superhealing approach affirms and recognizes that your essential nature is derived from your spirit, the foundation of all health and well-being.

A superhealing approach emphasizes the importance and necessi-

ty of involving the whole person, all aspects of being, in the creation of optimal wellness. Imagine a continuum of wellness, with optimal health and well-being on the far right and terminal illness on the far left. You can view superhealing as movement from wherever you

begin—even a position of so-called neutrality, represented by a state of health that is seemingly okay but cannot be sustained—toward an increasingly positive state. This approach recognizes and promotes the fundamental innate capacity of the body to heal itself, and the role your various aspects of being play in the process. It acknowledges the role that all aspects of your being—your mind, your body, and your spirit—play in the expression of your health and the development of disease.