Mind-Body-Spirit and the Placebo Effect

00:19 Welcome to episode number three of the health sovereign podcast. In this episode, we'll be diving into points number three and four of the health sovereign tree. Let's dive right in. Number three, I understand that mind body spirit is a system and a multi-way street psychology affects physiology and vice versa. All levels affect all levels. We talked about this a little bit last time, that the different levels which I like to label, physical, energetic, mental, emotional and spiritual, all interplay with each other, and this is important to recognize with healing. So even though you have a physical pain in your body, for instance, you can work on that and sometimes a block is a mental or emotional. One of story just popped in my mind as I was doing my EFT certification. This is emotional freedom technique. I worked with a woman who had a shoulder pain.

01:22 This was chronic shoulder pain that she had for years. I don't remember exactly how many, but quite a few years, maybe eight or 10 or something like that. So we started tapping around it specifically addressing the emotional trauma around when it happened, if I'm remembering correctly, there's probably some other aspects in there that we worked on. At the end of our session, the pain was gone, so it was something she had been carrying. Physically understand, most of us think of pain as a physical thing, but well, pain is actually tricky in a hard thing to measure with this woman. We did some tapping on some meridian end points and saying some stuff around the story and the feelings of it and her pain went away. One of the analogies I like to think of is, well, not an analogies. Science is showing this, right? So every single cell in our body gets turned over.

02:15 Even the, the most dense of materials, our bones, those cells actually get replaced every seven or so years. Other parts of our system, like our blood cells get turned over much faster, like month to month. So every single cell in your body is changing yet a chronic pain such as shoulder pain, back pain, whatever. This can stick around for 20 years, the whole lifetime. So what is keeping that pain in the place? Is it necessarily something physical? Most people would just assume. So once again, this comes to our worldview. What if the thing that is keeping that in place is some sort of mental, emotional or even spiritual block and energetic block that is stopping the body from engaging in the natural healing processes that it possesses. You cut yourself. Do you have to actually do anything for your body to heal? And in fact, can you do anything to make it heal even better?

03:10 I think you certainly can influence this, but the body heals by itself. So when something does not heal, often there is some sort of block there. And these blocks tend not to be physical. That's my experience. And this is why it's important with the thousands of different methodologies that we talked about on the previous episode that you look at ones that do not just focus on the physical because all this stuff interacts. So a little bit of history on how the mind and body got split in the first place. This really, from what I've seen goes back to Descartes, the guy that said, "I think therefore I am." Cognito Ergo sum, if I'm remembering the Latin correctly. This was an interesting thing to take place and how it really shaped our worldview for hundreds of years. The mind and body got split and this can be seen in kind of the split between science and religion.

04:04 There was the okay science, you take the physical, you can take the body, you can take everything that you measure, but we're going to deal with the soul or the spirit here on the religion side, and this was kind of like a division of labor and to one degree or another it seemed to work out, but now we still have this fighting between science and religion, but even within the physical right determinism and behaviorism where you think that human beings and all animals out there are just stimulus response. Descartes, He did some interesting experiments or cruel experiments depending on how you want to look at him. He thought of everything in nature as just like mechanical gears wound in a clock. And it was funny because what actually led him knew this was a mystical experience that he had. He saw like the whole universe turning these cranks like a machine and so he was dissecting dogs while they're alive in order to understand them.

05:05 So with this really, it came down to this philosophy of materialism, which I believe I talk about that in some of the future points. So I won't go super deep into it now, but this idea that everything, just the physical exists and everything can be explained by materials. So even our brain, the mind becomes just the firing of neurons in the brain. All consciousness even can be explained on this. And there's people that still believe this, that we will have it figured out at some point in the future. This is sometimes called promissory materialism because the promise that this philosophy of materialism is going to prove itself out. And of course, materialism has led to lots of great things as well as negative things by looking at the world through this lens, like the hard sciences work. But even with that, right, they figured, oh, we have the whole world mapped out.

06:02 We figured out everything in the universe back in the 19 hundreds they thought there was basically just some t's to cross and some i's to dot. Or more specifically a few more decimal places to make their calculations and they'd have everything figured out. But then boom, in came quantum mechanics, quantum theory, which made it so that this materialism could never solve all the problems. Why? Because Heisenberg's uncertainty principle basically says that you cannot measure everything, that the mere fact of measurement changes the outcome of what is being measured. That consciousness can be involved in things like the double slit experiment looking at light which behaves as a particle and a wave, which one it behaves as, depends on what you are trying to observe. You had a parallel with this golden rules, incompleteness theorem which said essentially that any logical set of conclusions is based on certain things with outside of that system that basically you cannot explain everything going on without assuming certain things are already true.

07:09 So what does this have to do with mind, body and spirit? Although it can be helpful and this is something we do with language, we divide things out. It can be helpful to look at these different components. We have to recognize that it really is all a unified whole. I mean our science is saying everything is all one sign says that. Now mysticism has said that since the very beginning and you have a few mystical experiences, you can enjoy this perspective for yourself. So although this duality of say, mind or body or body and soul can be useful to think about, it is false. Just boil it down, that means it is false. Well, if it's true, right, then we can think about, oh, we can do these physical practices for the physical body and we can let religion or spirituality handle the soul. But once again, that's not how the world actually works.

08:02 So this stuff all needs to be brought together. So healing is not just a physical thing, but exists through all these levels and everything affects one another. This is very important because once again, a lot of us get trapped. Physical body, physical symptoms. Therefore this is a physical problem. Sometimes just physical treatments will work, but oftentimes, and even if it is, that is the case, right? There is mental and emotional trauma built around those physical symptoms. So if you get diagnosed with cancer, we can say, okay, there's a physical tumor in your body and we can treat this with the standard Western methods of chemotherapy, radiation and surgery, all physical treatments, right? Or we can treat this well, of course nothing can treat cancer besides the standard western medical approach, but we can look at other alternative methods and see that a lot of these also work on physical methods, nutrients, detox, changes in diet, in lifestyle or physical things, but also more than that.

09:09 And there are methods that look specifically around treating the mental and emotional trauma of getting a cancer diagnosis. My viewpoint is that cancer or chronic illness, all kinds of things that we have our best looked at as course corrections. You can just treat them on the physical level and then unfortunately you're not going to get the deeper impact in there. So recently I had poison oak really bad on my eye and my genitals. How I got it there, I got some of the oils on my hand. I thought I was washing them off, apparently not well enough. So I had the poison oak oils for people not familiar with poison oak had similar to poison ivy or Sumac, I believe there's tons of it here on the west coast of the u s so I got these oils on my hand and then spread them to these other areas and it got very swollen, both my eye and the other area.

10:06 I ended up going out to this event despite my disfigurement and while people offered me some physical medicine, some things that would have brought down the swelling, I decided not to go that route because well I don't take pharmaceutical medicine. That's just kind of something I personally decided to live by unless it is absolutely necessary. And since making this part of my philosophy, I've not found a single case where it is absolutely necessary for me. I ended up working with some energy healers and they were there at the event. They offered their help. I was like, yes, let's try it out and see what happens. So low intervention type of treatment and is interesting because in doing this mental and emotional stuff came up. I could even say that there was a spiritual lesson, and this goes to how I'm framing things, right, but definitely mental and emotional lessons around this where I got it on my body, what that was involved in, and I won't go into all the details of that, but it was very interesting to see these layers of healing be involved in this physical symptom of swelling of the eyes and genitals from physically touching this oil.

11:16 But there was more than just the physical there and had I just treated it physically, I would not have gotten these other layers uncovered, which I found very illuminating. So that was very good case in point and I feel like I got this just so I could learn this lesson, although that wasn't even everything there. It was very interesting to see how the mind, body and spirit all work together with something like contact with poison oak, which seems to be keep getting me for a reason. I hope I've learned those lessons and will not need to suffer through that again. So now I want to move onto point number four. Think I've covered 0.3 quite well there you either get it or you don't. Point number four, I will understand and harness the placebo effect for my own betterment a the placebo effect. This is a very fun subject.

12:06 I've been interested in this for years. It really started getting interested in it when I started delving more into psychology with my neuro linguistic programming training and even further as I continued down health. Just looking at all these things, I wrote a great article about this over at lost empire. herbs.com/placebo-effect. We'll link to that in the show notes, but I'll be talking about some of the points covered in that article as well. To me, most cool things to learn about the placebo effect that most people do not know is placebo surgeries perform as well as actual surgeries in several circumstances. Certainly not all. So what they do in these cases is they get the person prep for surgery, they will a man, they anesthetize them. Then they do like an incision in the area, but there's no actual surgery performed and these performers as well as real surgeries.

13:01 Right. So we often think of surgery. Okay. It's a physical thing. It is the height of western science and medicine and it's not doing more than placebo in some cases. And there's quite a few different ones. Things around the heart looking at joint surgeries with the knees, all kinds of different cases. They actually have not performed that this many of them because they say there's an ethical problem with doing these placebo surgeries, which I find kind of ridiculous because if you don't find out whether surgeries are actually useful or not, then is that not an ethical problem in and of itself. So again, height of technology of Western medicine does not perform as well as or only performs as well as placebo in some cases. The next time a surgeon tells you you need to get surgery, think twice about it. You have to understand to a doctor they want to use their tools.

13:55 Who a surgeon, their tool is surgery. So they're going to see the need for surgery in more cases than is actually necessary. And this is even if they're well meaning they really care. They probably believe it themselves. You have to look at more than one opinion. And once again go outside just the standard medical field for those opinions. I would encourage, another thing about placebos is they work sometimes in some studies, even when you know it's placebo. So you know it's not a real intervention. You know it's a sugar pill or I don't know if they've done this with surgeries, but you know you're not getting real surgery and yet it still works. How so here's the thing about placebo effect and why I say in this point understand and harness the placebo effect for my own betterment. You can make use of this. So as I said before, nothing works for everyone.

14:49 No method, no modality works for every single person. There's placebo effects in everything. So even if something has a real effect, if you believe in it, it may have a greater effect than it actually does. So this means it would be wise if you want to get an effect to really believe in anything that you do, whether this is chemotherapy or homeopathic medicine, anything that you do, having your belief behind it is likely to make it work better. And this can happen on top of of real effect, but certainly happens on top of no effects. So that's why I want you to harness it and to harness it. You want to understand it. Some things about placebos is two pills tends to work better in one. A injection using a needle works better than a pill. A more expensive placebo works better than a less expensive one.

15:39 Behind these three things we can look at. The reason why is that a bigger intervention tends to put more skin in the game. So by having it be more expensive or doing something that's an injection rather than pills or more pills. These things we tend to believe in. The more we have a higher expectation that they'll work because they are a bigger, a more expensive intervention. We can also see that different color placebo pills work better for different things. Why is this simple? Things like the Association of the color to in effect, so like a blue pill for most Americans in this different effects in different countries. With this, a blue pill is going to be more sedating than a red pill. This is important stuff to understand because then we can see that if we can use certain things like color associations, we can possibly use some with lower types of interventions, but ones that actually work say on the mental and emotional level, I don't pass it as much.

16:36 That might be interesting to do. An interesting story I heard about this long time ago, the founders at NLP, Richard Bandler and John Grinder wanted to market and sell placebo pills saying they're 30% effective for everything. They actually did some research as far as putting this out there and didn't go through with it for one reason or another, but today there is someone selling placebo pills. The x pill by Robbie Richmond. I actually met him at an event and we did a whole ceremony around this. It's very interesting, but the guy is selling placebo pills. Why? Well, there's a methodology behind it. If you set your intention and work with this placebo pill, then people are finding it works for stuff. Why? Because the placebo works. If we know placebo works, even if we know it's a placebo, then why are we not harnessing this effect for herself and why are we focusing so much on, I mean, there's reasons to focus on the whole gold standard of science in medicine is to test something against a placebo in a well-controlled style double-blind.

17:41 So people do not know the placebo effect because that will influence it. Even though we've shown that when you know it's a placebo can still work, this whole thing is set up so we can find things that work better than placebo. And yet how much attention is aimed at actually just harnessing the placebo effect for ourselves. I would argue that since we're getting such great results with placebo, then it's a good thing to do. And yet still there's drugs out there, right? That have been shown to not be working any better than placebo, like SSRI as antidepressants and there's still a widely sold, widely used and sure they're probably helping some people, but they're also giving really bad side effects to some people including some murderous rampages. It seems that is one of the worst side effects that happens with those. Some other important details to know is that there can be placebo side effects.

18:32 This is known as the no CBO, so placebo in Latin means I shall please, nocebo means I shall harm. This can be a tricky one too because placebos is, we might think of that as no intervention, but depending on how it's set up, side effects can happen as well. So if people are told they're taking a drug and this drug has such side effects, then they often get those side effects. This is something we need to know and something we need to look at further. But if we take something like homeopathics right. I talked a little bit about this in the last episode, so was low intervention. I'm not aware of homeopathics having any side effects. So people say there's nothing there, so how can it possibly work? Well, a reliably works as a placebo if nothing else. I've had good results with homeopathics.

19:18 Many other people have and some studies are showing that they work even though the actual best use of them seems to be in a clinical setting. And here's something about that clinical setting, right? So we understand that mind, body, and spirit are not separate. If we do any intervention, can we understand the psychology behind setting up that and intervention to best coax out this placebo effect and doing that in addition to something that actually has a real effect too. Why are we not researching and figuring out how to do this? Well, I'd be really good clinicians because they have a lot of experience in doing this. Actually do that. There's also the reverse placebo effect. So sometimes this has confused with nocebo, nocebo specifically has to do with placebos that caused side effects. The reverse placebo effect. That's why I like to call is can you stop something from working because you don't believe in it.

20:08 It's just the same power of mind. Spirit. However you want to talk about it working in the opposite direction. So don't believe in herbs even though they're proven to work and it's not gonna work or less of an effect. So this is very important stuff to understand how our psychology affects the things that are happening out there. And if you can understand this, then it can be involved in what you do. So any intervention you're doing for your health, it is best to not work on it or think about it as a detached, observant scientist subject and object being separate, which quantum physics showing, not actually. So why not? Instead, fully believe that you're going to get results with something and sure it's not always gonna work and you can't necessarily just easily change your belief, although there are processes of doing that. But if we can harness the placebo effect on top of real effects, why not do so?

21:04 There's a lot more about that. Once again, I will link to the article in the show notes. This will be health sovereign.com/three the numeral three will take you there and you can see the link, read about more details and link to all the primary research in which this kind of stuff was done. To recap, mind, body and spirit is all one thing. We can look at the different levels to hopefully guide through our lives, but to recognize them as separate is false. And we want to really bring them together to recognize how that affects our health. And then the placebo effect is showing exactly that. Our belief in an intervention can change the physical. So it's putting the previous point right in action there. So with those knee surgeries, if you look at the actual case study, so there's a guy like crippled to the point of being in a wheelchair, gets the placebo knee surgery, and he's out playing basketball, completely changed his life of a placebo knee surgery.

22:03 Understand that, understand we know next to nothing about how health really works in the standard worldview. But this information is out there. I'll look it up, learn, educate yourself, take responsibility for yourself, become a sovereign. And you'll get better results. Once again, this show is made possible by the work of lost empire herbs, which you can find at lost empire, herbs.com herbs that really work for your health. What we specialize in is herbs that you can actually feel an impact from. I think so many people end up taking supplements based on faith and that can be good. Faith can be a good thing. As we've just shown faith in an intervention seems to work out quite great, but if you can have a feelable impact from a nervy take some then and you feel it, feel its effects in whether that's more energy, mental clarity, better sleep, what have you, then you know that thing is working for yourself.

22:58 Sure. Some people might say it's just placebo effect, but hey, I'm interested in results, aren't you? So lost empire herbs so you can go take those herbs and remember, believe in the herbs too and you may get even better affects that real effect. Plus the placebo effects lostempireherbs.com that's gonna wrap it up for this episode. We will be back again next week with the next couple of points. I hope you're really enjoying this. As always, leave a review on iTunes. Send your comments in, love to hear what you want to hear on the health sovereign podcast in the future. Thank you very much and I'll talk to you next time.