wisewords Joe Dispenza on
The Power of Thought Alone to Heal
by Kathleen Barnes M
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ost of us are familiar with the placebo
effect, when actual healing occurs after the only prescription a patient ingests is a sugar pill that the individual believes is medicine. Researcher and Chiropractor Joe Dispenza, of Olympia, Washington, knows the value of the placebo
effect from personal experience. When his spine shattered during a 1986 triathlon race as his bicycle was hit by an SUV, he had a good mental picture of what had happened. Consulting doctors proclaimed a bleak prognosis and offered a risky surgical procedure as his only chance of walking again. He left the hospital against the advice of his physicians and spent the next three months mentally—and physically— reconstructing his spine. His story is one of hope for healing for others, detailed in his latest book, You Are the Placebo: Making Your Mind Matter.
How did your pivotal healing take place? For two hours twice a day, I went within and began creating a picture of my intended result: a totally-healed spine. Nine-and-a-half weeks after the accident, I got up and walked back into my life fully recovered—without having had a body cast or surgeries. I resumed my chiropractic practice 10 weeks out and was training and lifting weights again while continuing my rehabilitation regimen at 12 weeks. Now, in the nearly 30 years since the accident, I can honestly say that I rarely experience any back pain.
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How does your approach differ from mind over matter? It’s the same. So many people have been conditioned into believing that mind and body are separate things. There is never a time when the mind isn’t infl uencing the body and vice versa. The combination is what I call a state of being.
How does the placebo effect work? Think about the idea of giving somebody a sugar pill, saline solution or a false surgery. A certain percentage of those people will accept, believe and surrender—without analysis—to the “thought” that they are receiving the real substance or treatment. As a result, they’ll program their autonomic nervous systems to manufacture the exact same pharmacy of drugs to match the real substance or treatment. They can make their own antidepressants and painkilling medicines. Healing is not something that takes place outside of you.
Can you cite examples of disease in which self-healing has been scientifi cally validated? There is amazing power in the human mind. Some people’s thoughts heal them; some have made them sick and sometimes even hastened their death. In the fi rst chapter of You Are the Placebo, I tell a story about one man who died after being told he had cancer, even though an autopsy revealed he’d been misdiagnosed. A woman plagued by depression for decades improved
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