Now let me ask you this: What do you think has triggered this cold? Was it sheer coincidence, or was there something deep inside of you (your mind?) that was actually responsible for you coming down with the cold or flu? Well, the truth is that – even though you may not have had the conscious thought that becoming sick would be the solution – your subconscious mind “thought” that if you were sick you couldn‘t go to school or attend the event and “created” the cold. You were most likely completely unconscious of that thought, but your body responded to it nonetheless.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could actually use this ‘feature’ of your mind in a conscious and positive way to create health and well being and cure your body from any disease? Well, the good news is, you can. Unfortunately though, for many people the concept of having the ability to heal themselves by using the power of their mind is still foreign. Yet more and more scientific evidence suggests that it is our mind, or rather the thoughts and the beliefs that we hold in our minds, that decide whether we get sick in the first place, how fast we recover from a disease, or whether we recover at all.

Every medical student learns that the mind can override the body. They learn that some people get better when they are given a “sugar pill”, even though this pill has no medical value whatsoever. It is their belief that this pill is going to help them that does the trick. In the medical field, this phenomenon is called ‘placebo effect’. However, in some scientific fields, this effect is called more appropriately ‘perception effect’ (Rob Williams), or ‘belief effect’ (Bruce Lipton).

Personally, I think that the term ‘belief effect’ is the most appropriate one, as it emphasizes the fact that it is the ‘belief’ that a person holds in their mind that determines the outcome of the treatment. So far, most people believed that this kind of ‘placebo effect’ only worked for patients given drugs or pain killers. However, a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that patients who received a placebo surgery, an arthroscopy for osteoarthritis in the knee, had the same improvement as the patients who had undergone a real operation. Dr. Mosley, the surgeon who executed the operations, says: “My skill as a surgeon had no benefit on these patients. The entire benefit of surgery for osteoarthritis of the knee was the placebo effect.” (For the full article, go tohttp://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa013259#t=articleTop )

We know now that placebos can relieve depression as effectively as Prozac, ease pain with a sugar pill, and even reduce knee or back pain as much as surgeries. Unfortunately, the same process also works in the opposite way, which is then called ‘nocebo’ effect. Nocebo, derived from the Latin meaning ‘to do harm’, is a negative response to something that should cause no harm. For example, if doctors tell patients that a certain procedure will be extremely painful, the patients tend to experience significantly more pain than patients who did not get that warning. Or, if patients were given either a drug with serious side effects or a sugar pill, the patients on sugar pills experienced the same negative side effects than the people on the drugs, if they were warned in advance that those negative effects are likely.

In extreme cases, patients who were mistakenly informed that they have only a few months to live died within the time frame they were given, even though postmortem examinations showed that there was no physiological explanation for their early death. It seems as if the expectations of the patients’ physicians, their families and friends, as well as their own expectations contribute largely to their early death by ‘suggesting’ that there is no hope for them and they are going to die soon.

As you can see from all these examples, it is the mind that is responsible for whether we get sick or not, whether we recover or not, and even, in extreme cases, whether we die or not.
I guess it has become very clear by now that it is absolutely essential that we make our mind our ally in our healing process.

Probably the easiest way to use our mind to heal our bodies is by using our imagination. We all use imagination daily, whether consciously or unconsciously. We use it when we plan a surprise party for a friend, our vacation, or even a business meeting. We see pictures in our mind when we describe an event, explain to someone how to get to a certain street, or write a story. And yet most people never think of using their´imagination when it comes to healing. The reason for that is that nobody ever told us about this powerful tool and explained to us how to use it.

You are creating in your mind an image of something you would like to occur or achieve in real life, such as being pain free, or moving your body fluidly and freely again after an injury, or being free of cancer, to name just a few. You could imagine, for example, that your white blood cells are an army of fearless warriors that are fighting successfully against the cancer cells in your liver, killing each one of those cells with their swords. Or you could imagine that your pain is like snow melting away on a warm spring day. It‘s like creating your own movie in your mind. You are using all of your five senses, sight, sound, touch, smell and taste, to create this image or recreate an experience of being healthy, fit and pain free. You also try to bring in strong positive emotions that would represent the achievement of your goal. This mental experience is helping your body to actually recover much faster and/or getting rid of the pain, or even destroy your cancer cells.

Using creative visualization and imagery can help you manage your pain or control your illness and complement your physical rehabilitation and other treatments. Your unconscious mind cannot distinguish between what is real and what is vividly imagined. By doing his practice daily you suggest to your unconscious mind that what you experience in your mind is real and thus installing the belief that you are already healed, healthy and pain free. And, as you know now, it is your belief that is responsible for your healing, not the pill or the surgery.

I really appreciate that you took the time to come over and leave a comment below.

As I said before, I love to hear from you. I want to hear your stories and answer your questions.

The last couple of months have really been a roller coaster for me. It all started with Dengue Fever, a viral infection transmitted by mosquitoes. The extreme high fever led to dehydration, which in turn caused my existing kidney stones to move. The pain was so horrible and excruciating that it was only bearable by taking morphine.

For weeks I was experiencing constant disorientation, headaches, persistent dizziness, loss of short-term memory, and drowsiness. It was as if I was living in a fog. I couldn’t focus or concentrate – whenever I tried, I would immediately get a headache. I wasn’t living, I was merely existing.

Anything of this sounds familiar to you?

I thought that being so sick was due to the Dengue Fever, but I soon realized that most of the symptoms I was experiencing were negative side effects of the morphine.

This experience brought back the memories of how pain killers had affected my life nearly 20 years ago. If you have read my free report, you remember that at that time I was dealing with excruciating shoulder and back pain. Back then I refused to continue taking any more pain killers after I had realized that I could no longer concentrate and was losing my short-term memory.

Since then, I’ve stayed away from any kind of pain killers and medications. And now, 20 years later, I was experiencing the very same side effects again. However, this time it only took a few days for the side effects to kick in, and not a few months as the first time around.

If I hadn’t known before, these last few weeks really hit home with me again that pain killers can never be the solution to dealing with any kind of pain. The side effects are just too severe. And trust me, there is not one single pain killer out on the market that does not have side effects. So, the only way to avoid the side effects of pain killers is – to NOT take them.

And now I’d love to hear from you.

Tell me if you have ever used morphine or another pain killer or medication and as a result were dealing more with the negative side effects than with the original pain or illness?

What are your experiences with taking medication and/or pain killers?

Could you feel their effects on your body?

Please tell me your experiences in the comment box below.

In love and health,

When you see some cracks in the walls you immediately check if the house lacks foundation. If your car is difficult to handle, especially after you hit a large pothole or the curb, you immediately check the alignment settings in your car. In both cases you make sure that there is a proper structural foundation.

Why is it that doctors rarely check the foundation – the feet – when someone is dealing with back or hip pain? When it comes to the ‘structure’ of our bodies we seem to forget that it needs to have a proper foundation as well.

The most obvious reason why doctors and therapists don’t look at the feet is that they are ‘too far away’ from where the pain is. How can something that is so far away be responsible for the pain in the back?

Well, the answer is pretty simple: If the feet are not fulfilling their proper function as the foundation of the body, all the structures that lie above the feet, like the knee, hip joint, or the spine, have to compensate for that.

The foot as a whole is a very complex structure that has two important functions: weight bearing and moving the body forward. In order for that to happen the foot must give you both stability and flexibility.

If you think about the foot, it has a whole bunch of bones, muscles, and three arches, even though most people are only aware of the big arch at the inside of the foot. Each part of the foot needs to fulfill a certain function while you are standing, walking or running. One of the bones’ vital functions is to spread the weight of the body over the whole foot, while the arches are the body’s number one shock absorbers and adapt to uneven ground.

Your Footprints Tell Your Back Pain Story

Have you ever looked at the footprints you leave in the sand when you are walking along the beach? Have you ever looked at the pattern that other people‘s feet are making in the sand? Have you ever watched how people are walking in general?

Well, if you haven’t, then I invite you to do so. Walk barefoot along the beach and have a look at your footprints. What are they telling you? How are you placing your feet? Are they both turned out? One foot turned out? Both feet turned in? One foot in, one foot out? Can you see the ‘arch’ in the footprint?

Then go out and observe how other people are placing their feet on the ground. This will be very revealing, because you will easily spot different movement patterns. You may be able to see how much tension people are holding not only in their feet, but also in their calves and lower backs.

The most common pattern that you will see is the ‘toeing out’ or duck feet. It is also the saddest pattern, really, because people learn to walk like that. Every time I go out and watch people I am shocked to see that so many kids are walking with their feet turned out, and neither their parents nor their doctors seem to realize that these kids are back pain patients waiting to happen.

This is not the natural way of walking or standing, and completely contradicts how we are supposed to walk. Unfortunately, many doctors will tell you that it is a structural failure of the body that cannot be corrected. But that is simply not true.

Are you holding too much tension in your feet so that the arches are too rigid and cannot work as shock absorbers? Are you clawing your toes, for example, so that the weight can not be distributed properly over the whole foot?

Depending on the way you are standing and walking, certain muscles in your feet, legs, and even your upper body will tighten up. Those tight muscles will shorten over time, while other muscles are not used at all. This will put more stress on the ankle and knee joints, which may lead to cartilage damage, and the hip and spine have to compensate as well.

As I said before, if your feet don’t give you the proper foundation your body needs, all the muscles, joints and tendons that lie above the feet will have to compensate. If you are holding too much tension in the arches of your feet they cannot fulfill their task as shock absorbers. This will ultimately have an impact on your spine as your spine is the next in line of absorbing the impact of every step you take.

Holding too much tension in your arches, or walking and standing with your feet turned out are only two of the many movement patterns that you have learned and developed over the years and that have a very damaging impact on the back.

These walking or standing habits can really make or break your back pain, so you need to find out what movement patterns you have. If you want to heal your back pain for good, you need to give your body a proper foundation. And TRIVAnetics – The Cybernetic Approach To Healing Your Back Pain does exactly that.