The Psychobiology of Body-Mind Healing
A science of healing in which a person can gain control of their own biochemistry.
The placebo effect is part of modern medicine. Numerous doctors and therapists use it to consoli-date a treatment, but very few catalyse this mental act on the body for the conscious benefit of a patient, meaning, those who teach someone to use the placebo effect to heal themselves—perhaps thinking that knowing a placebo is a placebo makes it stop working.
While this may be true in some cases, a profound understanding of the mind-body healing functions, could be more powerful, working as an auto-hypnosis capable of surging relaxing hor-mones that fight off toxic responses. The difference lies in becoming our own doctors or being patients —dependent upon somebody else’s knowledge and on the interaction of chemical substances foreign to our bodies. In this dilemma it is worthwhile to men-tion, the alchemical principle of medicine which suggests that the person doing the healing is one-self—the doctor is merely an interface.
In his book, The Psychobiology of Mind-Body Healing, Ernest Lawrence Rossi says: “The placebo is our internal doctor”, surely one of the central texts of the incipient science of psychobiology (the study of mental factors in biological processes). Hypnotherapist of the Erickson School, Rossi has spent the past decades investigating the mechanisms through which the mind is able to act in the body and make things as incredible as curing cancer (as was the case of “Mr. Wright”, which was documented by Philip West).
In his book, he sets forth the missing link or the missing connection in the experiences where the mind can make a difference in the treatment of a disease and the physical manner in which the mind can manifest itself and affect health. Rossi identifies the neural and chemical paths (“messenger hormones”) through which attitudes and emotions are processed by the body creating physiological and biochemical changes. The map of the interactions between the endocrine system, the immunological system and the nervous system, shows that what we believe and think can indubitably have an effect in the way we develop a disease and the inner-workings of our body. What is thought as new age or pseudo-scientific finds in Rossi an impeccable research, which surely will make the most skeptical rethink their vision concerning how the body works in relation to the mind.
The approach outlined in The Psychobiology of Mind-Body Healing, to body-mind healing asserts that the psyche can unfold “symptoms of stress in significant signals” that are orchestrated by the body. However, these same signals can be detected and psychological problems can be transformed into creativity functions. Rossi’s theory maintains that all forms of organization, on biological, physiological and psychological levels are actually expressions of information and its transformations. Information is actually found on a more basic level than matter and energy. In the same way that energy and matter are convertible, information is also converted into energy and matter: this is known as transduction; the basis of body-mind healing. Rossi theorizes that what happens in the limbic-hypothalamic system of the brain (emotions and feelings) can be “transduced” in adopted physical responses of the body.
We highly recommend this book and in general all of Ernest Lawrence Rossi’s work, especially for those looking to attain a deeper knowledge of the self-healing possibilities and the operative mysteries of the human body and its inseparable alliance with the mind. The (voluntary) operational capacity of our bodies is just beginning to be discovered and the work of this American hypnotist is waking us from centuries of dreaming—finally allowing us to feel like we can take control of our own health.
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