1

Is there scientific proof we can heal ourselves? By Lissa Rankin at TEDxAmericanRiviera

(Transcript)
Can the mind really heal the body? And if so, is there any scientific evidence to convince skeptical
physicians like me?
These are the questions that fueled the last few years of my research and what I discovered is
that the scientific community, the medical establishment, has been proving for over 50 years, that
the mind can heal the body. We call it the placebo effect. And we’ve been trying to outsmart it for
decades.
The placebo effect is a thorn in the side of the medical establishment. It’s an inconvenient truth
that gets in between, trying to bring new treatments, new surgeries into the medical establishment.
So it’s a problem. Supposedly.
But I actually think, this is really good news. The placebo effect is excellent news. Because it’s
concrete evidence that the body holds within it innate self-repair mechanisms that can make
unthinkable things happen to the body.
So, if you find this surprising, if you have a hard time believing that the body can heal itself, you
need look no further than The Spontaneous Remission Project, a database compiled by the
Institute of Noetic Sciences of over 3500 case studies in the medical literature of patients who
have gotten better from seemingly incurable illnesses.
You think there’s such a thing as an incurable illness? I swear, if you go look at this database, it
will blow your mind. Everything is in there. Stage 4 cancers that disappeared without treatment.
HIV positive patients, that became HIV negative. Heart disease, kidney failure, diabetes, high
blood pressure, thyroid disease, autoimmune diseases, gone.
A great example of this in the medical literature, is a case study from 1957 of Mr. Wright who had
advanced lymphosarcoma. So, things weren’t going well for Mr. Wright, time was really running
out. He had tumors the size of oranges in his armpits, his neck, his chest, his abdomen. His liver
and spleen were enlarged, and his lungs were filling up with two quarts of milky fluid every day
that had to be drained in order for him to breathe.
But Mr. Wright wasn’t giving up hope. He had heard about this wonder drug called Krebiozen,
and he was begging his doctor, “Come on, just give me some of that Krebiozen, it’s all going to
be good.”
Now, unfortunately the Krebiozen was only available on a research protocol and the protocol
required that the doctor be able to make an assessment that says that this guy has at least three
months to live. And his doctor, Dr. West just couldn’t do that.
But Mr. Wright was tenacious and he didn’t give up. He kept badgering his doctor, until finally his
doctor was like, “Okay, fine I’ll give you the Krebiozen.”
So he dosed him up on a Friday, not expecting that Mr. Wright would make it through the
weekend. But to his utter shock, when Dr. West came in to do rounds on Monday, Mr. Wright was
up, walking around the wards, and his tumors had shrunk to half of their original size. They had
melted like snowballs on a hot stove. And 10 days after getting the Krebiozen, they were gone.
 2

So Mr. Wright was up rocking and rolling like crazy and Krebiozen is the miracle drug he believed
it to be, for two months, until the initial reports came out about Krebiozen that said that it didn’t
really look like Krebiozen was working so well.
Mr. Wright fell into a deep depression and his cancer came back. So this time Dr. West decided
to get sneaky, and he told his patient that “You know that Krebiozen that you got, that was a
tainted version, really not so good.
But I got us some ultrapure highly concentrated Krebiozen, this stuff’s got it going on.
He then injected Mr. Wright with nothing but distilled water. And once again, the tumors
disappeared, the fluid in his lungs went away. Mr. Wright was up rocking and rolling for another
two months.
And then the American Medical Association blew it, by publishing on a nationwide study that
proved definitively that Krebiozen was worthless.
Two days later, Mr. Wright after hearing this news died.
Soon after that, I came across another study in the medical literature that was the stuff of fairy
tales. Three baby girls were born, delivered by a midwife, on Friday the 13th in the Okefenokee
Swamp, near the Georgia-Florida border. And the midwife pronounced that these three babies,
born on such a faithful day, were all hexed.
The first, she said, would die before her 16th birthday. The second, before her 21st. The third,
before her 23rd birthday.
And as it turned out, the first girl died the day before her 16th birthday, the second died the day
before her 21st birthday, and the third girl, who knew what had happened to the other two, got
wind of that, and the day before her 23rd birthday, she showed up at the hospital hyperventilating,
begging them, to make sure she survived. She wound up dying that night.
These two case studies are great examples from the medical literature of the placebo effect, and
its opposite, the nocebo effect.
So Mr. Wright, when he got that distilled water and his tumors melted away, that’s a great example
of the placebo effect. When you get a seemingly inert treatment and yet something is happening
physiologically in the body, such that the disease goes away.
The nocebo effect is the opposite. So the three hexed girls are an example of the nocebo effect.
When the minds believed that something bad is going to happen in the body then it comes to
manifest.
So the scientific literature that medical journals like the New England Journal of Medicine and the
Journal of the American Medical Association, these scientific journals are full of evidence that the
placebo effect, and the nocebo effect are incredibly powerful. We’ve known this since the 1950s,
and we’ve seen countless case studies that showed that in almost everything you study, if you
give people a fake treatment, a sugar pill, a saline injection, or most effectively, a fake surgery –
yeah, really – 18% to 80% of the time, people get better.
 3

And it’s not just in the mind, that’s what I thought in the beginning, like “Oh! They’re just feeling
better, they’re thinking better.” But it is not. It’s actually in their physiology. This is measurable.
You can actually see what happens to the body.
So for example patients getting placebos were found to have ulcers that healed, colons that
became less inflamed, bronchia that dilated, warts that disappeared, cells looked different under
the microscope. It’s provable, it’s happening in the body, even though it’s initiated by the mind.
So, when you look at these, some of the studies are just amazing. I love the Rogaine studies. You
get a bunch of bald men, you give them placebos. They grow hair!
The opposite is also true. So if you give people a placebo and you tell them it’s chemotherapy,
they vomit, and they lose their hair. So this is really happening in the body.
And the question I have is – Is it just the mind’s positive belief that’s making this happen? Not
according to Harvard researcher Ted Kaptchuk. According to him, he thinks that the most
essential part is actually the nurturing care of a health care provider, more so even than the mind’s
positive belief that some of the studies actually say that the doctor is the placebo or can be.
So Ted Kaptchuk wanted to study this, and he did a great study looking at patients that were
getting placebos for an illness, for treatment of an illness and he told them, “You’re getting a
placebo, there’s nothing in here, inert ingredients, nothing active.” They still got better.
Most likely, Kaptchuk postulated, because they felt tended, nurtured, they felt like they were doing
something, they felt like somebody cared.
So to say that you can heal yourself is sort of a misnomer. You know, the body can heal itself.
The body has this innate natural self-repair mechanisms, but the scientific data proves that you
need the tending nurturing care of a healthcare provider, of some sort of a healer, to facilitate that
process. It’s not an easy process to go through alone, so it makes a big difference if somebody
else is holding that positive belief with you.
But the problem is while the doctor can be the placebo, the doctor can also be the nocebo. So,
what patients need from us, as healthcare providers, they need us to be forces of healing, not
forces of fear or pessimism.
So every time your doctor tells you, “You have an incurable illness, you’re going to have to take
that medication for the rest of your life,” Or God forbid, you get cancer and they say, “You’ve got
a 5%, five year survival rate”. It’s really no different than when that midwife told those three baby
girls that they were hexed. It’s a form of medical hexing that’s so prevalent. As doctors, we think
we’re being realistic, you know? We’re giving people the kind of information we think they need
to know, but we actually can be harming them.
Instead we need to be more like Dr. West. You know? Picking that distilled water, “Really Mr.
Wright, I promise, this is going to do it for you.”
But do we have to count on our doctors to dupe us? Do we have to get fake surgeries and fake
drugs, and wind up in clinical trials? This is what led the next phase of my research.
 4

So in my last TEDx talk, l talked about a new wellness model that I developed, called the Whole
Health Cairn, and this came about as part of my research, trying to find how else can we harness
this mind’s power that’s clearly evidenced by the placebo effect and the nocebo effect, can we do
something without being in a clinical trial? And my hypothesis was that in order to heal ourselves,
in order to be optimally healthy, we need more than just a good diet, regular exercise program,
getting enough sleep, taking your vitamins, following your doctor’s orders. Those things all are
great, and critical and important.
But I also came to believe that we need healthy relationships, a healthy professional life, a healthy
creative life, a healthy spiritual life, a healthy sex life, a healthy financial life, a healthy
environment. In essence, we need a healthy mind.
So I wanted to try to prove this, and I went into the medical literature and the copious data that I
found, proving that all of those things are essential, really blew my mind. I compiled them all into
my upcoming book, Mind Over Medicine: Scientific Proof That You Can Heal Yourself.
But I want to give you a few highlights about what this is all about. So you can see from the Whole
Health Cairn, that all of these facets are built upon a foundation stone that I call your inner pilot
light. And for me that’s the essential authentic part of you, that knows what’s true for you. That’s
willing to tell you the truth about maybe what’s out of alignment in your life, what stones in your
whole health cairn might be out of balance.
And as you see I’ve put the body, physical health, on the top of the whole health cairn because
it’s the most fragile, the most precarious, and the most easy to kind of fall out of balance if other
things in your life aren’t going so well.
So what I found in the medical data is that relationships matter. People who have a strong social
network have half the rate of heart disease compared to those who are lonely. Married people are
twice as likely to live long lives as unmarried people. In fact, curing your loneliness may be the
most important measure of prevention you can enact upon your body. More so than quitting
smoking or starting to exercise.
Your spiritual life matters. Those who attend religious services live up to fourteen years longer.
Your professional life matters. You really can work yourself to death. In Japan they call it karoshi.
Death by overwork, and the survivors of those who die of karoshi, can actually apply for
workmen’s comp like benefits in Japan.
But it’s not just Japan, it’s actually happening even more in the United States, we just don’t get
benefits here.
So they did one study and they found that people who fail to take their vacation, are actually a
third more likely to get heart disease.
The attitude really matters. Happy people live 7 to 10 years longer than unhappy people, and
optimists are 77% less likely to get heart disease than pessimists.
So how does this happen? What is happening in the brain that is making the body change? This
is what’s fascinating to me.
 5

What I found is that the brain communicates with all the cells in the body via hormones and
neurotransmitters. So, for example, if you have a negative thought, belief or feeling in the brain,
your brain triggers this as a threat. Something’s wrong. If you feel lonely or pessimistic, things are
bad at work, you are in a toxic relationship, the amygdala says, “Τhreat! Τhreat!” and it turns on
the hypothalamus, that talks to the pituitary gland, that communicates with the adrenal gland and
the adrenal gland start spitting out stress hormones like cortisol, norepinephrine, epinephrine.
Ιt turns on what Walter Cannon at Harvard calls the stress response, that triggers the sympathetic
nervous system, and puts you into that fight or flight mode, which is adaptive, it’s protective if you
are running away from a mountain lion, but in everyday life, you’re supposed to have that quick
stress response if there is a threat and then it’s supposed to switch right off. This isn’t what
happens in our regular lives these days.
But fortunately there is a counter balance in relaxation response that Herbert Benson at Harvard
described. And when this comes about, the stress response turns off, the parasympathetic
nervous system turns on, and healing hormones like oxytocin, dopamine, nitric oxide, endorphins
fill the body and bathe every cell in the body.
What I found the most amazing about this is that those natural self-repair mechanisms that we all
have they only flip on when the nervous system is relaxed. So when you’re having stress
responses, all those natural self-repair mechanisms get flipped off. The body is too busy trying to
fight or flee, in order to heal itself.
So, when you think about this, you have to start to wonder like, how can I possibly start to change
the balance in my own body? So one study showed that on average we have more than 50 stress
responses per day. And if you’re lonely, or depressed or pessimistic or unhappy at work or in a
miserable relationship that number is going to be more than twice as many.
Now this relaxation response is what researchers think explains the placebo effect. So when
you’re going to get supposedly maybe a new wonder drug — you don’t know whether you’re
getting the placebo or not — it triggers that relaxation response, that combination of the mind’s
positive belief and the nurturing care of a healthcare provider relaxes the nervous system. And
then all those natural self-repair mechanisms can come into play.
Fortunately though you don’t have to be in a clinical trial to turn on your relaxation responses.
There are lots of simple pleasurable activities that turn on the relaxation responses and these
have been proven in the medical literature.
So you can meditate, you can express yourself creatively, you can get a massage, do yoga or tai
chi, you can go out with your friends, you can do work that you love, you can have sex, you can
laugh, you can exercise, you can play with animals.
So I ask you to consider the Whole Health Cairn in your own life. Which stones in your Whole
Health Cairn might be out of balance? Each of these stones can be a factor for creating stress
responses or relaxation responses. How might you turn on more relaxation responses in your
body? And most importantly, what does your body need in order to heal? What prescription do
you need to write for yourself? And are you going to be brave enough to take action on the truth
of what your inner pilot light already knows?
 6

But I also came to believe that we need healthy relationships, a healthy professional life, a healthy
creative life, a healthy spiritual life, a healthy sex life, a healthy financial life, a healthy
environment. In essence, we need a healthy mind.
So I wanted to try to prove this, and I went into the medical literature and the copious data that I
found, proving that all of those things are essential, really blew my mind. I compiled them all into
my upcoming book, Mind Over Medicine: Scientific Proof That You Can Heal Yourself.
But I want to give you a few highlights about what this is all about. So you can see from the Whole
Health Cairn, that all of these facets are built upon a foundation stone that I call your inner pilot
light. And for me that’s the essential authentic part of you, that knows what’s true for you. That’s
willing to tell you the truth about maybe what’s out of alignment in your life, what stones in your
whole health cairn might be out of balance.
And as you see I’ve put the body, physical health, on the top of the whole health cairn because
it’s the most fragile, the most precarious, and the most easy to kind of fall out of balance if other
things in your life aren’t going so well.
So what I found in the medical data is that relationships matter. People who have a strong social
network have half the rate of heart disease compared to those who are lonely. Married people are
twice as likely to live long lives as unmarried people. In fact, curing your loneliness may be the
most important measure of prevention you can enact upon your body. More so than quitting
smoking or starting to exercise.
Your spiritual life matters. Those who attend religious services live up to fourteen years longer.
Your professional life matters. You really can work yourself to death. In Japan they call it karoshi.
Death by overwork, and the survivors of those who die of karoshi, can actually apply for
workmen’s comp like benefits in Japan.
But it’s not just Japan, it’s actually happening even more in the United States, we just don’t get
benefits here.
So they did one study and they found that people who fail to take their vacation, are actually a
third more likely to get heart disease.
The attitude really matters. Happy people live 7 to 10 years longer than unhappy people, and
optimists are 77% less likely to get heart disease than pessimists.
So how does this happen? What is happening in the brain that is making the body change? This
is what’s fascinating to me.
What I found is that the brain communicates with all the cells in the body via hormones and
neurotransmitters. So, for example, if you have a negative thought, belief or feeling in the brain,
your brain triggers this as a threat. Something’s wrong. If you feel lonely or pessimistic, things are
bad at work, you are in a toxic relationship, and the amygdala says, “Τhreat! Τhreat!” and it turns
on the hypothalamus, that talks to the pituitary gland, that communicates with the adrenal gland
and the adrenal gland start spitting out stress hormones like cortisol, norepinephrine, epinephrine.
It turns on what Walter Cannon at Harvard calls the stress response, that triggers the sympathetic
nervous system, and puts you into that fight or flight mode, which is adaptive, it’s protective if you
are running away from a mountain lion, but in everyday life, you’re supposed to have that quick
 7

stress response if there is a threat and then it’s supposed to switch right off. This isn’t what
happens in our regular lives these days.
But fortunately there is a counter balance in relaxation response that Herbert Benson at Harvard
described. And when this comes about, the stress response turns off, the parasympathetic
nervous system turns on, and healing hormones like oxytocin, dopamine, nitric oxide, endorphins
fill the body and bathe every cell in the body.
What I found the most amazing about this is that those natural self-repair mechanisms that we all
have they only flip on when the nervous system is relaxed. So when you’re having stress
responses, all those natural self-repair mechanisms get flipped off. The body is too busy trying to
fight or flee, in order to heal itself.
So, when you think about this, you have to start to wonder like, How can I possibly start to change
the balance in my own body? So one study showed that on average we have more than 50 stress
responses per day. And if you’re lonely, or depressed or pessimistic or unhappy at work or in a
miserable relationship that number is going to be more than twice as many.
Now this relaxation response is what researchers think explains the placebo effect. So when
you’re going to get supposedly maybe a new wonder drug — you don’t know whether you’re
getting the placebo or not — it triggers that relaxation response, that combination of the mind’s
positive belief and the nurturing care of a healthcare provider relaxes the nervous system. And
then all those natural self-repair mechanisms can come into play.
Fortunately though you don’t have to be in a clinical trial to turn on your relaxation responses.
There are lots of simple pleasurable activities that turn on the relaxation responses and these
have been proven in the medical literature.
So you can meditate, you can express yourself creatively, you can get a massage, do yoga or tai
chi, you can go out with your friends, you can do work that you love, you can have sex, you can
laugh, you can exercise, you can play with animals.
So I ask you to consider the Whole Health Cairn in your own life. Which stones in your Whole
Health Cairn might be out of balance? Each of these stones can be a factor for creating stress
responses or relaxation responses. How might you turn on more relaxation responses in your
body? And most importantly, what does your body need in order to heal? What prescription do
you need to write for yourself? And are you going to be brave enough to take action on the truth
of what your inner pilot light already knows?
I believe our healthcare system is badly broken, and it’s largely because we’ve lost respect for
the body’s ability to heal itself. The medical establishment has gotten arrogant. We’ve come to
think that with all of our modern technology, and all that we’ve learned in the past century, that
we’ve mastered nature, and we find it repelling to think that maybe nature could be better than
we are sometimes.
But I also came to believe that we need healthy relationships, a healthy professional life, a healthy
creative life, a healthy spiritual life, a healthy sex life, a healthy financial life, a healthy
environment. In essence, we need a healthy mind.
 8

So I wanted to try to prove this, and I went into the medical literature and the copious data that I
found, proving that all of those things are essential, really blew my mind. I compiled them all into
my upcoming book, Mind Over Medicine: Scientific Proof That You Can Heal Yourself.
But I want to give you a few highlights about what this is all about. So you can see from the Whole
Health Cairn, that all of these facets are built upon a foundation stone that I call your inner pilot
light. And for me that’s the essential authentic part of you, that knows what’s true for you. That’s
willing to tell you the truth about maybe what’s out of alignment in your life, what stones in your
whole health cairn might be out of balance.
And as you see I’ve put the body, physical health, on the top of the whole health cairn because
it’s the most fragile, the most precarious, and the most easy to kind of fall out of balance if other
things in your life aren’t going so well.
So what I found in the medical data is that relationships matter. People who have a strong social
network have half the rate of heart disease compared to those who are lonely. Married people are
twice as likely to live long lives as unmarried people. In fact, curing your loneliness may be the
most important measure of prevention you can enact upon your body. More so than quitting
smoking or starting to exercise.
Your spiritual life matters. Those who attend religious services live up to fourteen years longer.
Your professional life matters. You really can work yourself to death. In Japan they call it karoshi.
Death by overwork, and the survivors of those who die of karoshi, can actually apply for
workmen’s comp like benefits in Japan.
But it’s not just Japan, it’s actually happening even more in the United States, we just don’t get
benefits here.
So they did one study and they found that people who fail to take their vacation, are actually a
third more likely to get heart disease.
Τhe attitude really matters. Happy people live 7 to 10 years longer than unhappy people, and
optimists are 77% less likely to get heart disease than pessimists.
So how does this happen? What is happening in the brain that is making the body change? This
is what’s fascinating to me.
What I found is that the brain communicates with all the cells in the body via hormones and
neurotransmitters. So, for example, if you have a negative thought, belief or feeling in the brain,
your brain triggers this as a threat. Something’s wrong. If you feel lonely or pessimistic, things are
bad at work, you are in a toxic relationship, the amygdala says, “Τhreat! Τhreat!” and it turns on
the hypothalamus, that talks to the pituitary gland, that communicates with the adrenal gland and
the adrenal gland start spitting out stress hormones like cortisol, norepinephrine, epinephrine.
Ιt turns on what Walter Cannon at Harvard calls the stress response, that triggers the sympathetic
nervous system, and puts you into that fight or flight mode, which is adaptive, it’s protective if you
are running away from a mountain lion, but in everyday life, you’re supposed to have that quick
stress response if there is a threat and then it’s supposed to switch right off. This isn’t what
happens in our regular lives these days.
 9

But fortunately there is a counter balance in relaxation response that Herbert Benson at Harvard
described. And when this comes about, the stress response turns off, the parasympathetic
nervous system turns on, and healing hormones like oxytocin, dopamine, nitric oxide, endorphins
fill the body and bathe every cell in the body.
What I found the most amazing about this is that those natural self-repair mechanisms that we all
have they only flip on when the nervous system is relaxed. So when you’re having stress
responses, all those natural self-repair mechanisms get flipped off. The body is too busy trying to
fight or flee, in order to heal itself.
So, when you think about this, you have to start to wonder like, How can I possibly start to change
the balance in my own body? So one study showed that on average we have more than 50 stress
responses per day. And if you’re lonely, or depressed or pessimistic or unhappy at work or in a
miserable relationship that number is going to be more than twice as many.
Now this relaxation response is what researchers think explains the placebo effect. So when
you’re going to get supposedly maybe a new wonder drug — you don’t know whether you’re
getting the placebo or not — it triggers that relaxation response, that combination of the mind’s
positive belief and the nurturing care of a healthcare provider relaxes the nervous system. And
then all those natural self-repair mechanisms can come into play.
Fortunately though you don’t have to be in a clinical trial to turn on your relaxation responses.
There are lots of simple pleasurable activities that turn on the relaxation responses and these
have been proven in the medical literature.
So you can meditate, you can express yourself creatively, you can get a massage, do yoga or tai
chi, you can go out with your friends, you can do work that you love, you can have sex, you can
laugh, you can exercise, you can play with animals.
So I ask you to consider the Whole Health Cairn in your own life. Which stones in your Whole
Health Cairn might be out of balance? Each of these stones can be a factor for creating stress
responses or relaxation responses. How might you turn on more relaxation responses in your
body? And most importantly, what does your body need in order to heal? What prescription do
you need to write for yourself? And are you going to be brave enough to take action on the truth
of what your inner pilot light already knows?
I believe our healthcare system is badly broken, and it’s largely because we’ve lost respect for
the body’s ability to heal itself. The medical establishment has gotten arrogant. We’ve come to
think that with all of our modern technology, and all that we’ve learned in the past century, that
we’ve mastered nature, and we find it repelling to think that maybe nature could be better than
we are sometimes.
And yet, spontaneous remissions from incurable diseases are proof that sometimes nature is just
better than we are. It’s a narcissistic wound for physicians. We don’t know what to do with that. It
makes us feel helpless and hopeless and useless.
But fortunately, we’re needed. The physician and all the other healthcare providers are absolutely
essential to this process. We need to embrace this. And patients need to change their outlooks
on this as well. It is not just doctors. We need patients to stop thinking that your body is not your
business, taking your power and handing it over to other healthcare providers. Your body is your
 10

business, and your mind has tremendous power to communicate with your body, such that your
body can heal itself.
So I once had a dream, and in my dream I was standing there, looking at these mountain sides,
full of millions of people that were standing shoulder to shoulder, and they were all facing due
north, dressed in all this tribal garbs, beautiful colors covering the mountain sides like a quilt.
And there was a bright streaming light on their face and everyone was facing this light, and that’s
what I think of, when I think of healthcare. I think of all of us, standing up, and facing the light. So
please stand with me for a moment. It’s going to take all of us. Just because things have gotten
bad doesn’t mean they can’t get better. I believe that just like there are no incurable illnesses
there are no incurable systems. But it’s going to take all of us, needing to open our heart and our
minds, and bring care back to healthcare.
So please hold hands with your fellow neighbor and let’s just set the intention right here, that
things are going to be different from now on, that we can start this grassroots effort that it all starts
with you.
Be the love that you want to see in healthcare, and I believe miracles can happen.
As we do this you’re releasing oxytocin, dopamine, you start to heal yourself and as we do so we
can heal healthcare.