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your brain and body, as well as how to create the same kind of miraculous
changes in your own brain and body all by yourself, by thought alone.
Chapter 1 starts off the book by sharing some incredible stories
demonstrating the amazing power of the human mind. Some of these tales relate
how people’s thoughts have healed them, and others show how people’s
thoughts have actually made them sick (and sometimes even hastened their
death). You’ll read about a man who died after hearing he had cancer, even
though his autopsy revealed that he’d been misdiagnosed; a woman plagued by
depression for decades who improved dramatically during an antidepressant
drug trial, despite the fact that she was in the group receiving a placebo; and a
handful of veterans hobbled by osteoarthritis who were miraculously cured by
fake knee surgery. You’ll even read some startling stories about voodoo curses
and snake handling. My purpose in sharing these dramatic stories is to show the
wide range of what the human mind is capable of doing all on its own, without
any help from modern medicine. And hopefully, it will lead you to the question
“How is that possible?”
Chapter 2 gives a brief history of the placebo, tracing accounts of related
scientific discoveries from the 1770s (when a Viennese doctor used magnets to
induce what he thought were therapeutic convulsions) all the way through the
modern day, as neuroscientists solve exciting mysteries about the intricacies of
how the mind works. You’ll meet a doctor who developed techniques of
hypnotism after arriving late for an appointment only to find his waiting patient
mesmerized by a lamp flame, a World War II surgeon who successfully used
saline injections as an analgesic on wounded soldiers when he ran out of
morphine, and early psychoneuroimmunology researchers in Japan who
switched poison-ivy leaves with harmless leaves and found that their test group
reacted more to what they were told they were experiencing than to what they
actually did experience.
You’ll also read about how Norman Cousins laughed himself to health; how
Harvard researcher Herbert Benson, M.D., was able to reduce cardiac patients’
risk factors for heart disease by figuring out how Transcendental Meditation
worked; and how Italian neuroscientist Fabrizio Benedetti, M.D., Ph.D., primed
subjects who had been given a drug, and then switched the drug for a placebo—
and watched the brain continue to signal the production of the same
neurochemicals the drug produced without interruption. And you’ll also read a
striking new study that’s a real game changer: It shows that irritable bowel
syndrome (IBS) patients were able to dramatically improve their symptoms by
taking placebos—even though they knew full well that the medication they were
given was a placebo, not an active drug.