You may wonder why on this site, postings that inform about some of the therapies and medicines used at Healthy Healing are occasionally interspersed with articles that appear to have no apparent connection to any practical issues, but rather point to the dynamics involved in the client/doctor interaction, or the meaning of disease and healing.
They are as important as the practical aspects. The emotions and meanings we observe and read into a situation, like a disease, are as essential as the facts. As Danial Goleman in his research and books and Bruce Lipton in the Biology of Belief have demonstrated, they contribute to a continuous creation of facts along the same lines.
Every once and a while a patient with a potentially fatal condition comes for consultation, and more often than not this patient is in a state of near panic, or at least somewhat frightened. Which is understandable. He fears for his life, and some other doctor that he consulted before coming to see me might have even told him something along the lines, “if you do not do such and such immediately, you will die within months, or within a year.” So understandably, fear is there.
The first step to help that person is to liberate him from the impact of this fear. Yes, one can die from cancer, many have. No doubt, one might die once diagnosed as being infected with the HIV virus. But plenty of people have lived with cancer happily for many years more, some have even fully defeated it, and only a fraction of those infected with HIV develop full-blown AIDS.
The first thing that has to go is the fear.
The following story, as related by Dr. Larry Dossey in his book Meaning & Medicine, illustrates dramatically how fear can actually kill, “…consider a case in which a patient who was highly allergic to penicillin was given a placebo pill, an inert substance with no known biological effect. After he swallowed it he was told an untruth – that the pill was not a placebo but penicillin. The man immediately became fearful, experienced an anaphylactic (“allergic shock”) reaction and abruptly died. This was a genuine “death from meaning”, for all that was manipulated in this situation was what the pill he had ingested meant to him.”
Therefore, it is important to remove the fear and give another meaning to the disease, beyond fear. It is important to make the situation workable, by assisting the client in learning how to interpret it as a challenge, or as a passing phenomenon, may be somewhat more frightening than other phenomena, but still… only passing.
The insight that the situation is workable, makes it actually more workable. Fear may be fatal, but understanding, commitment and participation are on the contrary - uplifting.