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Do you know how powerful the human mind is? Your beliefs, just your thoughts alone, control so much of what happens to you physically.

Dr. Bernie Siegel, a doctor who has worked intensively with mental techniques to reduce pain and help heal diseases, has reviewed many studies on the effect of the placebo. A placebo effect is where a patient is made to believe he will get better or overcome a disease after taking some remedy such as a pill. Actually the pill has nothing in it to make the patient better -- usually the pills are sugar or some other common, everyday substance. With a placebo, it is the patient's belief that he will get better that actually heals him. In his book, Love, Medicine, and Miracles, Dr. Bernie Siegel reports on a study done in England. This experiment took a group of men and gave them a placebo, telling them it was chemotherapy treatment. People generally believe they are going to lose their hair when they go through chemotherapy. Of these men given a placebo, thirty percent had their hair fall out! The power of your beliefs are incredible -- even more powerful than you realize!

My mother had cancer herself and has overcome it. Just before going through chemotherapy, she had to decide whether to order a wig or not. She knew it was a good possibility she would lose her hair. She would have to order the wig ahead of time, so she would have it if she were to lose her hair. After reading about the study above, she made a very bold and courageous decision. She decided she was not going to order a wig, because then she would be convincing herself that she was going to lose her hair. She didn't order the wig, and had mental determination to stay and look healthy -- she convinced herself that she would keep her hair. My mother's decision to not order that wig, and her mental determination, kept her with a full, beautiful head of hair! I respect you mother for your courage and strength!

USA Today Wednesday, May 25th, 1994 did an article on the awesome power of the human mind. Judith Turner of the University of Washington Seattle, studied the outcome of placebos on back pain therapy. Her conclusions, in the May 25th, 1994 Journal of the American Medical Association were based on the review of three books and 75 articles published over 15 years -- one of the most comprehensive ever on placebos. What she found was staggering. She found studies showing the placebo working effectively as a cure up to 70% of the time in patients getting ineffective treatments for many disorders.

Studies show when asthma patients are given an inhaler filled with water, their airways will expand if they're told it contains a potent new drug. A study of 2,504 back surgeries for lumbar disk disease showed that even when no problem was found-- and patients were just stitched up -- 43% had relief of pain anyway, because they merely thought the surgery fixed some problem.

The power of the human mind is awesome, but can be harmful if not used the right way. Just as we cure physical pain and diseases with the human mind, we may cause these same things with negative thoughts. And just as we may cause physical changes in our body by our beliefs and expectations, we can cause changes in our mental abilities by our expectations and beliefs. What are your beliefs about how much you can learn and how fast you can work? As we can see from these experiments which have given us insight into how much our beliefs affect our bodies functioning, we can see how our expectations of our own mental abilities, how good we think we are in certain subjects for example, affects our performance in each of those areas.


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