EVERYONE on this forum, MUST watch the movie "HEAL":

This is my first post in quite a long time; feels good to be back on this forum.

I just finished watching the film "HEAL", which is available to rent on both iTunes and Amazon.

This is a brilliant documentary that FINALLY and comprehensively, covers mind-body medicine. More specifically, it successfully exhibits and explains the inexorable tie between our thinking/thoughts and our body.
The more toxic our thoughts (fear, anger, shame, etc), the more toxic our body (chronic pain, indigestion, inflammation, etc.).
Most importantly, the film does an excellent job at showing how the exact opposite of the above, is true as well.

It's so refreshing (and about G-D damn time) to see this kind of film made and accepted by the mainstream media/consumer (it has received phenomenal reviews from both the critics and viewing public, alike). This means we are as a species, in the midst of a truly life-altering (and slowly accelerating) paradigm shift in the way we think about, view and practice, medicine. I honestly had no idea so many people had accepted or found intriguing, this (TMS-style/mind-body-connected) line of thinking.

I just found it really well-done, hopeful, optimistic and inspiring and I think its essential viewing for anyone that is dealing with some sort of mind-body problem.

Warm regards to all.

 

thanks for the link, avik.

 

I just put it on my Amazon watchlist, Avik, good catch!

Also available to rent on Amazon is The Connection, by Shannon Harvey, who recovered from a serious autoimmune condition and made this movie about mind-body recovery (and she's still blogging and creating new work in the field).

Louise Hay's classic, You Can Heal Your Life, is also on Amazon to rent, although I was able to borrow the DVD from my library back in 2011, and if you are struggling to love yourself enough to recover, it's a must-see that will open your heart to yourself.

It's always great to see you, Avik!

 

BEAUTIFUL.
Last year, I didn't quite understand my doctors meant when they said I could retrain my brain and autonomic nervous system to function correctly and not feel chronic pain 24/7. Then it clicked, and I can no longer unsee the mind-body connection.

I am so happy that this documentary will inform other people of this amazing connection and change their lives.

 

Starring Deepak Chopra? I'll pass. Dr. Sarno never endorsed woo-woo and new age approaches to healing.

 

New age? The Buddah teachings have been preaching for centuries that negative thinking/thoughts/emotions cause you to be sick.

Although I have not seen this programme, I would watch before dismissing it.

 

are you better?

 

Dorado
I am so happy to read on your page that you are doing better. We joined the TMS Wiki about the same time and I remember reading your message. I am glad that the two, mainstream medical centers you connected with were able to say that YOU can retrain your brain and autonomic nervous system........
You offer us all wisdom and hope.
With kindness
Lainey

 

Yes! I'm not perfect, but I'm about 75% to 85% better (depending on the day), and I expect that to continue increasing over time. However, I'm not obsessed with my progress and perfection - I try to just live in the moment, accept and understand where my pain is coming from, and not be fearful.

I've been posting about my story, and I hope it helps other people as well. In case anyone is wondering what symptoms I was dealing with, I posted about them here: http://www.tmswiki.org/forum/threads/small-fiber-neuropathy.11221/page-2#post-91816 (Small Fiber Neuropathy)

Thank you so much, Lainey! I hope you are doing well. We can and will get through this!

 

Would that be the Capitol Bldg in DC in the background?
Lainey

 

or SC?

 

Oh my, that's a pretty unyielding statement! NEVER? Are you absolutely positive about that?

As brilliant Dr. Sarno's work is, I personally have extended my knowledge of the mind-body connection well beyond his "oxygen deprivation" theory. I'm not much of a "woo woo" person myself, but I certainly don't want to be so rigid as to reject it out of hand for anyone else. It still has far more to offer than many aspects of traditional western medicine, IMHO.

The movie I mentioned, You Can Heal Your Life, along with much of Louise' Hay's work, has plenty of woo-woo in it, but it was an important part of my recovery, because self-love is crucial to doing this work.

 

Hi Avik
I know this is an older post but in my search to find someone who has suffered from similar issues I came across your post of 12/16.
Your post of 12/16 has inspired me. I have pasted it below:

Just going to throw something in here to compound on what Abbo said and how you definitively need to ignore your Chiro.
First off, I strongly believe that if everyone on this planet accepted the TMS diagnosis, Chiros would very quickly thereafter go out of business.
Second, here is a list of the things that I was told by my chiro and Orthpedic Surgeon, two years ago...after having gone through several MRIs in a six month span:

Torn Labrum in right hip

1. No cartilage in left hip; bone hitting "roof"
2. MAJOR leg length difference (2 inches!) which was supposedly the cause of my sciatica and chronic neck and back spasms
3. S curvature in my lower spine
4. Numerous herniated discs in my neck and lumbar sections
5. "Tilted Pelvis" from walking on a right leg
6. Torn rotators in BOTH my shoulder

Thank G-D I came to my senses and went to go see Dr. Rashbaum at NYU and he basically told me that everything I was dealing were all TMS equivalents. That all of these "issues" were actually normally occurrences in a (sigh) aging man's body.

Huck-I was told that I soon would not be able to walk if I didnt get my hip replaced. I am an amateur bodybuilder and the thought of being out of the gym for a year was unbearable.
The pain I had was indescribable. I could barely walk.

I never had any of those procedures.​

I am wondering how you are doing now, vis a vis your hip issues?

Thanks for your input to this forum
Lainey

 

Jan
Thanks for fixing the post I sent above. Was just one of those days.....sigh.
Lainey

 

It's not "woo-woo." Even Steve Ozanich discusses the body's ability to heal itself from a host of supposedly "incurable" diseases. One example is Stephen Flynn, who is listed on Steve's site as a stage 4 metastatic cancer survivor.

Here's another example:

http://www.cnn.com/2011/HEALTH/03/03/ep.seidler.cancer.mind.body/index.html (Can you imagine cancer away? - CNN.com)

A quote from the article:

My intention is not to imply that every single cancer patient can fully cure themselves, but there are indeed stories where documented "spontaneous" remissions and recoveries have occurred, and they really aren't all that spontaneous - modern science simply doesn't recognize or respect how deep the mind-body connection goes in some of these individual cases. Do I believe that a baby with leukemia can meditate their way out of disease? Absolutely not. However, is it worth someone's while to at least incorporate aspects of mind-body healing into their medical care when they've dealt with trauma and/or fit the TMS profile? Yes. Can some people achieve a complete recovery, or at least significantly improve the quality of their lives and live longer and/or in less pain through TMS work? For sure.

I'm of the belief that every single disease and symptom, structural or not, has a psychogenic component. I know this as an Ehlers-Danlos patient. I posted this a few months ago, and I still stand by it: "Remember that every disease has a psychogenic component, meaning that our emotions play a major role in how we feel and thrive, no matter what the diagnosis is. I remember reading that gay AIDS patients from the 1980s died much quicker if they weren’t out to their families and felt ashamed of themselves; alternatively, gay AIDS patients who received strong familial support and loved themselves often lived years longer. And this was before working medications were available to AIDS patients. Now, of course stress didn’t cause AIDS, but it ultimately impacted the quality of the patients’ lives and made them more suspectible to opportunistic infections. Breast cancer patients who practice mindful meditation and self-love also lived longer than those who didn’t in multiple studies. There are so many other examples of this. This is because stress and rage can further suppress our immune systems, nervous system function, hormones, etc."

 

Caulfield, have you read Dr Gabor Maté's book, 'When the Body says No'? I listened to it recently as an audiobook (Read by his son an actor). It's an excellent book. He talks about the mind body link in serious illnesses such as cancer and auto immune diseases. I like that he emphasis that the mind body link is a major factor, but not the only factor. In other words, for example, he isn't saying you can think your way out of cancer, but that it can be a major role in the onset or the remission.

 

It is a truly excellent book.

 

Yes! That is indeed the Capital Building in the early 1980s. Picture is Bobbi Campbell, a gay AIDS patient from that era. He is one of my biggest health, TMS, and attitude inspirations. That may sound puzzling to some, but he spoke extensively about the importance of maintaining a fighting attitude while dealing with disease as well as recognizing the overall mind-body connection, which greatly helped me after my Ehlers-Danlos and TMS diagnoses. I posted about wanting to apply for assisted suicide a year ago, but Bobbi fought for his life and saw value in his experiences (both challenging and happy) every single day, which I admire. Back when he had AIDS, patients were treated terribly by the world, and there were no medications available.

Cancer (Kaposi's sarcoma) was one of the opportunistic infections Bobbi developed from AIDS. A nurse practitioner in San Francisco, he was very aware of research on how certain personality types may be more likely to develop cancer. Fortunately, my TMS has significantly improved (I could barely type, hold my cell phone, pet my cat, etc. last year!), so I was able to type up part of a discussion Bobbi had on this exact topic. This transcription is quite literal and raw, so there are definitely some grammatical errors.

BOBBI: I feel very positive about the chemotherapy. Many people who have cancer who are on chemotherapy have a negative view of their chemotherapy. Some work that has been done recently, especially in San Antonio, Texas and other places, make it clear that cancer is real closely related to one's mental status, and it may very well be that people bring on cancers by their mental attitude, that there's a certain type of personality which is associated with a predisposition to get cancer, and that once a person has cancer, you can either give up and die, quite literally - people who adopt kind of a defeatist attitude are more prone to have widespread metastases or spread of their cancer, and they're more likely to die quicker. Whereas people who have more of a fighting attitude who believe they're going to live, do in fact much more commonly. And one of the ways to do that is through techniques known as visualization which you imagine the chemotherapy as sort of like little Pac-Men eating up the cancer cells and flushing them out. And I've tried to have, well, I have a real positive attitude toward my chemotherapy. One week when I was not allowed to have it because my white count was too low, I really felt cheated.

INTERVIEWER: The attitude that you're talking about, that a positive attitude will help people get over their diseases, and maybe prevent them to begin with. How do you think that works? Is there the possibility of conscious control of the immune system, that's what it sounds like?

BOBBI: I would say indirectly, yes. It seems pretty clear that...

INTERVIEWER: Secrets of the yogi.

BOBBI: Something like that. I think that we in the Western world tend to have a real dichotomy, a real separation in ourselves between the mind and the body, and I don't think that's so. And I'm only just beginning to come to this realization, I'll tell you, but it certainly has been made clear recently that people have control over such things as their heart beat or their body temperature, that kind of thing, things which were formerly believed to be classed under the autonomic nervous system, which by its very name implies that it's not under your control, it's automatic. It seems also to be true that if people can raise their blood pressure or raise their body temperature or so forth, that they can also inhibit certain processes in their body which...

INTERVIEWER: Or activate...

BOBBI: Or active certain processes in their body which either help you or hurt you in certain ways. It may well be for instance that a person who tends not to take care of themself, through whatever reason, may develop an illness. And this may sort of be the body's way or the organism's way to make you stop and take stock of yourself and start taking care of yourself. It's rather an extreme measure, I must say. I will say that I am taking care of myself more now than I ever did before. I just wish I hadn't had such a firm kick in the butt to do it, but I am. And I'm real happy with that.

INTERVIEWER: Activating one's immune system to work with the doctor's drugs to overcome cancer is a long process, but doctors have written before about "miraculous remissions" and so forth, that they just simply cannot understand. It seems that those are just the power of faith or prayer or whatever has a lot to do with what it does to the attitude of people, and a re-integration of "mind and body," "spirit and flesh," however one wants to do it. Those are only words anyway.

BOBBI: Right. I'm, as I say, I'm just starting to come into this. I was, up until now, quite the empiricist and quite the logical scientist...

INTERVIEWER: Rational Western man.

BOBBI: Rational Western man. And I, up until a few months ago, really did not put a whole lot of stock into that, and I'm coming around on that. I am beginning to believe now that having a, as I say, a positive mental attitude is real important. It seems pretty clear that people who feel depressed can get sick, and people who are sick can get depressed, that these things can have kind of a feedback effect on one another. And now that I am sick and somewhat depressed, I'm trying to break that cycle by raising my own psychological state and also by making myself as healthy as possible outside of the Kaposi's [a type of cancer that is considered highly opportunistic in AIDS patients]. I'm trying to eat better, I'm trying to get more sleep...

SOURCE:

• Website: http://www.glbthistory.org/archives/audio-search/ (Audio search)
• Interview: The Gay Life, 1982-01-10: Marcus Conant, M.D. and Paul Volberding, M.D., U.C. San Francisco Medical School; Bobbi Campbell, Kaposi's Sarcoma cancer patient.
• Time this particular discussion begins during the interview: 49:47

​

 

Hi Lainey-

Thanks for the message.

I decided on that very day, after having met with Rashbaum that I was done running around yet again chasing another elusive diagnosis.
From that day forward I simply ignored the pain (or, rather...it was quite difficult but the decision to do so what quite simple).

Those pains have never come back again.

Could you imagine...I was going to have multiple surgical procedures and seemingly for...nothing?

I run, I squat, I swim and do everything else the surgeons said I would no longer be able to do.

 

Caufield,
Thank you for posting this interview with Bobbi Campbell. Very moving. I'm glad you knew him.
The posts on this thread are so inspirational. Good food for the soul and the body.
I grew up in Washington DC and was curious. I'm glad my curiosity gave you the initiative to post this interview.
Kindly
Lainey