Growing Your Own Placebos

According to Dr. Bruce Lipton, who helped pioneer the new hard science of epigenetics, both our positive and negative thoughts and beliefs shape our biology. The placebo effect can be described as the phenomenon that your brain can convince your body with positive thoughts that any treatment — even a fake one — is real and can bring healing. In “The Power of the Placebo Effect,” the Harvard Men’s Health Watch at the Harvard Medical School wrote that “science has found that under the right circumstances, a placebo can be just as effective as traditional treatments.”

The science behind the placebo effect can be demonstrated by the simple fact that any outside drug that has an effect on your body — say tetrahydrocannabinol, the “THC” in pot — results from the fact that your body already has a receptor for that drug. That means you have a natural equivalent of that drug in your body! This begs the question that if your body needs a particular substance to heal, why not just “grow your own?”

Lipton says that if your own body is NOT manufacturing the “drug” that your body needs to heal, that means your consciousness is not supporting your health appropriately. What’s required, he says, is an adjustment of consciousness, not an adjustment of your biology.

That sounds simple enough, but the challenge is that while positive thoughts create the placebo effect, negative thoughts create the “nocebo effect,” which produces disease and even death. And our minds spend much more of their precious time, focus and energy on repetitive negative thinking. For many, negative self-talk has become a habit.

Fortunately, you can train your brain to think differently, to break habits and even to build new neuropathways for positive and constructive behaviors through the process of neuroplasticity. My career in art and design allowed me to finely tune my brain’s ability to visualize new solutions, ideas and concepts that I then applied to create art or solve a client’s problem. Working to improve my own health and wellness, and show others how to promote self-healing, I developed many useful tools for visualizing and “talking to my nervous system” and other mind-body systems to bring healing where it was needed.

If you want to learn more, and you’re ready to go positive, then let’s “gocebo!”