‘Epigenetics’ is a recently established pillar of biomedicine, it examines how environmental signals control the health of our cells, and lots of healthy happy cells means a healthy body, and vice versa, disease or dis-ease.
Most people I know are scared, or at least uncomfortable, with going into hospital, some are absolutely terrified. Particularly if they have nosocomephobia (excessive fear of hospitals). A well-known sufferer, Richard Nixon, said: “If I go to a hospital, I’m fairly sure I won’t come out of it alive”.[1] Whilst this could just be discounted as yet another phobia, this fear is actually making our physical bodies less able to recover and potentially stimulating ill health. This all comes down to our beliefs, particularly those stored in our sub-conscious minds, and how our thoughts control our physiology. However, the good news is there is something we can do about it. Whilst a large part of the medical profession is still obsessed with the genes, and how these are supposed to be controlling our health and our lives, there are many pioneering researchers who are changing the paradigm; such as Dr Bruce Lipton and Dr Joe Dispenza, whose work has highly influenced this article.[2],[3]
Whilst many of us think of our body as a single entity, we are in fact a community comprised of over 50 trillion cells, and each cell is like a mini person, with many common functions including a ‘brain’. Through his research, Bruce has shown that it is the cell membrane, or “mem-brain”, that controls the function of the cells for good or bad, and it is this membrane which responds to the environmental signals it receives through a range of ‘receptors’. This ‘above gene control’ is called ‘Epigenetics’, a recently established pillar of biomedicine. The key point is that environmental signals control the health of our cells, and lots of healthy happy cells means a healthy body, and vice versa, disease or dis-ease. The environmental signals which the cells pick up include electromagnetic waves, radiation, photons and so on. Dr Bruce says:
“The behavior of energy waves is important for biomedicine because vibrational frequencies can alter the physical and chemical properties of an atom as surely as physical signals like histamine and estrogen”.
Everyone has heard of the placebo effect, and many studies have shown people get better through belief alone. But what is actually going on in the body? We’ve seen that cells are like mini-people, and like people in a community they respond to a leader. In this case the central nervous system which includes your thoughts. So, beliefs create thoughts, thoughts create energetic signals within the body, the cells respond through production of different proteins and move towards health or sickness, depending on whether the thoughts are positive or negative. The strength of the placebo effect is clearly shown in Dr Joe Dispenza’s book ‘You are the Placebo’, where he recovers from a spinal injury with no surgery but positive belief, which aided his cells to heal. There are many other examples of such healing outcomes out there, just go look. The opposite of the placebo effect is the ‘nocebo effect’, which, simply put, is that negative thoughts create sickness. If you believe the power of the placebo effect, think about how important it is to not fall into the nocebo effect, driven by negative thinking.
So, coming back to the fear of being in hospital. You might now start to appreciate that if our minds are creating negative thoughts of fear and discomfort due to our learned beliefs that hospitals make you sick, we are already signally our cells to become unhealthy (the nocebo effect). This is the last thing you want when you are going somewhere to become healthy. The good news is that we can change these negative beliefs that are stored in our sub-conscious minds (a whole other article though!).
But we can start with something much simpler. The interesting thing about the sub-conscious is that it is not a thinking mind, it is more or less like a hard drive or tape recorder that responds to certain stimuli or triggers; the act of entering a white-walled hospital might be the trigger for the fear response, for example. The sub-conscious will also believe stimuli that are imagined and respond accordingly. Why is this of relevance? There is a large amount of research that shows people are more happy, calm and relaxed when they are in nature – exactly the type of response we want to illicit when people visit a hospital (remember the placebo effect: happy thoughts, healthy cells). This response can be elicited through simply imagining we are in nature. So, covering hospital walls with highly real and believable Biophilic images, for example, could help trigger our internal biological and energetic mechanisms and improve patient recovery times.
If you have some skepticism, just try to put it to one side for a brief moment, what if it was true, what if you were the placebo?
Tim Elliott, The Conscious Forest
[1] https://www.fearof.net/fear-of-hospitals-phobia-nosocomephobia/
