Have you heard the story of Mr Wright? He was a gentleman diagnosed with an advanced cancer called lymphosarcoma, and his is a really good example of how powerful the mind can be, to the extent of controlling how the body heals or deteriorates.
I will quote Mr Wright’s story here, told so well in Lissa Rankin’s blog:
Mr. Wright
As reported by Bruno Klopfer in the Journal of Projective Techniques in 1957, Dr. West was treating Mr. Wright, who had an advanced cancer called lymphosarcoma. All treatments had failed, and time was running out. Mr. Wright’s neck, chest, abdomen, armpits, and groin were filled with tumors the size of oranges, his spleen and liver were enlarged, and his cancer was causing his chest to fill up with two quarts of milky fluid every day, which had to be drained in order for him to breathe. Dr. West didn’t expect him to last a week.
But Mr. Wright desperately wanted to live, and he hung his hope on a promising new drug called Krebiozen. He begged his doctor to treat him with the new drug, but the drug was only being offered in clinical trials to people who were believed to have at least three months left to live. Mr. Wright was too sick to qualify.
But Mr. Wright didn’t give up. Knowing the drug existed and believing the drug would be his miracle cure, he pestered his doc until Dr. West reluctantly gave in and injected him with Krebiozen on a Friday.
To his utter shock, the following Monday, Dr. West found his patient walking around out of bed. Mr. Wright’s “tumor masses had melted like snowballs on a hot stove” and were half their original size. Ten days after the first dose of Krebiozen, Mr. Wright left the hospital, apparently cancer free.
Mr. Wright was rockin’ and rollin,’ praising Krebiozen as a miracle drug for two months until the scientific literature began reporting that Krebiozen didn’t seem to be effective. Mr. Wright, who trusted what he read in the literature, fell into a deep depression, and his cancer came back.
This time, Dr. West, who genuinely wanted to help save his patient, decided to get sneaky. He told Mr. Wright–that some of the initial supplies of the drug had deteriorated during shipping, making them less effective, but that he scored a new batch of highly concentrated, ultra-pure Krebiozen, which he could give him. (Of course, this was a bold-faced lie.)
Dr. West then injected Mr. Wright with nothing but distilled water. And a seemingly miraculous thing happened–again. The tumors melted away, the fluid in his chest disappeared, and Mr. Wright was feeling great again for another two months.
Then the American Medical Association blew it by announcing that a nationwide study of Krebiozen proved that the drug was utterly worthless. This time, Mr. Wright lost all faith in his treatment. His cancer came right back, and he died two days later.
Amazing how powerful the mind can be, huh? It can either make you or break you…
© Then there is the story of Sally who suffered severe brain injury due to bullet shots, but her mind was strong enough to heal her body, even when her doctors said they could do nothing. In How Your Mind Can Heal Your Brain, Linda Gabriel tells Sally’s story beautifully:
Something terrible happened to Sally a few years before we met.
A random intruder shot her and left her for dead.
A bullet lodged deep within her chest. Emergency responders rushed her to the operating room and soon surgeons were struggling to control the bleeding in her collapsed lung.
At first no one saw the other wound.
Then an O.R. nurse noticed a small pool of blood near Sally’s head. A portable x-ray revealed a second bullet had pierced her skull and destroyed a significant amount of Sally’s brain.
Emergency surgery saved her life, but Sally was now blind. Her brain’s speech center had been devastated, and her motor function was severely impaired. A large piece of her skull was gone.
Sally couldn’t see. She couldn’t talk. She couldn’t walk.
However, after surgery, Sally soon regained consciousness. She couldn’t see or talk, but she could hear. So she was able to understand her neurosurgeon’s words when he stood at her hospital bedside and told her about the extent of her brain injury.
The news was devastating
The doctor explained that her brain was permanently damaged. Sally was toldshe would never see again; told she would have difficulty speaking for the rest of her life, told she would need to make arrangements for long-term nursing care and because she had been recently widowed, she would need to find full-time childcare for her 2-year-old son.
That was the bad news. The good news?
Sally would be severley disabled, but she would survive.
Perhaps – with years of physical therapy – her doctors said she might be able to learn to walk again. But, no promises.
She couldn’t speak, but one thought echoed through Sally’s mind: NO.
Why am I telling you this sad story?
Because by the time we met, Sally could walk.
She could talk.
And she could see.
In fact if you met Sally today, you would never guess that once upon a time, she had suffered permanent brain damage.
In case you’re doubting the seriousness of her brain injury, let me assure you Sally wasn’t exaggerating. The crime and subsequent trial had been big news in her part of the country. Before we met, I happened to read an in-depth article about the incident. Her recovery is nothing less than a medical miracle.
Yet Sally doesn’t consider herself special.
She’s not a motivational speaker. She hasn’t written a book or appeared on Oprah. She’s not famous; she’s a very private person, in fact ‘Sally’ isn’t her real name.
She’s a normal woman – a wife and mother who runs a thriving small business with her new husband. She’s not particularly religious – though she admits she’s a bit more spiritual now than before her injury.
The Power of the Positive No
One day I asked Sally what she thought might be the key to her miraculous recovery:
“That moment in the hospital when the doctor told me about my prognosis, I suddenly got very stubborn. I had no reason to believe my own opinion more than his, but for some reason I simply refused to believe him.”
She smiled as she told me how she just mentally said, “No” to everything he said. “I wasn’t in denial, she explained, “I knew my situation was very serious, and I couldn’t speak, so he had no idea. But I just found myself mentally saying ‘no’ to everything he said with simple, calm conviction.”
“You’ll never see again.”
No.
“You’ll always have problems speaking.”
No.
“You may never walk again.”
No.
Sally refused to accept her doctor’s description of her future. She cancelled the order.
Make it part of the dance.
Did I mention that before the injury, Sally had been a talented professional dancer?
She once told me that dancers have a rule:
“If you happen to stumble or make a mistake during a performance, a good dancer knows how to ‘make it part of the dance’ – and just keep on going.”
Sally made a decision to make her brain injury “part of the dance” of her life.
She’d stumbled but she chose to keep moving forward no matter what.
Sally took her physical therapy seriously. If she had a bad day, she remembered to ‘make it part of the dance.’ She worked hard to restore her ability to walk. She reclaimed her ability to talk. And somehow Sally found her own unique way to reconstruct her vision piece by piece. Today she sees well enough to read, drive, and look into the eyes of her son – without glasses.
Her doctors still can’t explain how she can do that.
I hope Sally’s story inspires you. If you’re dealing with a challenge such as a life-threatening illness or injury it’s helpful to remember that not everyone has the worst-case scenario your caregivers may be describing. Side effects of treatment don’t always occur. Your prognosis isn’t written in stone.
Perhaps you’ll follow Sally’s example and draw upon the power of your own mind to help yourself – and maybe even heal yourself.
You are more than your body. Your mind is stronger than your brain.
When someone tells you something will be difficult or painful, they’re programming your subconscious. It’s like a hypnotic trance. This is especially true if it’s a doctor or other authority figure.
People who’ve been told to expect serious side effects often will suffer them, even when the “medicine” is a harmless sugar pill. Studies have proven this.
It’s called the nocebo effect – the opposite of the placebo effect.
For better or worse, the mind has the power to create real physical results, even when it involves the brain.
Think about that for a minute.
So the next time experts tell you how bad things are going to be, I invite you to let your subconscious know YOU have other plans.
I’m not telling you to avoid medical treatment. If you are having a health challenge, of course see a doctor and follow her advice. You’re not saying no to the actual treatment.
But when experts tell you about bad things that may happen such as scars, pain, or negative side effects, I invite you to indulge in a harmless experiment and simply say a strong internal, NO!
This isn’t an argumentative “No.”
It isn’t a fearful “No.”
It’s the same thing you might say to a waiter offering you a platter of some food you don’t like to eat – a polite, yet firm,
“No thank you.”
I invite you to welcome the healing effects of your treatment, but firmly reject the rest of the side effects.
The power of the mind is amazing. Take advantage of it.
So you see, the mind is indeed a very powerful thing. Napoleon Hill once said, “Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve.” Coincidentally, this is one of the quotes that has stuck with me through the years, and it is also one that my Mom kept repeating to me when I was young(er).
When faced with a problem or a difficult situation, do you think of how you would celebrate when you solve it, or do you immediately think of all the bad things that could happen?
Do you tend to overthink things and visualize the worst there is to come? Or do you always feel that the best is yet to come and an obstacle is always a stepping hurdle to success?
Do you feel that by expecting the worst it prepares you for whatever you are going to face, or do you find that the expectance of something bad that may or might not happen is hampering your focus to succeed in the task at hand?
I’d like to think of myself as a positive person, for I can almost always see the good in every kind of situation. Of course, I am only human and I do sometimes think about that “What if…?” scenario, however the difference is that I do not wallow in it and create a fortress around me that engulfs me in that deep deep sorrowful state.
Now that I am in this life-saving mission of mine, I find that it is more important than ever to remember and be aware that the mind is indeed more powerful than we think. True, I am sharing with my friends and loved ones these amazing natural health supplements, Izumio and Super Lutein, that have been proven scientifically and through tons of testimonials, that they effectively treat and heal all sorts of conditions and illnesses. However, if the patient concerned does not believe his body can heal and does not command his mind to summon healing power on his body, not even the best treatment in the world will help.
It is so important to understand that, and I never fail to stress this to anyone I share the availability of these supplements with.
How powerful your mind is depends of course on only yourself, for you alone are capable of great things your mind perceives and conceives. Don’t shoot down possibilities before they are impossible. Surround yourself always with positivity, and think happy thoughts. A happy mind makes a powerful one.
I’ll leave you with one last story, an inspiring one, about Stamatis Moraitis. This is how happy endings are meant to be. Lissa Rankin tells it well:
Stamatis Moraitis
Stamatis Moraitis was a Greek war veteran who was living in the United States when he was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer and told he had only 9 months to live. He was offered aggressive treatment, but after 9 doctors apparently assured him that it wouldn’t save his life, he decided to save his money, decline treatment, and move with his wife back to his native Ikaria, a Greek island where he could be buried with his ancestors in a graveyard overlooking the Aegean Sea.
He and his wife moved into a small house on a vineyard with his elderly parents, where he reconnected with his faith and started going to his old church. When his friends got wind of the fact that Stamatis was back home, they showed up with bottles of wine, books, and board games to entertain him and keep him company. He planted vegetables in a garden, basked in sunshine, savored the salty air, and relished in his love for his wife.
Six months passed, and not only did he not die, he was actually feeling better than ever. He started working in the untended vineyard during the day, making himself useful, and in the evenings, he’d play dominos with friends. He took a lot of naps, rarely looked at a watch, and spent a lot of time outdoors. At one point, 25 years after his diagnosis, Stamatis went back to the United States to ask his doctors what had happened. Apparently, the doctors were all dead. Stamatis finally died this year in Ikaria. He was 102 years old.
© 
Little Miracles
Our Journey of Love
