Cancer Brain Tumor

[music] narrator: "tumor" is one of themost frightening words a doctorcan say to a patient. and when a tumor is in someone'sskull base, it's even moreunpleasant. the anatomy of the skull base is particularly challenging, and the spatial relationshipsare very sensitive, so there's virtually no room forerror. narrator: the skull base is the area below the brain, but stillwithin the skull. it contains the bones around theeyes, the ear canals, some major arteries, and twelve cranial nerves.

it's a very complexarea because all theblood vessels that supply the brainand all the nervesthat come from the brain to the tissues travel through various openings through the skull base to get to thoseareas. so, when we're operating on tumors or other abnormalities in that area, you have to be careful to try topreserve those structures that are critical to supportinglife and other functions. narrator:dr. bob rostomily, dr. jay rubinstein, dr. larry duckert, and dr. neal futran operate in skull base surgeryteams at the university ofwashington medical center. tumors in the skull base are ina shared surgical area between neurosurgeons and ear, nose, and throat surgeons.

each one of us is passionate about what we do for these patients and their particular problem, and we each have a particulararea of expertise, even though we understand the broad concept of what the tumor is, and what the patient has to go through. but the great ability we have atthe university of washington medical center is, each of us can do the part we'rebest at, and then you put that together as a whole, and come out with the ideal treatment. it's the team. we are the team. narrator:while all surgical procedures are performed by teams, operations in the skull base involve two surgeons with different specialties workingin an extremely small space.

it's critical in this type of surgery, since you're working in a confined space, with very intricate structures, that you develop a rhythm withthe individual you're workingwith; you know each other's moves, and you work in concerttogether. it's much like having a dancepartner where each member of theteam has to know what the other isdoing to get that fluidmovement, to create theappropriate result. narrator:tumors in the skull base may damage one or more of the twelve cranial nerves, affecting a patient's vision,smell, facial movement, balance,or hearing. the most common of these raretumors are acoustic neuromas. these are benign tumors. they're slow-growing tumors.

they're very rare tumors; they originate in the general population somewhere in the neighborhood of 1 to 100,000. they generally are manifest by hearing loss, and they can also impact the balance, and they generally will alsocause tinnitus, which is headnoise. so, patients will commonly complain that they've developeda hearing loss in one ear. it's never both unless they have two tumors. and as the tumor slowlyenlarges, the hearing slowlydeteriorates. narrator: an acoustic neuroma, also known as a vestibular schwannoma, grows in an area heavilyprotected by bone, making itdifficult to reach, surgically. this is the temporal bone, the bone in which these tumors originate.

and more specifically, theyoriginate from this channel, which is the channel thatcontains the balance and hearingnerve, as well as the facialnerve. as they enlarge, they grow outof this channel and they grow towards the brain stem, which is sitting here. so, smaller tumors are going tolook like a mushroom cap with astem, and as they enlarge, they willgrow towards the brain stem. narrator:the way to diagnose these tumors is with magnetic resonance imaging, or mri. if a tumor is discovered, thereare a number of treatmentoptions, including radiation, surgery,or simply observing the tumor over time. sometimes no treatment isnecessary at all, depending on the age and the health of the patient.

there are many different ways to deal with them, and every tumor is individual. there are different factors youhave to weigh in the decisionmaking. right now, there's no right answer on how to treat these:to observe them, radiate them,or take them out. so, that's why it's reallyimportant, if you have a tumorlike this, for the patient to have theoption for any one of thosemanagements, at its highestlevel. so, having a team of people whoare experienced in surgery and radiation, all the different treatment options, in managing the patient pre- andpost-operatively, and having a center where youcan perform the surgery safelyand effectively is reallyimportant. in the removal of acoustic neuroma, a team approach has been developed

where neurosurgeons and neurotologists each use their different expertise to maximize the outcome of theprocedure in terms of benefitfor the patient. neurosurgeons have more expertise in dealing with tumors that involve the brain; neurotologists have more expertise in the anatomy of the temporal bone, and work with the nerves thatare traveling within thetemporal bone. narrator:this teamwork is critical to successful surgery. >> we're going to monitor the hearing interoperatively. so, the earphone is playingsounds into the ear and theneurologist will be recording the auditory brain stemresponse, in response to that.

for surgery, you have to have monitoring. that's extremely important forsafely removing the tumors and having the best outcomepossible for hearing and facialnerve function. and we have a dedicated team of neurophysiologists who help monitor hearing and allthe cranial nerve functionsduring surgery. how's the hearing?it looks good. in addition, we have neuro-anesthesiologists who are part of the team also. and they specialize in providinganesthesia for skull base and neurosurgical procedures. so, we all come together andwork on the patient's behalf, atone sitting.

narrator:the approach to surgery varies, depending on the tumor's size, location, and effect on the patient. >> there are a variety ofdifferent surgical approaches toacoustic neuromas, and dr. duckert tends to workmore through what's called thesub-occipital approach. i tend to work more through themiddle-fossa approach forhearing preservation, or the trans-labyrinthineapproach, if hearingpreservation is not an option. the trans-labyrinthine surgery is, of the three approaches,the one that will eliminate whatremains of the hearing. because the surgeon actually removes the bone which contains the hearing apparatus. this is the mastoid. the mastoid is removed. it's removed with a drill,

and as we drill deeper into theskull base, we encounter thebalance organ, and that balance organ is removed, in order to access the channel which contains the tumor. in the case of a middle-fossa approach, a window is opened along the lateral skull base. via that window, we then can approach the tumor from above. so, we're coming from thisdimension to approach the tumor from above. in the case of a sub-occipitalor retrosygmoid approach, the window is made behind the mastoid. and the surgeon then has accessto the tumor from behind. and once again, we can approachthe tumor within the channelthat contains it and any portion of the tumorthat is outside of that channel.

narrator:the cause of these tumors is not fully understood.so, who's at risk? >> acoustic neuromas can occur at all ages. the youngest person i'veoperated on for an acousticneuroma was eleven years old, but i've seen the first onset of an acoustic neuroma in the seventies, as well. any individual who complains of hearing loss or ringing in only one ear is at risk for havingone of these tumors. so, it's very important that anytime anybody complains ofhearing loss in general, but particularly hearing loss inone ear, that they be evaluatedfor acoustic neuroma. do you want to go down with me?do you want to sit?no. no? you just want to push me? wheee...

narrator:a couple of years ago, jamie youngquist had those symptoms. she heard ringing in her leftear, as her normal hearing onthat side gradually disappeared. an mri revealed a tumor, and atthat point, her doctor sent herto the university of washington medical center for treatment. >> we have a very close working relationship with referring physicians. it's a question of addressingtreatment alternatives, thendiscussing and deciding with thepatient which of those alternatives is going to be optimal, and then proceeding with the surgery, and then sharing the outcome of that surgery with the referring physician. and then of course, we maintaincontact with the patient. narrator:jamie and her husband, brad, met the members of the team, starting with dr. larry duckert.

>> he went into detail, justabout the three differentapproaches to get to the tumor, and really left it in our handsto decide which approach wewanted to take. and that, that was somewhat ofan easy decision just for us, just based on the numbers andthe statistics he gave us, andjust kind of the percentages ofhearing loss, post-surgery, and so, we pretty much knew after that which approach we wanted, and we went for it. and he was very, he was sooptimistic, that we just had allthe confidence in the world withdr. duckert. narrator:dr. duckert warned jamie that due to the damage the tumor had caused, she would probably have nohearing at all in her left ear. >> post-surgery, when i went back and saw him, he was very surprised, and we were all pleasantly surprised

that i could still hear about10%. i still have about 10%hearing in my left ear. which is great, because it, ican hear the ambient noise. ready? one, two, three! narrator:that residual hearing helps minimize jamie's tinnitus. >> if i lost complete hearing,the ringing would get worse without the ambient noise. so, the fact that i had a littlebit of hearing was a very goodthing. and i can notice when i get tired out that the ringing kind of is a little bit moreintense, but it's not a bother at all,by no means. narrator:post-operative care includes rehabilitation therapy,

to recover balance, when that particular cranial nerve has been affected by the tumor's removal. and there are regular follow-up visits. >> in as many as 60 to 70% of these patients, hearing will be preserved, and we'll be monitoring thehearing regularly, making surethat the hearing levels aremaintained. we'll also be monitoring them with regular imaging. depending on the size of the tumor, its location, sometimes a small portion of the tumor will be left behind. i don't mean inadvertently;it'll be left behind because toremove it we might anticipate that its manipulation wouldresult in some degree ofdisability, may lose somefunction. and in order to preserve thatfunction, we'll purposely leavea small portion of tumor behind,

knowing full well that in many cases that tumor doesn't grow; that the blood supply has been altered, so it just sits there. and then, the patient will be monitored on a regular basis with sequential imaging, to make sure that it's not goingto grow, or if it does, then we'd have to reconsider,and revisit other treatmentalternatives. so, these patients become good friends over many years as we continue to monitor them and make sure that they continueto do well. narrator: since her surgery, jamie and brad have had a daughter, and are expecting their secondchild soon. her tumor hasn't returned, andher life is back to normal.

free and clear. and i feel wonderful. ok, addy. there's twelve words here you'll hear. and all i want you to do is pick which word that you think you hear. so just go ahead and press it, and it'll start. pick one. narrator: an academic medical center combines the benefits of ongoing research with state-of-the-art patientcare. in dr. jay rubinstein's lab,they're testing new software forcochlear implants. addy is astar patient. >> previously, she was in a deafschool, and now she's been moved to a mainstream school. and her hearing has improved dramatically since we've been seeing her, so we're really excited about her progress. go ahead and listen to them and get familiar with them, and then when you're done with that,

just press start, and it'll playa melody, and then you pickwhich one it is. my research is on auditory implants in general. i work on signal processing strategies, to improve hearing with auditoryimplants. in the case of cochlearimplants, people already havevery high levels of speechunderstanding in quiet, so my laboratory at the virginiamerrill bloedel hearing researchcenter is developing improvedtechnologies that allow speech perception in noise, as well as better music perception with these devices. for people who have auditory brain stem implants, their ability to understand speech is far more limited, and our research is aimed attrying to improve basic levelsof speech perception. it's kind of fun, because ilike to hear things,

like voices where, laughter,like, people laugh, and i cantell voices, like if i ever talkto people, a group of people, and there'smusic or something, i can knowboth of them with each ear, and it helps me understand wherethe sounds are. narrator:while addy was born deaf, the research benefits patients who have lost hearing for other reasons, including tumors. there are wonderful techniques available now for rehabilitationof hearing loss in people who have had acoustic neuromas removed. for example, if one has normalhearing in the opposite ear,there is a device called a bone-anchored hearing aid that can be placed on the deaf side that restores hearing to that side.

the device allows the person tohear sounds that are on the deafside through their normalhearing ear. in people who have had acoustic neuromas removed from both sides, we have a technology called theauditory brain stem implant, where, after removal of anacoustic neuroma, we can place a hearing implant intothe brain stem, which restores some degree ofspeech recognition to thatindividual, so they do not need necessarily to lead out the rest of theirlives deaf. ator:dr. bob rostomily's skull lab serves as a training area for resident physicians, as well as a center forresearch. new surgicaltechniques are developed here. comparisons of exposure andangles of surgical access can bemade between new and oldapproaches,

all of it leading to betterpatient care. >> let's have a look with the endoscope, see how it looks. so, sometimes we can use the endoscope to actually get a much closer look, that can be viewed on thetelevision by the otherparticipants in the surgery, and it gives us the ability tolook at different angles thanthe straight-on microscope. endoscopic approaches, minimallyinvasive surgery, is becoming areal player in surgery of theskull base. the question is whether it'sreally better, and what are the limitations ofthat versus traditionalapproaches. the skull base is shared by multiple specialties, and this lab gives not only neurosurgeons,

but otolaryngologists and other surgeons the opportunity to perfect techniques that we'lluse in patients. and when we have specificpatient scenarios, we can work them out in the lab, so that when it comes time to go to the operating room, everything is worked out so it occurs flawlessly. narrator:dr. neal futran uses an endoscopic approach for surgery on sinus tumors, a technique that was developed and practiced in the lab. it's an endonasal approach,working through the nose to beless invasive than traditional surgery. >> traditionally, to get there,we would have to make anincision across the top of thehead,

remove a portion of the skull, and actually lift the brainaway to get to that area in between the eyes and the middle of the head. and so what we've been able todevelop is, using newer types ofapproaches that we use for sinussurgery, and actually extend thoseapproaches to move beyond the sinuses and remove tumors in the skull base. the other way that makes itextremely safe is we are able todo something called interoperative navigation. it's kind of like using a gps system for the middle of your head, where we can use computer-aidednavigation to know that whenwe're using these telescopes inside somebody's nose and inthe skull base, we can actually visualize the structures we want to save,

remove the tumor safely, andusually we're able to dischargethe patient within a couple daysof surgery, as opposed to a much longer hospitalization with the open approaches. narrator:another goal of research is to understand why some tumors cause hearing loss and some don't, and to possiblydevelop ways to reduce thatloss. >> we do have a research projecthere to try and compare tumors that have come from patients where, all else being equal, some have hearing and some don't, to determine whether there areother factors that influencehearing function preoperatively, aside from the usualexplanations of mass effect, orpushing on the nerve, or compromise from a blood supply standpoint.

we hypothesize that there mightbe some secreted factors, or some toxic factor thatcertain tumors create, thatinfluences the hearing function. this is a potential target thatyou could find therapies for, soif somebody wanted to watch a tumor, or was having fluctuatinghearing loss that you couldpotentially treat that. this is one of the tumors that we've actually been trying to do with the newer endoscopic approaches through the nose, using a skull base approach to minimize some of the side effects in a lot of thepatients. narrator:every day, there are opportunities for the team to share information informally. it enhances the team dynamic. >> the people who are involvedin our team, dr. futran,duckert, rubinstein, and myself,

are very interested in treatingthese complex cases, and in addition, have aninterest in asking questions about what to do, what we could do better, from the surgery side to minimally invasive techniques, standard techniques, and alsoasking questions about why wecan't, why things don't work sometimes, and the basic biology of these tumors, and how we can apply what we know about that to better care of the patient. what are the other alternatives,if you don't use the endoscopic approach? you could do a bifrontal craniotomy, or a unilateral craniotomy, and get this out from a moretraditional approach, larry.

yeah, but looking at this, thisis fairly central, there areopen sinuses. this would be one where if wecould approach it endoscopically, it would really limit themorbidity of the surgery, getthe patient out of the hospitala lot sooner, and we could likely get aroundthis with a minimal amount of effort that way. so, you and bob would do this together? the amazing thing to me about working with these guys is the immediate access we have with each other to help manage patients, and thewillingness we have to pitch inand help out, not only in a traditional way - because there are certain aspects of an operation or patient management that are more likely to behandled by an otolaryngologistor a head and neck surgeon,

or a neurosurgeon - but that weall are very, as neal pointedout - passionate about what we do, we really love what we do, and it's actually fun to provideservice when everybody's working together. and to me, that's the biggestreward for working at theuniversity of washington medicalcenter with this team.

Cancer Bracelets Rubber

i want to thank all of you for coming and doing the work you're doing to inform other people. i'm gonna say a lot of things that may bother some of you. but please be patient. i'm not your enemy. i'm gonna tell you things that... about you society you may or may not know. i want to say first

that the language we speak was designed hundreds of years ago. and it's almost impossible to talk to one another. although we think we talk to one another, we really repeat in language that's highly insufficient. whatever you say to other people, it goes in their heads and comes out to fit their society.

you don't always communicate with people. so the problem is - can we develop a language that has consistent meaning? well, if you still don't understand me - sometimes i might say "have a nice weekend." why don't we say "have a nice life"? why just a weekend?

our language, again, is old. is it possible to devise a language that's not subject to interpretation? when you read the bible, (if you do) it says "jesus meant this" (somebody says that). "oh, no. he meant that." the third people says "you're both wrong. this is what he really meant." so you have the lutheran,

the seven days adventist, the catholic, because it's subject to interpretation. the language of chemistry, mathematics, science, engineering is not subject to interpretation. when a chemist writes a formula, no matter what country it goes to, they interpret it the same way.

i'm trying to tell you, it's possible to develop a language that's not subject to interpretation. so, we really talk at each other, rather than to one another. that's a major problem, that's why lawyers exist. they can take language, mold it, reshape it. but you can't do that.

those of you who do want to know how to communicate, there are books such as "science and sanity" by alfred korzybski, "language in thought and action" by [samuel ichiye] hayakawa, "the tyranny of words" by stuart chase. you don't even know this, but the words you use have no communication value.

take junior grade school for example. when a teacher says to a child "that's wrong" that doesn't tell the child anything. think about that. "that's wrong". what does that tell you? nothing in particular. and the teacher says "that's not what i told you". that doesn't tell the child anything. so the most of our language is empty. and there's another bullshit word. and that's "love". don't get mad at me. hear me out.

now, most of us don't like everything we've done in life. i'm sure we don't. we've made mistakes. we've made false judgements. so, sometimes you like yourself. sometimes a little bit. sometimes not at all. so, love is a fluctuating thing. even if you marry somebody and love them, you'll find sometimes you love them very much, sometimes little less,

sometimes "how did i ever get in this situation?" so, love is a fluctuating thing, not a fixed thing. that's why we don't understand what's happening. sometimes a guy is conditioned by society to like a girl of a particular configuration. but he marries a girl of a different configuration. and he is always looking at different configurations. and you think "what the hell is the matter with this guy?" nothing is the matter with him. he was brought up that way.

there are not good or bad people. there are no creative people or lazy people. all that is bullshit put out by your country. now i gonna tell you a little bit about it. if you were raised by the headhunters of the amazon. you'd be a headhunter. and if i've said to you "doesn't it bother you to have five shrunken heads?" he'll say "yes, my brother have twenty." so... is he nuts? no. that's normal to his culture.

if you were brought up in ancient rome, assuming you were christian. the romes believed in many different gods. and you come up with one god, you must be nuts. so they put you in an arena with a lot of hungry lions. and they starve the lions for week to put on the good show. then they take the clothes off the christians. so the lions can tear on them easy. the whole family would come saturday and sunday to see christians fed to lions.

. and the kids would say "daddy, can i come next week to see christians fed to lions." dad says - "if you behave yourself." now... are this people nuts? no. that's normal to that culture. just as we go to prize fights and watch men punch the heads of other men. all the things we do are stupid and far beyond civilization. we are not civilized yet. that's why you have prisons,

police, war and all the problems you have. unnecessary human suffering. because people don't understand yet. there are schools to not educate people. they teach you to become a cog in a wheel as roxanne pointed out. they teach them to become a carpenter, an engineer, an architect. all these are false fields. they have to teach you

how to become a generalist. how to understand the history of civilization which is lacking in all our universities. they will be shut down in the future and people will be brought up to become generalists. so they understand human behavior, they understand what makes a person, what gives a person drive. so all of us are brought up to believe there are different kinds of people, which is a lie.

that the japanese mind can't grasp technology. that the chinese can't understand certain things. and always get a dumb polak to clean out your cellar. and a damn italians are waps. they brought the mafia to this country. and all that hatred comes from cheap labor. as rule when the first irish came to this country. they worked for the one half the amount americans worked for. "so let's get rid

of those damn irishmen. they are no good." they took their jobs away. that's why we've got mad at them. and during the depression if a factory put up a sign "help wanted" everybody lined up to get a job, hundreds of people. and normal americans - normal means fucked up - normal americans would say "let's get the god damn waps out of the line". "let's get the god damn filipinos out of the line". because they threaten our jobs.

that's why they do that. racial hatred is tolerated and brought about. but i want to tell you this - if a normal american baby or greek baby, or french baby were brought up in nazi germany. and all they see is "heil hilter! deutschland ã¼ber alles!" (germany above all) they become nazis. if you brought up in america - you become "yes, sir. i'm an american and i proud of it." most americans don't know that george washington, the first president,

had three hundred slaves. today he'd be arrested as a nut. and the most of the people... harry truman, president truman was a hat salesman, real jackass in presidential position. now, who are these people in government? what is a politician?

i don't want you to take my word. i want you to walk over to any politician you know or do not know. and ask them "how can you grow food faster without exhausting the soil? and feed the hungry?" "- i don't know." "how can you make automobiles that don't hit in each other?" "how can you make highways safer?" - "i don't know." they don't know anything. don't take my word for it. ask them. they really don't know a damn thing.

and i mean politicians all over the world. all countries, all are basically corrupt. if you don't understand what i'm saying where do you think america got america from? you think the indians - "come on over and enjoy yourself, take all the land you want." no, we kill thousands of indians. we starved 50 million buffalo to make it tough for the indians.

and the indians have fought back. they really tried to take some land back. but the government decided that they want to get rid of those aggressive indians. that wouldn't conform to what we wanted. so they offered 10 bucks for every indian you killed. and the guy walked over and said - "i just killed 10 indians." the government says - "how do we know that?

bring back a piece of the indian." so they started scalping. americans, not the indians. and we brought back 10 scalps to collect 10 bucks for every indian you killed. americans are no good, french are good, the greeks are no good. all nations are corrupt. they say "the sun never sets on england." where do you think england got all that land from?

they took it by killing thousands of people. so, if you don't like the guy next door. if you shoot him and missed by one inch, you're not a murderer. but if your aim is a little better, you're a murderer. if you hit the guy. so, today they have guns,

machine guns with the laser beams, when it's on you and you pull the trigger, bullets come out. if it's a little off, no bullets come out. the guns are getting smarter. soldiers are getting dumber. and they are killing machines. we would train soldiers to be problem solvers, send them back to school. how do you bridge

the difference between nations. how do you improve agriculture. how do we fight hurricanes, heart disease. this is the real problem. not killing. when you kill people and bomb cities... consider the abortionist. some people say "jeez, it's terrible. they commit abortion, they take a life." if these people were consistently educated, when you have war you kill pregnant women, children, everybody. why don't they fight against war? why just abortionist? there is something dreadfully wrong with all our schools. they have better equipment than ever (the universities).

the best. and the war is getting worse. the atom bombs considered nothing today compared to the cobalt bomb. they would kill many more people. each submarine (i'm talking about america, it's the only country i have information on) has 300 hundred submarines. according to the navy each one

has more destructive power than all the wars in history. what can you accomplish with that? then they tell you other things. they tell you things like be good, be kind. how can you be kind or good? suppose i have a factory and i turn out things ten times faster than your factory. same product.

if i share that with you, i'll lose the competitive edge. if i have patents, i deprive people all over the world from making things that make life better. so how can you be decent? so you go to church on sunday and what do you do there? you look at the clothes of other people. everybody dressed to outpace the other person. and so when they go to church, what do they do mostly - bother god.

"we need a new car. my wife needs a car. i'd like a home in the country. and i like this, i like that." and they say that god knows everything. that's what they teach you in church. god knows everything. he made every planet, every galaxy. so when i went to church, i insulted the minister by saying: "if god knows everything, why did jesus insult god?" he said - "i don't remember jesus insulting god".

well, they crucified jesus. just before they crucified him, he looked up and said "father, forgive them for they know not what they do." and god said "jeez, i didn't know that. thanks." you know, if he knows everything what is jesus talking to him about? what are you talking to him about? (if he knows everything) "aunt manny is sick and she is suffering. please ease the pain." "well, i didn't know about that aunt manny. o.k." so, you see,

man makes god in his own image - some jerk that get angry and says "noah, build yourself an ark. i'm gonna flood the whole area. i don't like the products i turned out." he want to kill everybody. so, noah is to build an ark. if he took two kinds of every animal, the ark would be about a mile long.

who cleans the shit out of that boat? the story is so ridiculous, it not even sensible. so when i... i read the bible instead of the comic strips. because there is nothing in it that makes sense. god sits on the throne. he makes a men and a women, puts them in a beautiful garden. and then he has a snake, that walks upright.

according to the bible, not me. and the snake says "eat of the fruit of knowledge" and eve did that. and he kicked them both out and slammed at the gates shut. all loving, all kind god. the contradictions are so thick in the bible. it's amazing that everybody doesn't see it. now, in the bible (if you're religious) it says "thou shalt not kill". it doesn't say "you can kill wednesdays and thursdays".

it says "thou shalt not kill". than it says "love thy enemy". meaning if a man strikes you, turn the other cheek. and what happens in times of war? what's the matter with these christians? larry kind once said "what do you think of christianity, fresco?" "this is a great idea, when are they putting it into practice?" frankly, i've never met a christian.

that forgives people. that loves the enemy. that turns the other cheek. that has no locks on the door, when a hungry person knocks, they bring them in and say "do unto others as you would have others do unto you." i never met a christian. never found one everywhere i've traveled.

so, the point is, all of us need security. all people, all over the world need clean air, clean water, arable land and a relevant education. what is relevant education means? to study agriculture, nature, how we relate to nature,

how we relate to one another. to give us the tools to live in accordance with what we want. not what they want you to be. they want you to be patriotic. that meant they want to control you. patriotism (einstein said) is a disease. but he couldn't say that publicly. when he came to this country,

he was a socialist (to america). and they said "don't talk socialism. they will ship your ass back to germany." so he wouldn't talk about it. einstein... i once asked him whether he felt that uh... social designed with the social design would be prevalent for all people, useful. he said, he was a socialist. he really didn't know the anatomy of social design.

he said "you are interested in mathematics?" i said "yes, as a tool". but he didn't really know the process of social design. i asked communists "how will you prevent corruption in the future?" they said "well, when that time comes," (this is at the great depression) "that time comes, we'll work on it." i asked them "how will house millions of people?" "well, ah, when that time comes, we'll work on that."

i said "let's start a technical branch of the communist party or the socialist party or any party to make live secure for all people. so no one can become corrupt." they said "you are deviating from the teachings of marx. you'll have to leave." i wasn't trying to deviate or disrupt communists. i was trying to give them methods of solving problems. so i joined (at that time, during the depression),

i joined technocracy. because they talked about using science in government. but there were no black in the organisation. and i said "how come there's no blacks?" they said "well, let them start their own section." i said "what about orientals?" they said "the oriental mind can't grasp technology." of course, as you know today, they lead the world in robotics.

so, all our thoughts about different kinds of people are lies. they are not real. we have to understand that all people tend to love their kids. all people want their kids to be better educated. all people want to know about nutrition. so, let's say the drug companies were really sincere. and they found out that celery juice lowers blood pressure. you can't make any money selling celery juice, 'cause...

but you can get two bucks for every pill you sell. so, there was a book written many years ago. i also like to know how many people ever heard of it. "a hundred million guinea pigs." how many of you have heard of that book? it should have been in every library. it's not. what did "a hundred million guinea pigs" talk about? the lies put out by the drug companies.

and the people of america (it was a bestseller by the way in america, years ago) and they demanded that the government put in a food and drug administration to check the claims of the drug companies. and they did. they got that in. now it's run by people of the drug companies. everything becomes corrupt.

everything we touch. so oppenheimer went to visit harry truman (president harry truman). and said "now that we have an atom bomb. why don't you demonstrate it about 30 miles out at sea? so that japanese can see it. so you won't have to drop it over japan. give them a change to surrender." harry truman said "get out of my office.

i never want to see you guys again." and they dropped the atom bomb on hiroshima, nagasaki. because he was a jackass. most presidents are very stupid people. they know nothing about ecology, evolution of the society. (well, i have ever...) no politician has ever increased the agricultural yield, made automobiles safer, airplanes safer. what the hell they're doing there? how did they get the job?

there is something dreadfully wrong with education. the people in washington... i can only talk about them. i believe all countries are similar. the people in washington should know more about human behavior, the latest technologies. they tell you - "if you want freedom, write your congressman." why do you have to write them? he should know all those things.

when you fly on an airplane, you don't have to write the pilot. say, you've been flying at an angle for a half an hour. straighten up. they know their business. the same for government. they should know everything about modern technology, human behavior. when you put a man in prison. say he stole a watch that costs 150 dollars. and that's the fourth time he committed that crime.

so you put him in jail for seven years. that's a hell of a lot of watches you can give him. figure the costs of that. feeding him, medical care for seven years. let him have the watch. it's much cheaper to give people the thing they need than to kill them. it's much cheaper. think of man in jail for life.

do you know how much that costs? they worried about the fact that he tried to rob the jewelry store of may be three or four hundred dollars. it's always cheaper to feed people. and when they go to jail, i can assure you, they don't come out any better. they call them correctional institute. they don't even know how to correct people. they are not people trained in that area.

then you have a bunch of people they call psychologist. i hope there is none here today. and psychiatrist that adjust you to this fucked up culture. how can you adjust people to this culture if you're sane? do you understand what i mean? so even psychologist

and psychiatrist are part of the culture. so is religion. "jesus needs money". jesus doesn't need anything. god doesn't need anything. they also try to tell you that god so loved with the world, that he gave his only begotten son. according to the bible, it says they crucified christ,

he arose and ascended into heaven. where is the sacrifice? think about it. so, we don't think about what we've read. we just read and we just yack. and so, when we asked to vote for somebody, we vote for somebody that fits the patters we've been brought up to accept. now during the question period please

don't be polite. if i say anything you don't understand, say "i don't get it." and if i fail to answer your question, say "you didn't answer my question." don't be polite. so at the question period we will examine some of the idea and i want you to ask all kinds of naughty questions. don't accept the thing i say. i don't want you to follow me.

i want you to listen to what i say. if it makes sense, do it. if you like the venus project, when you leave here, if you don't talk to other people about it, nothing will happen. so, if you like what we stand for, look, it's not perfect. it's just a lot better than the society you live in. and it will continue to get better. there are no final frontiers. people think i am a utopian, i believe that you can make the best of all possible worlds.

i don't. even if i design a city that works, that city will be a straitjacket to the kids of the future. they will design their own cities. if you make a statue of me and put it in the city that holds people back. in order to move forward you have to look at things, examine it, improve it, move on. history is very poor. you don't learn much from it.

if you study history exclusively, you won't come up with new ideas. we want to move on. there is no such thing as utopia. every city i design would be the best i know up to now. and as time goes on you learn more and the city changes. nothing can be frozen and kept that way. everything keeps changing.

there are no final frontiers. that's what the matter with heaven. it's fixed. everything is the same way. consider this - if you went to heaven and you look down to starving kid in africa, war on earth. would heaven be a peaceful place for you? absolutely not. there were bands of angels that turned against god. so he kicked them all out. they call them fallen angels.

if he don't have a peace up there, how the hell you're going to have it down here? you have to read your bible. you have to be ruthlessly honest. if you not honest, it won't work. it says in the bible "judge not, lest ye be judged." that means "don't judge anybody." you don't know enough about what made him that way.

that also says in the bible "therefore but by the grace of god, go i". that's anybody you see in a wheelchair, blind. all of us, that can happen to all of us. they don't know what to do about it. in 1927 i came up with a little idea, which i got from bats. bats can fly at night and not hit anything. how do they do it? by sound.

so i made a little gadget that would fit over the person's ear and generate sound waves. so you can hear an open door even though you're blind. you can hear an object in front of you by sound feedback. so we can build things in all cities so that blind don't needthat white stick or a dog or anything like that. in a mean time we'll work on artificial systems of vision.

i think that human being can solve any problem. if you don't understand me (i am not upholding germany this time. some people think i do.) we formed the blockade to prevent the germans from getting rubber. but they had enough technicians so they synthetic rubber, all the rubber from their airplanes and everything out of their own chemistry. so... with technicians

not in charge. understand - i don't want to see science in charge of government... or technicians. what i want to see is their assignment to problems such as agriculture. when you can grow food twice as fast on the soil, you exhaust the soil. so we want to know how to grow food faster without exhausting the soil.

the united states army dumped 65 tons of nerve gas into the ocean off the coast of miami near the golf stream. how can you love the country if the army did that? they don't know what they are doing. "we want you to dump nerve gas." - "yes, sir." we don't want obedient people anymore.

we want you to understand what's happening. we don't want to vote for a senator - some other jackass. they are incompetent. all of them. i want you to understand everything that you have today is your electric lights, your airplanes, your automobiles. you have nothing to do with them. you got them just being born in a country that has that technology. you got it for nothing.

i don't think any of you here worked on the electric light or radio, or television, very few people. you've got all them for nothing. does it hurt you? of course not. they say - "well, you don't want to give people things for nothing. do you?" this kid said that to me at princeton university. "fresco, you want to give people things for nothing." so i said - "are you paying your way through college?" he said - "no, my dad is." - i said - "does that hurt you?"

this kid said to me he still doesn't believe anybody ought to get things for nothing. so i said to him "well. as i understand your father is wealthy. if he dies, you want that his moneyto go to the heart fund and the cancer fund, but not to you 'cause you don't believe anybody ought to get anything for nothing." he said "just a minute now!" everybody wants things for nothing. you've got the earth for nothing. you were born here.

beautiful scenery, clouds. you didn't make those things. does it hurt you? of course not. but if you're born in a polluted world with smog in the air and automobile pollution, you say - "i guess that's the way it is". it isn't that way! it's because the people in charge in government are totally incompetent. so what you really want is a world free of burden, pain, prisons, police, crime.

can we do that? the church has been trying to do that for year. they don't know how. they have no idea how to do it. they say "be kind. be good". how do you do that? so i wanted my children (two of them) to learn how to read.

so i never taught them how to read. i would open a book at night and i read to them in bed. i read to them about things kids are interested in. this happened to be my son. he was about four years old. i was reading about dinosaurs. and i said - "when the two dinosaurs met... aeeh [yawn]" i said - "that's all for tonight." i close it. he - "what happened when the dinosaurs met?"

i said - "look, if you learn to read you can figure it out for yourself." so i gave him a reason to want to read. don't just teach them to read. teach them a reason for want to learn mathematics. teachers teach you how to read. "the dickie dare and his sheep. on the way he met a cow. "moo moo", said the cow". what is that crap? and then they have it in america (i don't know how much you have it here) the mickey mouse club. now, what the hell happens

if you condition kids to join the mickey mouse club. you make a bunch of pinheads. do you understand? kids want to know everything. how the airplanes fly. "daddy, what make the light go on." he - "i don't know that." daddy usually doesn't know anything. and congressmen know less. so, i'm saying - everything that you have is technical. if we took away technology. if you shut down boulder dam. tomorrow

all the food in all the refrigerator from la to san francisco would fail. all the food would rot away. everything that you have is technology. if you shut down the power projects, men would have to pull cars and boats. they did it on the volga river. they had to pull freighters. men (slaves) were whipped to do that. slavery

was normal in the old days. and kings felt that they were put here to rule over people. people in my position like to think that they are here to try to make the world a better place. divine wisdom guides them. look... divine wisdom doesn't guide anybody. when christians were fed to lions, they prayed like hell. the jews in concentration camp prayed and they were burned.

in salem, massachusetts, if a woman spoke up and she didn't quite agree with everything, she was burned alive as a witch. now, here is what you didn't know. i'm talking about united states. women, hundreds of them were burned alive. because they thought about things... just a little different. but, then what you didn't know is for every witch you found you inherited

their bank account and their land. so, it's a good job looking for witches in the old days. the more you can find, the more money you got... and free. so, here you have a world that is sicker than shit. and what i say i mean it, i mean that the world you live in is consisted of the stupid people including the military. the pentagon and washington think

that they are there to defend the country. whatever a man can think of, some other buddy can think of a way around that. you can't secure yourself. you think that you go to an airport, you put your luggage down,they x-ray it and you're alright. i can design clothing that gives off nerve gas. there are other ways around anything. i personally could think. i wouldn't do that of course.

i wouldn't work on weapons. when i was drafted in the army the first thing they've said "can you make a bomb, fresco, that goes sideways instead of up?" i've said - "i have no idea how to do that." it says - "cast ye your pearls before swine" people are not educated yet. they should not have weapons of mass destruction. they don't know how to use it.

they should have technology that enhances all humans’ life. this is what religion tries to do. i would say that the venus project is the nearest thing to the brotherhood of humanity. so i want to try to tell you a little more about people. if you were raised in the nazi germany as a baby. if you never saw anything else as the "heil hitler". if you're raised in france

"la tour eiffel". your facial expression, everything. if you're raised in the south of america, you speak with a southern accent. if i say "stop speaking with it". you can't. and you say ??"well, i'm gon' get me a nigga and i'm gon' kick his ass"?? is that you speaking? or is that picked from your environment? if you take a normal boy

and bring him up with six or ten very effeminate women. women speak differently than men. they move their hands a lot. and facial expression is different. more like i'm moving now. so, if you were just brought up with... a boy would move just like a woman. if you brought up in italy, you say "come on, eat! thes a gooda food." see, because even that is reflection.

if you brought up in germany again it's "deutschland ã¼ber alles." if you brought up in any other country, you might say you know where the person was brought up from by the way they speak. "how are you, mike?" you know now that guy comes from australia. well, you'd speak that way, your facial expressions would be that way. and you use words like individuality.

there's no such thing. everybody reflects their culture. if you lived in france ten years, you moved to germany, lived there 10 years, you'll speak with the german-french accent. not a thing you can do about it. so we reflect our culture. all of us. so when they say "think for yourself". you can't. 'cause you think as an american or a frenchman,

or a german, or a greek, or an italian. so.. really.. when germans speak, they speak (when they come to this country) they speak and say "well, i give you some idea what happened." that's the way they speak. they pick it up. it's a cross between german and english. i worked for a guy named ernst udet, who was an ace of world war i. he shot down 71 planes.

since i worked for him, i said "how did you shoot down 71 airplanes?" may be if you shot down 5 or 6, that's possible. but how can you shoot down 71 airplaines? he said [german accent] "it's very easy, fresco." (that's the way he spoke) he said "i would fly above the squadrons 'und' i looked for a rookie, a bad pilot, that didnâ´t know how, and i pick them off"

so, is he a good man? is he kind? is he humane? same with eddie rickenbacker. they always fly above the squadron and look for guys who can't fly too well and picked them off. that gives you a lot of medals, a lot of x's on your fuselage. so when you're brought up, you're brought up [where] lot of people go to church and say "thou shall not kill"

so it's hard to get people to enlist in the army. so they give japanese or chinese americans false teeth. and they make a movie by frank capra called "why we fight?" and it shows these japanese kids raping a woman. and the enlistment goes up 71 percent. you have to teach hatred

to have war to be a working system. an army man unfortunately 10 year after the war - that's the most exciting thing in their life. and they always go back and join the american legion. and they talk about the days they shot these god damn slanty eyed bastards. and the germans were called krauts, not human beings.

so, we shot them too. so, soldiers are killing machines. and if you want a world without war, people have to be educated to understand, that all people need the same thing - good food, healthy livings and relevant education. not killing. because war only produces hatred over the years. they remember that you killed their kids, their parents.

and they want to get even with you. and some people say to me (i'm just imitating them) "why are these god damn north koreans building rockets? and why are these chinese building big armies? they are threat to us." but, again i don't want you to take my word for this. there's a newspaper in england called "the telegraph". "the london telegraph". and in this newspaper they ran a headline

(about seven years ago) "the us intends to bomb seven countries". nuclear bomb, sneak attack on seven countries. it names north korea, china. all the countries we don't like. headlined in the "telegraph". you haven't seen that.

so, write for it, don't take my word for it. when you do that, if china said "we intend to bomb england, france, united states and other countries", we were armed to the tooth. that's why they are all building nuclear weapons. they are afraid of us, afraid of america. i didn't know they ran that, so you say "why are these god damn chinese doing that?" "why are these god damn koreans doing that?"

they are doing it 'cause they are scared of the united states. and united states, are their intentions good? they may be, but they are stupid people. even if they intended to do that, they should not have released it. it was released by the pentagon. according to the "telegraph." so, there is your reason.

people behave as they've been conditioned, as they manage news and turn you off from things they think you ought not to hear. like the theory of evolution was held back for a long time. and in all the parks in america (or most of them) there are canons, war tanks, airplanes. there should be statues of people that increase food that did wonderful changes in medicine. "wash your hands." "retain cleanliness."

they used to cut cadavers and then they go right on and do child birth with surgery. and the women would die of childbirth fever. that was because they did cutting with cadavers, never washed their hands. and the doctor that told them to wash their hands was kicked out of the university. because he told them to wash their hands. "how the hell are you to tell us what to do?"

so, everything new was fought - women's rights, child labor. there used to be children in factories. of course it's a little before your time. but people marched to get the children out of the factories. and they had rotten eggs throws at them. when you fought for women's rights, the same thing, there were rotten eggs thrown at you. "what do you mean 'women'? women only good for two things, you know." so, they had notions about women.

"you know, women can't learn to be architects and engineers. women are just good to produce babies and cook for the old man." well, all this crap is disappearing. but every inch of the way of progress was fought. just remember that. nothing comes easy. people are now producing articles about the venus project, because we're better known now.

they say - "fresco get his money from the vatican or the rothschild family, or this banking institute." i don't have any money. "fresco has two mercedes." i don't even have a car. so, anyway they will spread whatever rumors they have to keep in power. and that's what you're up against. whatever you do anything new or different. instead of, people are saying "you know, that's interesting thing. let me think about it.", you know.

they get mad at you, because you're upsetting the apple-cart. and that's what it's about. we have a tough job ahead. all of us. if you wish to live in a world without war, poverty, unemployment, hunger, human suffering, you have to talk to other people. if you do nothing, i can assure you, nothing will happen.

so i think i can open this portion to questions. so roxanne and i will take questions from any one of you. thank you again.

Cancer Blogs

female speaker: so i'm reallyexcited to host dr. lissa rankin today. it's funny to say "doctor"in front of your name. dr. lissa rankin: i know. female speaker: i call you"lissa." but i met lissa through a mutual friend, andlast year when i met lissa she talked about this bookthat was coming out. it's all about her research andthe medical world that she comes from.

so this is the book, "mind overmedicine." it's available here as well for anyonelooking to purchase. but first a little bitabout dr. rankin. so dr. rankin is a mind-bodymedicine physician, founder of the whole health medicineinstitute training program for physicians and other healthcare providers. and is "the new york times"best-selling author of "mind over medicine-- scientific proof you can healyourself." she is on a

grassroots mission to put thecare back in health care and to heal our broken health caresystem one doctor and patient at a time. lissa blogs at lissarankin.comand has created two online communities,healhealthcarenow.com and owningpink.com. she is also the authorof two other books. and lissa will work on the focusin an upcoming public television special that willappear on pbs that she just

finished taping, and shedelivered two popular tedx talks, which are availableon her website. she's also on the speakingcircuit with hay house i can do it! conferences. lissa's work has also beenfeatured on over 30 television shows, over 50 radio shows, andin publications such as "o" magazine, "the new yorktimes," webmd, and cnn. she's also a social networkingguru, and you can follow her on twitter and on her blog,which you can sign up for her

newsletter daily. so without further ado, i willhand it over to lissa. thank you so much. [applause] dr. lissa rankin:hi, everyone. it's so nice to seeyou all here. so i want to tell you the storyof how i ended up being here in front of you, talkingabout the things that i'm going to be talkingabout today.

in many ways, i'm the mostunlikely person on the planet to be talking about howyou can heal yourself. i was raised in a veryconventional upbringing with a physician father. i came to believe that inorder to get well, to be healthy, you do the things thatthey teach us how to do in medical school, right? so my definition of "health"meant, ok, so you eat well, you exercise daily, you getenough sleep, you take your

vitamins, you go to yourdoctor for preventive maintenance, and you shouldbe healthy, right? well, and i had once worked inthe inner city of chicago. my patients were often very,very poor, and they had very poor health habits. so it made sense to me thatthese people were sick. because when i was investigatingtheir health histories and thatsort of thing, they were eating poorly.

they weren't gettingenough sleep. they had many bad habits. often they weren't exercisingat all. so it kind of made sense to mewhy these people were sick. well, then i cameto marin county. and i'm not from marin, so ihad no idea what kind of people were in marin county. but these people are proverbialhealth nuts. i see you guys are smiling.

right? so i took a job at anintegrative medicine practice, and my patients were eatingtheir vegan diets. they were drinking theirdaily green juice. they were working out withpersonal trainers. they were getting eight hoursof sleep every night. they were taking20 supplements. they were getting the bestmedical care at places like stanford and ucsf.

so these people would come tosee me, and they'd have these laundry lists of chronichealth conditions. and it made no sense to me. i mean, these people should bethe healthiest people on the planet, and they were someof the sickest people that i'd ever met. so it didn't make any sense. many of them, by the time theyhad seen me, they had optimized everything thatwestern medicine had to offer.

so they had gone to all of theirfabulous doctors and had every fabulous test out there. so a few of them weresort of practicing some functional medicine. and so some of them, i wouldfind the occasional lab test that someone else hadn'tordered, and i'd find some abnormality that we'dbe able to treat. and all of a sudden, itwould be like the lights had come on.

they felt great and everythingwas terrific. but that was maybe10% of the time. and 90% of the time, i'd lookthrough everything that all the other doctors had done,and i didn't know how to explain why these peoplewere sick. so i did somethingsort of radical. i decided, you know what,maybe i'm not asking the right questions. maybe the answer is not in theirmedical record but in

the rest of their life. so i redid my patient intakeform, the forms that you fill out when you go seethe doctor. so i was asking all theconventional questions, but i started asking someother questions. i started asking things like,if you could break any rule and there were no consequences,what rule would you break? and i started asking peopleabout their romantic life.

are you in a relationship,and if so, are you happy? if not, do you wish you were? i started asking peopleabout their work. do you love your job? do you feel likeyou're in touch with your life's purpose? do you have a calling, andif so, what is it? and i came across somereal doozies. i started asking people, if yourhealth condition had a

message to teach you, whatis it here to teach you? and then the one that reallystarted being the mother lode for me, i asked peoplewhat does your body need in order to heal? now, when i started asking thatquestion, i thought that i would get treatment intuitionsfrom people, that maybe they'd tell me i thinki'll skip the antidepressant and we'll try the tryptophaninstead or something like that.

and occasionally they wouldsay things like that. but more often than not, i'dsay, what does your body need in order to heal? and my patients would say thingslike, i need to leave my abusive marriage. or i need to quit mysoul-sucking job. or i've got to getmy kid in rehab. or i've got to deal with myaging parent and get my mom out of my house.

or i need to finallywrite my novel. and i'd say, well, great. you've just written theprescription for yourself. go do it. and they'd look at me and say,well, i can't do that, that would be crazy. so i started talking to mypatients about, well, let's assume for a minute that youjust answered the question of what does my body needin order to heal

and that it's true. what if you actually did thatthing and your health conditions went away? would you be willingto do it then? and some of them would say, youknow what, actually not. i'd rather be sick thanhave to follow through on what i just said. but some of my patients startedgetting really brave. and so i was watching thesepatients as they were going

out into the world and sortof making these courageous choices, often from this laundrylist of things that they've written out about theanswer to what does my body need in order to heal. and i started witnessing mypatients having these incredible, spontaneousremissions from a whole host of health conditions. so i was not giving these peopleany medical treatment. they had already gottenthe best medical

treatment out there. and they were getting better,and i couldn't explain that. that didn't make any senseto my very logical, very scientific, very academically-educated doctor brain. it's like, does not compute. i really couldn't explainwhat was going on. so i started researchingspontaneous remissions. this is a term the doctors useto explain patients that get

better either with no medicaltreatment or with medical treatment deemed to beinadequate for cure. so i started looking into this,and i came across a database called the spontaneousremission project. and this is a database of over3,500 case studies in the medical literature put togetherby the institute of noetic sciences. and they're case studies thatdoctors have written up as kind of medical mysteries, ofpeople that had everything

from stage iv cancersthat disappeared. there was an hivpositive person who became hiv negative. there's a gunshot wound tothe head left untreated. and it wasn't justlife-threatening illnesses like heart failure andkidney failure. it was ordinary things, likethyroid disease or autoimmune disorders or diabetes orhigh blood pressure. so i was reading through thesecase studies and this didn't

make any sense to me. again, doctor braindoes not compute. because i was not only a veryskeptical physician, but i was a very skeptical patient. so by the time i was 33 yearsold, i had been diagnosed with a whole host of chronichealth conditions. and i was taking sevenmedications that my doctors had told me i'd have to takefor the rest of my life. so being a doctor, and beingraised by a doctor, i believed

my doctors. and i believed that these werechronic conditions that i would have for therest of my life. so when i started reading thesecases of spontaneous remission, it was likethis light bulb going off in my mind. like, wait a minute. every single health conditionthat i was dealing with myself, i was able to find acase study of somebody who had

that condition and got betterwithout medical treatment. and it was like a switch flippedin my brain, where all of a sudden i started thinking,what if my illnesses aren't chronic? what if they're not incurable? what if it's possible that imight not have to take seven medications for therest of my life? and it was really-- have youguys heard the story of the four-minute mile?

yeah, i see you guys nodding. so exercise physiologists oncebelieved that it was impossible, humanly,physiologically impossible, for a human beingto run a mile in less than four minutes. and nobody had ever done it. it was kind of this world-widebelief in the athletic community that thiswas impossible. and then roger bannisterran the mile in 3

minutes and 59 seconds. and now almost every world-classrunner has run a sub-four-minute mile. so it was like that beliefthat it was impossible suddenly shifted everything forthe world of athletics. and reading the spontaneousremission project and then going through even more casestudies in the medical literature was likethat for me. it was like all of a suddeneverything shifted, and i

suddenly started thinking, whatif it's possible that i could have a spontaneousremission? what if it's possiblethat you could have a spontaneous remission? and i was watching my patientsdo this by asking the question, what does my bodyneed in order to heal, and then getting really brave. so one of the case studiesthat i came across was recently in "the newyork times," this

guy stamatis moraitis. so stamatis moraitis was a greekwar veteran who came to the united states in the 1940swith a combat-mangled arm. so they fixed his arm. he wound up getting a job inmanual labor, and he married a greek-american woman, settleddown, had kids. and one day stamatis was at workand he was getting really short of breath. so he goes to see the doctor,and the doctor tells him, you

have terminal lung cancer. and basically tells him he'sgot nine months to live. so they offered him aggressivetreatment, but they said it's really not going to extend yourlife very much, and the side effects are goingto be rough. so stamatis decided, well, if ionly have nine months left, i'd rather skip the treatment. and i might as wellsave some money. i don't have a wholelot of money.

i might as well save themoney for my wife. so he and his wife decided tomove back to his native ikaria, a small islandin greece. he figured he might as well beburied in the graveyard with his ancestors, overlookingthe aegean sea. so they moved back to ikaria,and they move in with stamatis' parents. and word gets out. friends hear that he's back.

and they start coming andbringing bottles of wine and board games to play. he figures, hey, i'm dyingin nine months, i might as well die happy. so this goes on. he decides he's goingto plant a garden. he doesn't really expect thathe's going to be around to harvest it, but he thought itwould be lovely for his wife to be able to picksome vegetables

and think about him. and he starts going backto the old church that he grew up in-- reconnected with his faithand with the people that he grew up with. so one thing leads to anotherand actually the vegetables come to harvest. and he's feeling well enough toharvest the vegetables, so he decides he's going to starttending the untended vineyards

on his parents' property. and he winds up makingsome wine. well, long story short, that was45 years ago, and stamatis moraitis turned 98years old on new year's day of this year. so 25 years after his initialdiagnosis, he decides he's going to go back to the unitedstates and track down his doctors to find outwhat happened. and apparently, theywere all dead.

so stories like this made mereally start to question, what's going on here? and the question that keptcoming into my mind was, can the mind really heal the body? you hear about it, sort ofthis new age folklore. and i had read some books aboutmind-body medicine, and none of them seemed verywell-substantiated from a scientific perspective. so i was curious.

i was intrigued. i mean, it's a nice idea. but, again, my skeptical brainsort of thinking, that sounds like, at best, wishful thinking,and at worst, just good old fashioned snakeoil selling quackery. but then i started investigatingfurther. is there any evidence that themind can heal the body? and that's when i realized thatthe medical establishment has been proving that themind can heal the

body for over 50 years. we call it the placebo effect. you guys have all heardof the placebo effect. it's this thing we kind ofbrush under the carpet in western medicine. we know it's there. we know that in clinical trials,when you give people a sugar pill or a salineinjection or, most effectively, a fake surgery, 18%to 80% of them get better.

so they know they might begetting either the real treatment or this faketreatment, but they don't know which they're getting andneither does their doctor. so on average it's about 30% to35% of people get better. and certainly, as a doctor, iknow about the placebo effect. it's out there. we're sort of taught about it. but nobody really explains it. what's happening when 30% to 35%of people get better from

getting a sugar pill? so i started investigatingthe placebo effect. i thought, is it justin their minds? are they just feeling better? but no, it's physiologicallymeasurable. these people in theseclinical trials, their bronchi are dilating. their warts are disappearing. their colons are becomingless inflamed.

there's measurablephysiological things that are happening. bald guys getting sugar pillsin the rogaine studies actually grew hair. so it's not justin their minds. it's something physiologicalhappening in the body. so it sort of led me down thisrabbit hole of my own research, of one questionafter another. i found that the mind can notonly heal the body, the mind

can harm the body. there's something called thenocebo effect, which is the evil twin of theplacebo effect. those same clinical trials where18% to 80% of people get better from taking a sugar pill,we also have to warn those people when they're inthose studies of the side effects that they might get ifthey're getting a real drug. so we tell them, here'sthe side effects. well, an equally high percentageof people actually

get those side effects whenthey're not getting the drug. they're getting thesugar pill. so thinking that we mightactually be at risk of these side effects actually makespeople get these side effects. and there's much more dramaticinstances of things like that. there's case studies all overthe medical literature of people that were told thatthey were going to die in three months, for example, ofa cancer diagnosis, and then they die almost exactly threemonths to the date, and on

autopsy, it turns out theydon't have cancer. so there's all kinds of studiesout there showing that when we have negative beliefsabout our health-- and many of us do. many of us are programmed withnegative beliefs about our health from an early age. we have those, oh, breast cancerruns in my family, therefore, i'm at risk ofbreast cancer, thoughts. or we have, i'm always goingto be battling my weight

because my parents alwaysbattled their weight. or even just something simple,like i can't heal myself. i'm dependent on doctorsto heal me. so i actually, when i was doingthis research, i have a seven year old, and at the time,my daughter was four. and i was reading all the datashowing that basically, our subconscious minds getprogrammed by the time we're about six, and that 90% to 95%of the time, we're operating from these beliefs of oursubconscious mind that are

often programmed into usby the time we're six. so i was noticing my husband,when my daughter would get injured or when she'd get a coldor something, he'd start pretending he's an ambulance. and he's going aroundgoing [siren noise] we've got to take an siennato the kid factory. we've got to gether a new knee. or, we've got to get her anew throat, or whatever. and i told my husband, we'vegot to stop doing that.

because we're programming ourchild to think that the solution is at thekid factory. that she needs to go, and thatit's outside of her, this ability to get well. so we started reprogramming,and we started telling her, you know what, we're going toput this band-aid on your knee so that you'll feel better whileyour body heals itself. and i'm going to give you thiscough syrup so that you're going to feel a little betterwhile your body heals itself

from this cold. and now she's great. i mean, she's so programmed. so people talk about being sick,and she's like, it's ok, your body knows howto heal itself. so i was reading about all ofthis and i'm researching all of this, and i'm slowly gettingkind of accustomed to the idea of like, oh, maybe themind can heal the body. there's so much research, andit's all included in my book

"mind over medicine-- scientific proof that you canheal yourself." so i was chronicling all of this as iwas going, but my skeptic brain really neededan explanation. what's happening here? how do we explain this? i needed a physiologicexplanation. it's not magic. it can't be magic, right?

so i started researching whatexplanations are out there of how the placebo effect works. and what i found is thatresearchers believe that some combination of the positivebelief that they're going to get well-- people are in thisclinical trial, they're going to get the new wonderdrug or the new fancy surgery or whatever. so they believe that they'regetting the real treatment, and so they believe the realtreatment's going to work.

so it's that combination ofpositive belief and then there's also this element of thenurturing care of somebody in a white coat saying,i believe this is going to help you. and we put a lot ofmeaning in that. we're conditioned to believethat if somebody in a white coat says, this is going tohelp you, that it will. so researchers believe that thatcombination of positive belief and the nurturing careof a health care provider

leads to changes in the brainthat are translated into the physiology of the bodythrough a whole cascade of hormonal changes. so let me explainthis for you. i'm going to give you a littleneuroanatomy lesson first. so there's this part of ourbrain called the amygdala. and the amygdala is inthe limbic brain. so this is not your thinking,rational, logical forebrain. it's the ancient lizard partof your primordial brain.

and the amygdala's primaryjob is to keep on the alert for danger. so have you guys seen thosemeerkats at the zoo, the little prairie dogs? i love them. they're always sitting there,and there's always the meerkat sentry up on the mound, kind oflooking around to make sure that there's not a tigeron the loose. and it's their job to signalto the whole community if

something's coming. so the amygdala, i like to thinkof it as it's sort of like that meerkat, the sentryup on the mound. it's always trying to protectyou, so it's always on the lookout for danger. and this is a goodthing, right? because if there's a tiger onthe loose, then this is something that we need. because what happens is if theamygdala sees that there's a

tiger on the loose, all ofa sudden the amygdala can communicate with thehypothalamus, which communicates with the pituitarygland that talks to the adrenal gland. and all of a sudden the adrenalgland is spitting out cortisol and epinephrine. so you're now in the middle ofa fight or flight response. so walter cannon atharvard called this the stress response.

and it's there to protect you. it's so that when you're instress response and your life is in danger, your heartrate goes up. your blood pressure goes up. you get blood flow to the largemuscle groups so you can outrun the tiger. so this is here to protectyou, right? but the problem is the amygdalais not smart. so it can't tell the differencebetween there's a

tiger on the loose and you'reabout to get eaten or nobody loves me. or my family has a history ofbreast cancer and so i might get breast cancer. or i hate my job. or even something simple, likesomebody just spilled red wine on my white carpet. as far as your amygdala isconcerned, all of those are equal threats.

so whenever you have a thoughtlike that, the amygdala starts this hormonal cascade and thebody is full of cortisol and epinephrine. now fortunately, there's anequal and opposite reaction called the relaxation response,which is when the body is in the parasympatheticnervous system. so the fight or flight is thesympathetic nervous system. the parasympathetic nervoussystem is the homeostatic state of the nervous system.

so in the relaxation response,all of those stress hormones go away and the body releaseshealing hormones like oxytocin, dopamine, nitricoxide, endorphins. these are all hormones thathelp the body heal. so here's the one thing-- if youget only one thing from my talk today, this is whati want you to hear. the body is beautifullyequipped with natural self-repair mechanisms. we know this.

they teach us this inmedical school. it's in our physiologytextbooks. so we know that we all makecancer cells every day. we fight the cancer cells. our body knows how to do that. we're all exposed to infectiousagents all the time, right? but we fight the infectiousagents. they don't make us sickmost of the time.

we have broken proteins. the body knows how to fixthings like that. but here's what i didn'tknow until i started doing this research. the body's natural self-repairmechanisms only operate when the body is in relaxationresponse. so any time your body's instress response, those mechanisms are disabled. so that was a huge realizationfor me because we're only

supposed to be in stressresponse in emergencies. i was just driving to munster,indiana, last week to go speak to a bunch of people at a cancercenter, and all of a sudden two tires on the leftside of the car blew out. and the car literallyalmost tipped over. just something in the roadgot into the tires. and all of a sudden, i noticedmyself in that stress response, right? because all of a sudden, i'vegot to figure out how to--

i'm going 65 on the highway. i've got to get thiscar off, safely, to the shoulder, right? so this is good. my body is supposedto be in a stress response during that time. so i'm wrangling the car. i've got cortisoland epinephrine coursing through my veins.

i managed to get thecar safely off to the side of the road. now, if i were an animal, assoon as i'm safe, my amygdala would say, you're safe now. and that stress hormonewould go down. the stress responsewould stop. because those stress responsesare only supposed to last about 90 seconds afterthe threat is gone. but what starts happening?

my brain suddenly starts going,like, oh no, i'm still far from where i'm speaking. and i suddenly now havetwo flat tires. i'm going to miss my speech. i'm going to disappointthe event planner. i can't even-- where is my aaa card? my wallet was stolen. i don't have my aaa card.

this isn't even my car. i'm driving my bestfriend's car. these thoughts, right? we have these spiralingstress responses. and i was really aware in themoment of like, oh, this is how it happens, right? and this is how it happensfor most of us. so on average, we have about 50stress responses per day. and people who hate their jobsor they're in difficult

relationships, they probablyhave more like 100. and every time we have a stressresponse, our body's natural self-healing capacitiesare disabled. they don't work. so this is how the placeboeffect works. when we have that positivebelief that we're getting the wonder drug, and when it'sdelivered to us by a nurturing health care provider, theamygdala is calmed down. so before the person comes in tothe clinical trial, they're

usually nervous andscared, right? their amygdala is firing. you've got an illness. things aren't right. things are at risk. the little meerkat'sout there. but that combination of positivebelief and the nurturing care of the right kindof health care provider can calm the amygdala down.

and all of a sudden,the body's filled with the healing hormones. and voila, the body starts toheal itself, even though all you're getting isa sugar pill. so the next question that sortof was coming into my brain was, well, we're not all inclinical trials, right? should we all be going aroundpopping sugar pills? or is there some other waythat we can do that? that we can have that same sortof placebo effect in a

way that we can maybe control. so one of the things i wasresearching, when i was looking at spontaneousremissions and patients who had had these kind of medicalmysteries was, were these all just flukes? was stamatis moraitisjust lucky? or is there something thatthese people were doing? was there something proactivethat they were doing? and i came across the researchof dr. kelly turner, who did

her phd thesis-- she studied at harvardand uc berkeley-- and she did her thesis on peoplewho had had spontaneous remissions from stageiv cancers. and she was interviewing thesepatients, as well as the often alternative health careproviders that had facilitated their healing journeys. and she was trying to figureout, was there something in common?

could she learn somethingfrom these people about how to heal ourselves? and what she found is that therewere six behaviors that these people had in common. and only two of them were thesort of things that a forward-thinking doctormight have prescribed. one of them was changing yourdiet to more vegetable-based, often gluten freesort of diet. and the other was taking somesort of supplement that the

patient believed was reallygoing to help strengthen their immune system, help fightoff the cancer. the other four things, andthey're all listed in "mind over medicine," the other fourthings were all things that were happening here. they weren't medicaltreatments per se. so that's when i startedgetting really curious. like what could we do to flipon our body's natural self-repair mechanisms the waypeople in clinical trials have

them flipped on when they'regetting a placebo? so the whole second part of mybook is about the research that i found showing that inorder to be healthy, we need more than just a healthy diet,a healthy exercise regimen, getting enough sleep, takingyour vitamins, getting your pap smears, or whatever. we need healthy relationships. we need healthy professionallives. we need a healthyspiritual life.

a healthy creative life. a healthy sex life. we need a healthy relationshipwith our money. we need to live and work inhealthy environments. we need to have healthy minds. and this is why my patientsin marin were sick. i mean, i love kale. i drink my green juice, fivegreen juices a day. i'm a big fan ofa healthy diet.

but the reality is that noamount of kale can counter balance the poisonous effectsof chronic repetitive stress responses in the body and allthat cortisol and epinephrine, which not only turns off thebody's self-repair mechanisms, it also poisons the heart. it has all kinds of othernegative effects on the body. so i wanted to try to figureout, how can i help people activate those naturalself-repair mechanisms? how can we have the benefit ofthe placebo effect without

having to take a sugar pill? so i came up with a new wellnessmodel that i teach in "mind over medicine."it's based on something called a cairn. have you guys seen these? i love cairns. and they're all oversan francisco. when you're at the marina,they're stacked along the water there.

and it's amazing because they'reso simultaneously strong and fragile, right? i mean, they can withstand wavescrashing upon them, and yet you get one of those stonesout of balance and the whole thing falls apart. so i created a wellnessmodel based on this. i call it the wholehealth cairn. and it's based on all of thedata that shows that every single one of these facets ofyour health is scientifically

proven to affect the healthof your body. so for example, people withstrong sense of community, they have half the rate of heartdisease as people who are lonely. and there's tons of researchlooking at relationships and health, and there's a wholechapter in "mind over medicine" about that,about the effects of loneliness on health. so researchers concluded, afterlooking at all of this

data, that alleviating yourloneliness is more important for the health of your bodythan starting an exercise program or quitting smoking. but when was the last time yourdoctor put a prescription that said alleviateyour loneliness? work stress is another hugething that can trigger our stress responses and disableour natural self-repair mechanisms. in japan, they even have a wordfor death by overwork.

it's called "karoshi." andi include in "mind over medicine" all of the datashowing how much work stress affects our physical bodies. financial stress, same thing. so many people in this countryworried about money and the amygdala cannot tell thedifference between, oh my goodness, how am i going to paymy bills, and there's a tiger on the loose. so what i realized is thatevery stone in this whole

health cairn can either triggerstress responses or it can trigger relaxationresponses. so if you're in a loving,nurturing relationship, then that's going to fill your bodywith oxytocin, dopamine, nitric oxide, endorphins,these healing hormones, because the amygdalais calmed down. whereas if you're in a stressfulrelationship, things aren't going well, you're goingto be triggering stress responses all the time.

so each one of these stones inthe whole health cairn is essential to the healthof our bodies. so it led me to go back to mypatients and help them look at their lives. and i started teaching mypatients what i call the six steps to healing yourself. and these are all step by steplisted out in "mind over medicine." but based on what i learned,essentially--

this is the six steps. number one is you have tobelieve that it's possible. it was huge for me when irealized that my illnesses were are all illnesses that atleast somebody had had a spontaneous remission from. and i'm now down to half thedose of one of my seven medications, having done thissix step process for myself. but it all had to start withme shifting my belief. i had to believe that theseweren't chronic, incurable

illnesses, but that icould get better. and you all have to do the sameif there's any health conditions you're dealing with,and i'm not even talking about necessarily a diagnosis. for so many people there'sthis epidemic of just not really being sick butnot being vital. we've sort of settledfor being well. and i know. so many of my patients inmarin were like this.

they'd come in and theyjust feel tired. they're having body aches orheadaches or backaches. they've lost their libido. they're just not feeling-- their mood is kindof in the toilet. they're not feeling vital. so i started thinking of healthon sort of a spectrum. there's, like, sickpeople, right? where they have a diagnosis.

they have abnormallaboratory tests. they have abnormalvital signs. and then there's wellpeople, who-- in the medical establishment,these are the people who have normal blood tests. they have normal vital signs. but they still don't necessarilyfeel great. so these people are often veryfrustrated because they come to doctors thinking that we'regoing to have the solution,

and we fail them very often. because what they want to beis they want to be vital. they want to feel just electricwith energy, like overflowing with life force. and what i realized is this ishow we become overflowing with life force. we go through this process. so step one is believe that it'spossible that you could get well, that youcould be vital.

step two is findingthe right support. so what i found in thescientific data is that it's sort of a misnomer to say thatyou can heal yourself, because the reality is the body can healitself, but the body more effectively heals itself withthe support of someone else who believes that youcan heal yourself, with the right healer. i'm now training doctors andother health care providers at the whole health medicineinstitute how to be

that kind of healer. because doctors can be both theplacebo effect, you know. they can be that nurturing carethat calms the amygdala. that doctor that says, you'renot going to go through this alone. i believe in you. i know that you can get throughthis, and we're going to do it together. that is very calmingto the amygdala.

the body's natural self-repairmechanisms are more likely to be optimized in thatsituation. but the opposite is also true. the doctor can be the nocebo. so my mom recently, she had asore neck and she went to see the doctor. and the doctor did an x-ray andfound an abnormality on the x-ray and ordered an mri. and my mom asked why?

why the mri? and he said, well, because it's probably metastatic cancer. and he turned around and walkedout of the room without a single comforting word. and you can imagine my mother,who is a big fan of my work and has read "mind overmedicine" and practices this in her own life. my phone rings, andmy mom says, my

amygdala is freaking out. because her doctor just said thec-bomb without any other explanation. that is exactly what thebody doesn't need. if she had metastatic cancer,he did the worst thing a doctor could do, because hetriggered her amygdala rather than being a calminginfluence. so my mother, being smart aboutthis, she said, i need to look at my whole health cairnright now, and i need

your help walking methrough how am i going through the week. because if i do have metastaticcancer, i want to make sure my body's naturalself-repair mechanisms are totally optimized, right? so my mom and i walked throughall of these stones in her whole health cairn. how can we activate relaxationresponses in your body? and how can we make sure toreduce any stress responses in

your body this week? and my mother wrote what i callwriting the prescription. and she included all of thesethings that she was going to plan to do that week, and shewas religious about it. well, fortunately, my mom wentin to get her mri and it turned out to be aschmorl's node. it's this benign lesion thatdoesn't need any further treatment or follow up. but i told my mom, this was ahuge a-ha to me, because i

realized we shouldn'thave to wait for a metastatic cancer diagnosis. everything that she put on thatlist, i said, mom, you need to be doingthis every day. this is how you live to be 98years old, like stamatis moraitis, who is still healthyand vital to this day. we can live to be 98 by figuringout how do we reduce stress responsesin our bodies? how do we increase relaxationresponses in our bodies?

so step three is all aboutlistening to your intuition, to that part of you i call yourinner pilot light, which is the foundation stone ofthe whole health cairn. this is your inner doctor. this is the part of you thatknows better than anybody how your body is goingto heal itself. so as doctors, we like to thinkthat i know your body better than you do. ostensibly, i went to schoolfor 12 years and spent 10

years of medical practicebecoming a body expert. but the reality is you know yourbody better than anybody, because nobody but you knows howyou're going to be able to balance your whole healthcairn in this way. so my agent, my literary agentmichele martin, she was the first person to read my book. and she called me after readingit and she said, lissa, you changed my life. because she said, honestly,before i read your book, i

thought my body was noneof my business. she said, i thought itwas like my car. you know, my car breaksdown, i take it to the auto mechanic. i expect the auto mechanic tofix it and hand it back to me perfectly fixed. she said, i was doing thesame thing with my body. she said, but after reading yourbook, i realize my body is my business, because i am thegatekeeper of my mind and

it is my responsibility to calmmy amygdala and optimize my body's natural self-healingmechanisms. and that step three part oflistening to your intuition is all about that. it's about listening to thatvoice that knows the answer to the question, what does my bodyneed in order to heal? so step four is all aboutdiagnosing the underlying root causes of illness. it's figuring out what istriggering your stress

responses and which ways mightyou activate relaxation responses that you'renot optimizing. so in the book, there's a wholeseries of questions that were some of the questions thati asked on my patient intake form that are reallyintended to help people identify what might beout of balance in my which stone is toppling here? which stone isn't at peakperformance right now? and how can i reduce thosestress responses and increase

those relaxation responses inmy body so that my body's natural self-repair mechanismsare fully functional? and step five is basically, onceyou've done that, it's writing the prescriptionfor yourself. so it's answering the question,what does my body need in order to heal, andputting into place all of those steps that you'vewritten for yourself. so this takes a lot of courage,because it's one thing to identify the issues.

when i was asking my patients,what does your body need in order to heal, and theywere saying, i need to divorce my husband. i need to quit my job. i need to sell my business. that's one thing. one woman said i needto move to santa fe. and i said, santa fe? why santa fe?

and she said, i don't know. but i have a vacation home insanta fe and every time i go there, all of my symptomscompletely go away. so she was brave enough toactually leave her husband, sell her business, move to santafe, put her mom in a nursing home near her becauseher mom had been living with her and was triggering stressresponses all the time. she had always wanted to go toart school, so she signed up for art school.

she had this whole new communityof artist friends. she started datingthis new guy. and she calls me threemonths later. all her symptoms were gone. so step five is about writingthe prescription for yourself and then finding the courage toactually take action and to put into play what yourintuition knows about what your body needs in order tobe optimal, in order to be completely vital, in order to beexploding with life force.

so step six is one of thehardest steps, and it's the most spiritual. step six is surrender. so it's essentially, there arepeople out there that have done all of this. they have so much positivebelief that they're going to get better. they have the best healers. they are listening to theirintuition and doing everything

they can to diagnose the rootcause of what's triggering stress responses intheir bodies. they're writing the prescriptionfor themselves. they're being brave. they're doing it all. and they're still sick. one of these is my good friend,kris carr, who i asked to write the forward to thisbook because she's the best example i know of somebodywho is a model patient.

kris was in her early '30s whenshe was diagnosed with stage iv cancer, a typeof cancer for which there is no treatment. so basically, her doctor said,well, do what you can to take care of your immune system,and hopefully you'll get another 10 years. but they didn't think she'dlive beyond that. so kris changed her diet. she started followingthis, she calls it

her crazy sexy diet. she's "the new york times"best-selling author of "crazy sexy diet" and "crazy sexykitchen," as well as two other books. and she made a documentarycalled "crazy sexy cancer" that was about herhealing journey. and kris has done all of this. she has the most balancedwhole health cairn of anybody i've met.

i just had kris come to film advd with me and we did an hour long interview. it's going to be part of thepledge special for the public television specialthat i'm doing. there's going to be a wholepackage of stuff that's part of the public televisionspecial. she's really amazing. and yet she still hasstage iv cancer. so whenever we talk about thesesorts of things, it's

easy for people to kind of makethe leap to, well, i've done everything right. i'm still sick. i must be doing somethingwrong. or i must have caused myillness in some way. and i'm in no way suggestingthat anybody who is sick has brought this upon themselves. i'm in no way blaming or shamingor trying to guilt somebody about an illness.

it's not about that. all that does is triggermore stress responses. so step six is really importantbecause we have to, at some point, accept thatmaybe we're battling an illness because it'sour wake up call. maybe the illness is somethingour souls chose to experience in this life so that we canlearn what we're here on this earth to learn. or maybe it's just bad luck.

but there's a difference betweenthinking that you're a helpless victim of an illnessand recognizing that your body is your business. so it's a fine line. i was talking to one of mymentors, dr. christiane northrup, about this, and isaid, how do i explain this to people without it sounding likei'm blaming people for their illness? she said, lissa, we areresponsible to our illness,

not for our illness. kris carr says she participateswith her illness. in other words, your bodyis your business. and you have at least some powerover whether or not your body is going to be optimallyvital based on being the gatekeeper of your own mind. so figuring these things outchanged how i think about the whole establishmentof medicine. and i'm on this mission nowto heal health care.

to put the care backin health care. and i realized that one of thebiggest reasons that our health care system is brokenis because we've forgotten. we've forgotten aboutthe body's innate ability to heal itself. and we've gotten so investedin technology that we've actually lost touch with oneof the most healing things that the body knows how to do. and i firmly believe that ifevery empowered patient and

every conscious health careprovider started adopting this way of thinking about health,what i call whole health, that it would change ourentire system. so i've been going around thecountry on this book tour speaking to groups of patientsand health care providers and really trying to make a shiftin this way of how we think about these things. because it all startswith you. it all starts with one empoweredpatient, one

conscious health care provider,trying to heal the rift that has come up. i hear so many storiesof that rift. there are so many doctors andpatients that have the sort of experience my mother just hadwith her doctor, when in fact, as healers, it's our jobto be the calming influence on the amygdala. to remember the healingpower of love. to show up in support,nurturing, caring.

somehow, i mean, it used to bethat's pretty much all we had as doctors, right? we didn't have the technologythat we have now. we didn't have penicillin andvaccines and all these amazing pieces of technology thati'm not in any way suggesting that we ditch. in fact, i mean, my husband cuttwo fingers off his left hand a while back with a tablesaw, and thank god for dr. jonathan jones, whopainstakingly spent eight

hours in surgery with amicroscope, reattaching every artery, nerve, and bone in myhusband's fingers so that he has 10 fingers today. i'm sorry, no amount ofmind-body medicine would have done that. so i'm not in any way suggestingwe shouldn't optimize what western medicinehas to offer. i'm just saying it'snot enough. we need to not stop there.

it's not enough just to take themedicine or even to eat a pristine diet and exerciseregularly and take your vitamins. that we have to take the nextstep to figure out how to reduce our stress responses andincrease our relaxation responses so that thebody can do what it does best, heal itself. so i want to leaveyou with a quote. this is from dr. albertschweitzer.

and he says, the doctor-- he said-- hang on, i'vegot to get this right. i'm bad at quotes. he says, i want to tellyou a little secret. we doctors, we do nothing. we only help and empowerthe doctor within. so i encourage you tobe that doctor. everyone of you has the powerto be the doctor within. thank you very much.

audience: i have a question. the cortisol that happenswhen you're in stress. dr. lissa rankin: yes. audience: i've heard this alot, that whether it's the tiger or a deadline, your bodyexperiences it the same way. dr. lissa rankin: right. audience: and i've also heardthat it takes a long time for that cortisol to get backto a healthy state. that it takes a second to spike,but it can take 10

hours, 12 hours, aday to come down. but i am not a doctor. i don't-- is this-- can you speak more to it? dr. lissa rankin: yeah. audience: how do we know it'sthe same, whether it's minor or a car crash, that our body's interpreting it the same way?

well, cortisol is an interestingbeast because it fluctuates. it's supposed to fluctuatethroughout the day. and so cortisol, when we'reactively in stress response, the cortisol levels aregoing to go up. but over time, if we'rechronically, repetitively in stress response, the adrenalglands can get depleted. and so our cortisol levelscan actually be low. so if you test in the moment,cortisol levels, for example,

might be high in the middleof a stress response. but then if you're checkingbaseline cortisol levels in the morning on a regular day,those cortisol levels might be low because you've essentiallydepleted your adrenal glands. so it can be very hard to tellwith something like a lab test how stressed the body is withregard to cortisol. but what happens is that thosestress responses kick off, like you said. the cortisol levels can go up.

but then, over time as we'regetting these, like i was talking about when my car wenton the side of the road, we get these stress responsesthat kind of go one after the other. so like i said, it's supposedto only take 90 seconds. so it's possible for thosecortisol levels to go right back down. but for most of us, we have theongoing monkey mind mental dialogue that follows astressful event that leads us

to continue that process. so it very much dependson that. but animals, for example. they're much morepure about this. the stress happens. they get themselves to safety. and then their cortisol levelsgo right back down. so it's possible. we can do that.

so what i wound up doing, forexample, when i was on the side of the road, i was feelinglike, oh my goodness, here's my body instress response. i was watching itlike a movie. it was very surreal, becausehere i am on the road on a book tour, talking aboutthis whole process. and now i'm living it twice. this thing had just happenedwith my mom, and i was noticing the stress responsethat was coming up of my mom

potentially having metastaticcancer. my dad died of metastatic cancerseven years ago, so for both of us that was like a hugetrauma, kind of reopening that old wound. and the way in which my mind wasworking around that, like we don't have a diagnosis,right? there's no need to actuallybe scared yet. and yet i was terrified aboutmy mom's mri because literally, i had talked to thedoctor and i said, is there

anything it could be otherthan metastatic cancer? and he said no. and so i was terrified. and the same thing when i wason the side of road, right? i'm noticing this tendency thatwe have to make up all these stories about things. so i sat there, and what i didwhen my car, when i pulled my car off to the side of theroad, and i realized, ok, i'm safe now.

i no longer need to bein stress response. i don't need to protectmyself. thank you, amygdala, well done. good job. so i literally satdown and i did-- there's an exercise in the bookbased on herbert benson, this harvard doctor, has donea lot of research on the relaxation response. he wrote a wonderful bookin the '70s called "the

relaxation response." so ipracticed his technique, which is based on a type oftranscendental meditation. and it basically is thistechnique where-- we can do it right now. i'll give you the quickand dirty 30 second relaxation response. if you close your eyes for justa minute and just focus on your breath. and i want you to picka one word mantra.

something that resonates withyou, like "one" or "peace" or "love." i chose the word "safe"when i was on the side of the road. and as you breathe, i want youto just repeat that one word mantra on the exhale. now, you may noticeother thoughts coming into your mind. and that's all right. just passively disregard theother thoughts as they come

into your mind. just notice it. hello, remembering. or hello, planning. and just keep coming backto your breath, to that one word mantra. all right, go ahead andopen your eyes again. so if you were in one of herbertbenson's many, many, many research studies, he wouldhave had you do that

process for 10 to 20 minutesonce or twice per day. it's been proven to aidin almost every single illness out there. he's got the data. it's clear. it's that simple. so i sat there on the side ofthe road, and before i called my husband to find out what myaaa number was, and before i called aaa, and before i calledmy best friend to tell

her i'd just blown out two ofher tires, i did a little 10 minute relaxation response. because i knew, even though itwas going to take 10 minutes away from me getting to myevent, that the only way i was going to show up reallyin service at that event is if i was calm. so putting ourselves into therelaxation response can be that simple. and any type of meditationworks, but it's not even that.

and herbert benson found youdon't even need to close your eyes and be seated inorder to do this. you can repeat this one wordmantra on the exhale while focusing on your breath andpassively disregarding other thoughts that comeinto your mind. you can do it whileyou're shopping. you can do it whileyou're driving. you can do it while you'remaking dinner. and it's been scientificallyproven.

he puts everybody-- monitors them, monitorstheir blood levels. scientifically proven to put youinto relaxation response every time if you can quiet themind and you can calm the amygdala in that way. but there are some really easy,fun ways to put yourself into relaxation response. laughter is a great one. norman cousins wrote the"anatomy of an illness" all

about how he healed hisankylosing spondylitis by watching marx brothers movies. sex. another fun one. so playing with animals. the healing act of generosity,that's one a lot of people don't think about. i just saw a great newsarticle about this guy andy mackie.

he's 71 years old. he's had nine heart surgeries. and he was taking 15 medicationsfor his heart that were giving him all kinds ofterrible side effects. so he finally went to hisdoctors and he said, i've got to get off these drugs. it's making me miserable. and they said, well, if you stopyour medications, you'll die within a year.

so he said, well, if i'm goingto die within a year, i might as well die going out and doingsomething i've always wanted to do. so he took the money that hewas spending on those 15 medications and he bought 300harmonicas and gave them away to kids in public schools,complete with harmonica lessons from himself. so a month later, hewas still alive. so he took the same money and hebought 300 more harmonicas.

and it's now been 11 years and16,000 harmonicas later, and andy mackie is still alive,giving out harmonicas to kids. so we can calm our amygdalasin a whole variety of ways, and that's part of what you'regoing to want to write in the prescription for yourself. how can i add more relaxationresponses to my life? female speaker: thanks. thanks a lot for coming. dr. lissa rankin:thank you all.

female speaker: we'reout of time. dr. lissa rankin: thank you.