Reversing Chronic Physical Symptoms with the Help of the Mind

The Role of Stress Reduction, Psychotherapy, and Personal Development

Celebration of a milestone presentation

We immediately cleared out the content of our online community last Sunday to discuss this video with the group of people with Parkinson’s where we discuss the exact same things.

We were very excited to see the above recent TEDx talk, because it indicates that mainstream neurology and neuroscience is beginning to “sing from the same hymn sheet” and support what we have been telling for some time.

Below are our notes on the most salient and important, to us, points this speaker, a neurologist and neuroscience, covers in her talk.

In her clinics, a neurologist, a psychologist, and a physiotherapist are all in the same room with the patient at the same time. This team comes up with holistic, bespoke solutions.

She uses an analogy for the Nervous System [one we don’t particular like or agree with, as it is dehumanizing, and humans are nothing like machines, but we will go with it here]:

• hardware, structure - our brains, our nerves, our spinal cord;

• software - programs which run on them;

• the software can modify the symptom experience;

• structural disease shows up on scans and blood tests, but many chronic diseases do not;

• symptoms are still very real, not imaginary, not "all in your head", but the main problem can be in the software, rather than structural.

  Twenty years ago, her PhD was on the placebo effect. She worked with patients with Parkinson’s, and made a proper placebo experiment. She told people that a placebo was a medication and brain scans showed changes in the brain, e.g. a man in a wheelchair who was given a placebo was able to get off the bed and walk. She concluded that the mind, conscious thoughts, expectations, and beliefs, were able to alter their neurochemistry and also their experience of symptoms.

  “Integrates mind, brain, and body… open up new avenues for treatment, better patient experiences, more efficient healthcare systems... healthcare becomes healing, the whole person is seen…”

The video shows a number of profound “before and after” videos of real patients, including:

• 25 year old woman with uncontrollable movements of her body, could not walk - resurrected mindful ballet exercises from childhood, combined with physiotherapy, and she re-learned how to walk.

• 61 year old with a disabling tremor in the right side of body after an accident - combining anti-anxiety strategies such as breathing, meditation, together with physiotherapy was able to re-learn smooth movement.

• 32 year old man who had hyper-extended back when walking - taught his brain to shift the spotlight of attention away from the body onto activities outside the body he enjoyed, relearned to walk straight.

• 21-year-old woman with uncontrollable severe ballistic movements of the limbs, wheelchair-bound - taught her to reset her nervous system, to regulate how activated it was through breathing, visualization, and mindfulness practices, and was able to walk and even run again.

“New therapies combining psychotherapy and physiotherapy, patients got better, got better faster, got better for longer.”

• The greatest predictor of people who do best are people who are ready to change, and ready to engage in rehabilitation [convalescence].

• Barriers to uptake: hard to study in clinical trials designed for drug testing, the stigma of mental health, overvalued technology and tests, and undervalue people.

• Disease doesn't occur on a blank slate, it happens in a person with a lifetime of experiences, values, beliefs, and expectations which combine.

• Stop doing treatment to people, but instead work with them.

Join a waiting list for our online offerings which are based on similar concepts to the above successful strategies:

Read Lilian’s book, which applies these types of ideas to Parkinson’s: