This is a powerful presentation by Lissa Rankin, MD:advocating for a more holistic approach to healthcare. She presents compelling evidence as to the power of the mind over matter in healing and well-being. Yet, her approach is one of balance and wholeness. As a contemporary health professional, in no way is she advocating for a migration to alternative medicine. In fact, she calls her fellow professionals to a greater level of understanding of their own roles in the healing process.
Championing the cause of the unseen factors in recovery from illness, in the body's own innate ability to heal and the ways that we can support the body in this endeavor, Dr. Rankin explores the scientific literature, reviewing case studies of spontaneous remission, as well as placebo and nocebo effect data, to prove that our thoughts powerfully affect our physiology when we believe we can get well.
In her book Mind Over Medicine: Scientific Proof That You Can Heal Yourself, using extraordinary cases of spontaneous healing, Dr. Rankin shows how thoughts, feelings, and beliefs can alter the body’s physiology.
She lays out the scientific data proving that loneliness, pessimism, depression, fear, and anxiety damage the body, while intimate relationships, community, compassion, gratitude, meditation, sex, and authentic self-expression flip on the body’s self-healing processes.