Episode #38- ”You are the Placebo” by Joe Dispenza

Today I talk about Joe Dispenza's book, "You are the Placebo."  I give just a few examples from the book, so if you're interested in more the book is such an amazing resource!

 

The placebo effect demonstrates how the mind makes physical changes in the body, just by having a belief or expectation that something will happen.  

It demonstrates the power of your thoughts in healing.

 

If you want to listen to the podcast episode I did for Katrina Ubell's podcast, click here: 

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/weight-loss-for-busy-physicians/id1199570390?i=1000494569383

 

Follow Betsy on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/bodyandmindlifecoach/

 

Youtube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvXZSYYGL2cfJl-oEOzqspA

 

Website https://bodyandmindlifecoach.com

 

*Free Nervous System Modules- 4 free videos explaining the nervous system, how it affects your health, and how to regulate it  https://view.flodesk.com/pages/620ffa96e0eda1a0d870b5a6

 

*Curable App- 6 Weeks Free with this code http://www.curable.com/betsyjensen

 

If you like this podcast, please give it a five star rating and review on Itunes  https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-unstoppable-body-and-minds-podcast/id1493360543

Transcript- Automatically Generated:

This is Betsy Jensen, and you are listening to Unstoppable Body and Mind, episode 38, You are the Placebo by Joe Dispenza. In this podcast, we learned to upgrade our brain and understand the power of our thoughts, to heal and to create the results we want in our life. Become the person in control of your healing and make peace with your life.
Become Unstoppable Body and Mind.
Hello, my friends. I'll tell you what, I have had a great week. I was on Katrina Ubell's podcast.
She has a podcast, Weight Loss for Busy Physicians, and I've been working with her for the last six months, and she had me on her podcast to talk about her progress. Okay, so this is the title of it, which I just love. It's episode 196, How I Cured My Chronic Pain and Acid Reflex with Betsy Jensen.
And I have had a lot more listeners this last week to the podcast, which is exciting. Last week, my podcast had had about a hundred downloads for the week, and this past week, it was 1,400. So about 1,300 new downloads compared to the week before.
So any new listeners, welcome. I've also had more ratings and reviews on my podcast this last week. So thank you guys so much for that.
I was at 16 ratings last week, and now I'm at 24. So I really appreciate you taking the time to give some feedback and help this podcast be found by more people. Plus, I love reading the reviews from you guys and hearing your feedback.
I wanted to read one of the reviews that I just got. It's from KMR Doc, brand new listener. I found you through your appearance on Katrina Ubell's podcast.
Just listen to 34, number 34, about understanding the mind body pain connection. So well explained and make so much sense for the things going on in my life. Sent it to a friend for reference as well.
So glad I found you. Thank you so much. I really appreciate that feedback.
And if you haven't listened to episode 34 yet, it is such a great summary of basically what TMS is, what Dr. John Sarno called TMS or mind body syndrome. So take a listen to it if you haven't yet and see if it resonates with you. Now I am still doing the $100 Amazon gift card giveaway on November 15th.
So you can enter by giving my podcast a rating or review or following me on Instagram. So three possible entries. You can email me info at bodyandmindlifecoach.com.
The links will be in the show notes. And let me know that you've submitted a rating review or followed me, and you'll be entered to win $100 Amazon gift card on November 15th. Okay, that's all the housekeeping stuff.
I'm going to tell you today about several examples from Joe Dispenza's book, You are the Placebo. So it talks about the placebo effect, which many of you I'm sure already know, but it's a big factor in modern day medicine. In fact, placebo trials, double blind studies, all of that is because there is such a thing as a placebo effect.
First, we'll start just by talking about when it was basically discovered. The first one he talks about is Henry Beecher, who was an anesthesiologist in World War II, and they basically were running out of supplies, and they ran out of morphine. And so he started using saline, and many of the soldiers either had a reduction in symptoms or completely had no sensation of pain when they were injected with saline, thinking that it was a painkiller for them.
Then when Henry Beecher returned to the States, he is the one who started studying the placebo effect in drug trials. So basically what that would mean is there's randomized trials, two groups. A group that is given the drug and a group that is given a similar type of pill that is said to be the drug, and there's a huge placebo effect.
Spoiler alert. It's real. It's really hard to even tell how much of it is your brain creating.
These things. Okay, so in 1962, there's a study in Japan where they took 13 children who were allergic to poison ivy. And they would, I love this, in the 60s, they would rub poison ivy on one arm, and they would tell the children that it was a harmless leaf.
Only two of the children showed an allergic reaction, 11 of them did not. Then they rubbed a harmless leaf on the other arm and told the children it was poison ivy. And they all, all 13 of them developed a rash from the benign leaf.
When they believed the information that was told to them about whether the leaf had poison ivy or not, their body reacted accordingly. So on one hand or one arm, a poisonous substance had no effect and a plain leaf created symptoms because of what the children believed in their mind. This proves that thought could be more powerful than the physical environment.
Another study from the 60s, they took 40 asthma patients that were given inhalers full of water vapor. They were told that the inhalers contained an irritant. 19 of them, so 48%, developed asthmatic symptoms like restricted airways.
So almost half of them, when they were just given water vapor, and were told that there was an irritant in there, almost half developed asthmatic symptoms. 12 of them, or 30%, suffered full blown asthmatic attacks. So almost 80% of them basically had either symptoms or a full blown asthmatic attack, inhaling water vapor that they were told had irritant in it.
Then they were given another inhaler which was said to have medicine in it to relieve their symptoms. Guess what? It was also just water vapor.
But all of them had a reversal of their symptoms when they were given the second inhaler of water vapor that was said to have medicine to relieve their symptoms. Again, showing that their thoughts are more powerful than what was actually going on in reality, if you think about it on a chemical level. There's also what Joe Dispenza talks about as a nocebo effect.
When you are given a suggestion that you may develop some certain symptoms, then you are more likely to develop those symptoms if you believe that. So, for example, they took women and gave them a placebo for around their time of the month, basically they said, you'll have worse PMS, you'll have symptoms that are a little more exaggerated than normal. And 70% of them had that.
They were suggestible by that prompt that taking that pill would cause those effects in their body, in their mind, in their emotions, and guess what? They did. So he also talks about how you would probably be a little more susceptible to catching the flu during flu season.
So he says, winter long, you're seeing articles about flu season and about signs all around about getting flu shots. And they remind us that if we don't get a flu shot, then we'll get sick. And then if we see someone that's sick, are we like the Japanese children who believe that their bodies react from their programming?
Or the asthmatics who developed symptoms and then relief of symptoms because of what they thought was in their inhalers? Here's a quote from You are the Placebo. Are we more likely to suffer from arthritis, stiff joints, poor memory, lagging energy, decreased sex drive as we age simply because that's the version of the truth that ads, commercials, television shows and media reports bombard us with?
What other self-fulfilling prophecies are created in our minds without being aware of what we're doing? Good question, right? I think there are those self-fulfilling prophecies.
Pain is definitely one of them. I've heard a lot of people say, you know, Oh, my dad and all my brothers have bad shoulders. We've all had this surgery, you know, whether it's GI symptoms or sinuses or add backs, you know, we definitely just absorb part of that programming from what we hear around us and our body will start to show that.
They'll show those things just like the Japanese children that developed a rash when they thought that there was really an irritant on their skin. And of course, all of this was before COVID. So just insert that.
Okay, more examples. In the late 70s, Dr. John Levine gave placebos to 40 dental patients who had just had their wisdom teeth removed. Most of them reported relief.
So just had surgery instead of getting the good stuff. They're given placebos. I'm just thinking of all those videos of people doing crazy things after wisdom teeth.
They're given wisdom teeth removal, given placebos, most reported relief. And then they gave them Naloxone, which is an antidote to morphine. So this drug chemically blocks the receptor sites for morphine and endorphins, the pain relieving chemicals that our body naturally produces.
So when the patients were given Naloxine, the stuff that blocks the antidote to morphine, their pain returned. That proves that their bodies, when they take a placebo, are actually producing the chemical, like morphine, the endorphin in the body that has that feel good effect. They were creating their own endorphins in their body, producing their own painkillers.
So Joe Dispenza suggests that we are our own pharmacy, that our minds can make all of these natural things to heal our bodies and make us feel better. Exactly how placebos work is still a mystery to neuroscientists, but they have uncovered several important clues. Placebos help the brain release natural chemicals and change brain activity in ways that mimic the effects of real drugs and treatments.
So Joe Dispenza says that our brain is a natural pharmacy. And if you can remember, it's our thoughts that are creating our emotions. So it's those sentences in our brain, our thoughts, which trigger the nervous system to interact with the endocrine system, which is where the neurochemicals and hormones and neurotransmitters are released throughout the body to cause feelings, feelings, those vibrations that we have in our body.
So basically with a placebo, if you think that something has a great chance of working and you're optimistic and you're positive about it, and especially if you keep taking a pill every day, you're thinking those positive thoughts and having that reminder every day, and you basically start to reprogram your brain, produce those chemicals as if that drug is working, when it's basically all just your thoughts and your beliefs that are making it work. Crazy. Okay.
This one's fascinating. In 1981, in New Hampshire, men in their 70s and 80s took part in a five-day retreat. Half of them were asked to actively imagine being 22 years younger.
The other group were asked to remember being 22 years younger, but not to pretend to be different than their actual age. In the retreat, they had environmental cues, like looking at old issues of life and Saturday Evening Post, listening to music of that time, talking about political events and sports heroes all from 22 years ago. They talked about current events, so that was 1959.
Both of the groups, after this five-day retreat, where they immersed themselves in seeing, listening to, interacting with, imagining, talking about being in 1959 instead of 1981, both groups got physically younger. So that means they took some measurements before and after. Their height had increased.
They grew taller, basically, as their posture improved. Their joints became more flexible. Their fingers lengthened as a result of the arthritis diminishing.
Their eyesight and their hearing got better. This is in five days. Their grip strength improved, and they did better on memory tests.
Some of the men, by the end of five days, gave up their canes and were playing flag football. Not tackle football, he says, mind you, but flag football. But if they're in their 70s and 80s, imagining being in your 50s and 60s, that's still pretty active and great.
So then if you compared the two groups, the group that actually pretended that they were younger, as well as talking about it, you know, listening to all the verbal cues and the cues from the environment, they actually thought of themselves at that age and were just really pretending to be younger. And that age, they measured significantly better than the other group in all of those areas. So definitely shows that their body chemistry responded to their thoughts, and change was not just in their minds, but in their bodies.
Joe Dispenza in his meditation retreats shows that there can be changes in people's DNA after day meditation retreats. Research is revealing how thoughts and feelings as well as our choices, behaviors and experiences have profound healing and regenerative effects on our bodies. The power of the thoughts can create physical changes in our bodies.
The placebo may be inert, but the effect is not. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you learned a little bit about your brain today that helps you in your life like it helped me.
Please be sure and subscribe and leave a review. And of course, be sure and share this podcast with someone you know that wants an Unstoppable Body and Mind.