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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.