How Belief Heals: Mind Over Matter!
Image credits belong to: Zac Durant (@zacdurant) | Unsplash Photo Community
Mark 11:24
“Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.”
This current article is intended to build on my most previous article: The Latest Wound Healing Research is Evidence Against Materialism.
That article discussed how our perception of time can either speed up or slow down bodily injury. Various stories throughout history demonstrate how mind-over-matter situations can take place. I will discuss those examples here and how that relates to the work of Bruce Lipton, PhD, who is a cell biologist responsible for pioneering stem cell research at Stanford Medical School.
So, let me get started with the article…
In 1952, a 16-year-old boy had congenital ichthyosis which causes dry, itchy, scaly, rough, and red skin. The boy’s papilliferous (tiny, raised structures) skin became darker and thicker as time went on. All body parts except his face, neck, and chest were covered. He had “large warty excrescences” across his feet, thighs, and palms. His skin was about as thick as a “normal fingernail” which would “ooze blood-stained serum” if ever cracked. He experienced recurring and painful infections as a result of fissures being opened by any movements.
Reportedly, there are 30 different types of ichthyoses. Some types are passed from parent to child, due to a changed gene. Ranging from mild to severe, ichthyosis is incurable and requires lifelong treatment. However, the boy had no family history of this condition.
In 1950, plastic surgeons were unsuccessful in giving him grafting operations. But some time later, he was placed under hypnosis with the “suggestion” that his left arm would be healed of the condition. Five days later, the hardness started falling away and revealed an “erythematous” layer (reddish area of inflammation caused by increased blood flow) which eventually led to a complete improvement of the arm from shoulder to wrist. A small portion was biopsied from the calf to reveal that the overaccumulation of a tough fibrous protein, called keratin, was present and indicating the existence of the ichthyosis.
It was reported that the boy’s mental health improved significantly alongside his physical condition. After being treated like a pariah by his peers, he was able to improve his potential for better education, social relations, and career opportunities.
In conclusion, Dr. Albert Mason reported:
“From this response to hypnosis one of two inferences may be drawn. Either there is a hitherto unsuspected psychic factor in the aetiology of the disease or this is a case of a congenital organic condition being affected by a psychological process. A combination of both these factors is of course a third possibility. Whichever is true, the improvement in this case seems to be totally unprecedented, and was effected after the failure of all, recognized methods of treatment.”
With the use of the mind alone, Mason and the boy were able to achieve a feat that no one, until that time, believed could be done. Mason wrote about his handling of ichthyosis in the British Medical Journal in 1952, and attracted more patients with the rare, incurable, congenital disease. Mason tried his hypnosis on more ichthyosis patients and unfortunately could not repeat the same healing results. He blamed his own belief about the treatment as a cause for the un-replicating miracle.
In his 2005 book titled The Biology of Belief, Dr. Bruce Lipton comments on how the mind can overrule our biology that is programmed by genetics. An important question we all wish to answer is this: how could someone’s belief about the management of a biological condition influence its success or failure?
Part of Lipton’s answer is that the mind (energy) and the body (matter) are “entangled” in spite of Western medicine’s agenda to “separate them for hundreds of years” (Biology of Belief, pg. 124).
Rene Descartes of the seventeenth century separated the mind as an obscure, immaterial substance from the physical body, which leads us to an enigma: how can the immaterial mind impact the material body in any fashion if matter can only influence matter (Biology of Belief, pgs. 124 - 125) ?
Quantum mechanics apparently reconciles what Descartes separated. The mind (energy) still emerges from the physical body, according to Descartes. But thoughts, which are the mind’s energy, determine how the physical brain controls the body’s internal environment. Thoughts can trigger and restrain cellular functions and proteins, which therefore implies we must monitor our thoughts and how we invest our energy (Biology of Belief, pg. 125).
Mainstream professionals are trained to disdain exceptional cases such as the boy’s. But Lipton argues we should give them more attention and realize that the power of the mind can sometimes have better answers than conventional drug therapy.
Lipton cites other supporting examples such as these:
The ancient practice of walking across hot coals that can cause significant burns. The effect of belief is demonstrated by the fact that many are unharmed, and others are harmed while crossing the coals.
Some people with the dreadful HIV virus can be asymptomatic.
Some terminal cancer patients experience spontaneous remission.
One of Germ Theory’s nineteenth century founders, Robert Koch, had a critic who was so persuaded against the theory that he remained unharmed after quaffing a glass of water said to contain vibrio cholerae, which was believed to cause cholera.
Lipton warns us that positive thinking alone is not always enough to generate physical cures and improve your life, overall.
While reading Lipton’s 2005 work, which is against a gene-centric view of biology, I stumbled upon a Nature article titled: It’s Time to Admit that Genes Are Not the Blueprint for Life. The article was written on February 5th, 2024, by Denis Noble, an Oxford emeritus professor of physiology and biology.
Noble states:
“When the human genome was sequenced in 2001, many thought that it would prove to be an ‘instruction manual’ for life. But the genome turned out to be no blueprint. In fact, most genes don’t have a pre-set function that can be determined from their DNA sequence.”
Noble draws from the writing of Philip Ball, an “editor at Nature for more than twenty years”, to convey the idea that genetic activity can be influenced by forces outside of itself, such as the organism’s diet and environment. We should discard the distorted idea that the cause of a trait or disease boils down to a particular gene(s), especially when we have witnessed the continued performance of particular functions in spite of the removal of their key genes. A great example is the heart’s maintenance of its rhythm in spite of a mutated HCN4 gene that is responsible for encoding a protein that serves as the heart’s primary pacemaker.
Ball points out that proteins have “disordered domains”, indicating that they have a dynamic, ever-changing nature which goes against the popular notion that proteins have a fixed, static nature. In Ball’s view, proteins do not adhere to a target in a manner like keys fitting neatly in a lock. The indeterminate activity of proteins is an absolutely necessary feature of protein interactions, and not sloppy design, because the proteins have a kind of versatility that allows them to adhere to various partners and communicate diverse signals to fit the circumstance. Aconitase (an enzyme involved in cellular respiration) is a great example, because it is able to transition from metabolizing sugar to facilitating iron uptake by red blood cells when iron levels are low.
Noble remarks:
“Classic views of evolution should also be questioned. Evolution is often regarded as ‘a slow affair of letting random mutations change one amino acid for another and seeing what effect it produces’. But in fact, proteins are typically made up of several sections called modules — reshuffling, duplicating and tinkering with these modules is a common way to produce a useful new protein.”
Ball expresses no desire to renounce evolutionary theory, but he at least wants to rethink the dogmas that disregard “agency and purpose” as “definitive characteristics of life.”
Where there is agency and purpose, I also see the relevance of belief and its effects on biology.
Back to Dr. Bruce Lipton
Bruce Lipton’s career involved growing and maintaining endothelial cells in a controlled laboratory. Endothelial cells are specialized in forming the inner lining of blood vessels. From his studies on these cells, he developed his understanding as to how beliefs control biology. He observed how they vigorously moved toward vital nutrients and withdrew away from harmful substances (Biology of Belief, pg. 135).
His research focused on the integral membrane receptor-effector proteins (IMPs) that act as “perception switches” in the cell’s membrane, by joining stimuli from outside the cell to the appropriate protein pathways that produce responses. Contrary to popular belief, the nucleus is not the cell’s ‘brain.’ The cell’s ‘brain’ is the plasma membrane surrounding the cell’s cytoplasm, which is the barrier separating the cell’s inside from its outside. This exists because of the junction between environmental cues and cytoplasmic proteins that produce responses. Life cannot continue without cellular functions that are immediately obtained from movement of protein complexes which are stirred and fired up by their environmental cues.
Essential substances like potassium, calcium, oxygen, glucose, histamine, estrogen, toxins, light, and other stimuli usually must be present for cells to make a response. These are among the tens of thousands of receptors acting at once in the membrane to arrange the complex behaviors of the living cell.
Upon observing adrenaline and histamine in his tissue cultures, Lipton observed the adrenaline signals overruling the histamine signals. Adrenaline is akin to a “system-wide emergency alarm”, whereas histamine is akin to a “local emergency alarm.”
The mind's use of adrenaline to overrule the body’s local histamine signals is an example of the mind’s effects on the body.
Medical students pay insufficient attention to the mind’s effects on the body, and according to Lipton, medical education should not disregard “the power of the mind as something inferior to the power of chemicals and the scalpel” (Biology of Belief, pg. 137).
Such ignorance does not allow us to properly serve “the conservatively estimated one third of the population who are particularly susceptible to the healing power of the placebo effect.” Such ignorance is too costly in light of the irony that “some historians make a strong case that the history of medicine is largely the history of the placebo effect” (Biology of Belief, pg. 138).
What does this have to do with Christianity?
The elephant in the room is the unexpected and inexplicable disappearance or improvement of symptoms that some Christians experience after praying to Yahweh for healing. This can be easily seen as consistent with Mark 11:24, implying that belief can prompt answered prayers. When taking that consistency into account, to what extent is it really necessary to question whether Yahweh Himself or just the placebo effect healed Christians of their ailments? It gets the job done, and that is all that really matters.
Mark 11:24
“Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.”
The author of this blog post is Matthew Sabatine, who was born in the United States and raised as a Christian but left the faith in his early twenties. He returned to the faith midway through 2022. Matthew has some experience in the mental health field as a direct support professional, caring for people with intellectual and development disabilities and people who were in long-term residency/rehabilitation programs. Though Matthew has no formal undergraduate or graduate degree, he has experience co-facilitating therapy groups under the supervision of licensed counselors. Matthew currently works in sales/marketing by day and blogs on his free time at night.
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