Alternative Cures

I’m going to follow up my last badly spelled (!) post here at Alternative Cures about The Power of Belief, with some more powerful proof that as alternative cures, the mind’s ability to create health or illness depending on what it is led to believe.

It is a fairly well known fact that surgeons and staff around the operating table are told not to talk about the patient’s state of health unless is it positive. The old days of surgeons joking to each other that “This one won’t live through the night” or joking quips of similar sentiment are long gone thanks to evidence that proved that a patient under anaesthetic can hear and remember conversations between the people surrounding the operating table upon waking up.

Imagine going to your doctor with chest pains and him saying to you “Just go home and give up, because you’ll be dead in the morning.” What do you think your chances of making it through the night would be after hearing that?

Much better to hear “Take these pills and you’ll be fine in a few days,” even if the pills won’t do much by themselves. Or going to an alternative cures specialist and being given certain herbs to take that will heal the illness. Just hearing words of positive reassurance convinces the mind that that by taking them you’ll recover from whatever it is you are suffering from, so that’s what is most likely will happen.

Ok, it doesn’t always work like a textbook case. Life isn’t like that. No two people are the same and what will work for one person may not for another. Alternative cures are no different in that they may work for one person and not another.

In the past in my alternative cures profession as a hypnotherapist, I’ve had people come to see me wanting to quit smoking and would have put money on them stopping and staying stopped - but only to be surprised when they book a second session a week later because they thought they were going to waver and return to the evil weed. On the other hand I once saw this guy who was in his 60s and had smoked 80 to 100 a day all his life and only decided to quit because his granddaughter had pleaded with him. Well, I normally expect someone who truly wants to quit to quit, but if they don’t want it in themselves but are forced into it by others, they rarely stay quit.

Well, that old guy walked out of my consulting rooms a non-smoker and his daughter actually telephoned my two years later to thank me (on behalf of her own daughter) as her little girl’s grandfather hadn’t even the slightest inclination to smoke in all that time.

The power of belief is incredible as it is devastating. I watched my own father dying of stomach cancer 4 years ago and there was nothing I could do to stop it - I think he had simply given up and accepted he would die.

That’s part of the problem and why you hear of seeming miracles when people go into full remission from what doctors believed were terminal illnesses and others don’t. The cure in the miracle cases could only have come from within - where the person was so strong or believed so completely that they would be cured that they recovered. Yet in other cases the belief surely is not there, or worse the belief inside is that they will not survive the illness, lending strength to the illness and not to the cure.

My grandmother is one of those people who simply will not believe she will be ill. At the age of 93 she had pert of her bowel removed in what for most people half her age would be considered a life-threatening operation. Yet she recovered from it with a few weeks totally amazing her doctor and set about returning to her usual daily routine which included running for the bus to go to her beloved bingo session three times a week.

She’s 96 now and doesn’t look like hanging her hat up anytime soon!

That’s the power of will and of belief for you. She doesn’t need any alternative cures because her remedies all come from inside her head.
I just hope I’ve inherited her genes and not my father’s!

Freedom Writer Terry Didcott
Alternative Cures