DAY26 OF 100DAYS SELF-REINVENTION SERIES - You Can Choose Your Delusion or Placebo - Change Comes from the Inside
“Those who think they can and those who think they can’t are both usually right” – Confucius.
Several years ago, I lived in Kano, Nigeria; my office was at 6A Ahmadu Bello Way, GRA, Kano, just a six-minute walk from the Governor's house. I enjoyed the serene environment. I don't know if the ambience is still the way it is now with the advent of gun-wielding policemen and soldiers everywhere. I used to just walk past the Governor's house on my way to work from Hotoro, where I lived.
While I was in Kano, I had a very great friend, Mohammed who worked as a medical doctor in a nearby private hospital in Hotoro. As I will later find out, he was the junior partner in the clinic which he jointly owned with another doctor, Dr Ibrahim. The hospital was quite busy. Many of the indigenes of Hotoro loved the clinic, saying that the doctors were very brilliant. Fortunately, I never had need to go to the hospital for treatment while I lived in Kano, except social visits to see Dr Mohammed.
On a certain day, Mohammed visited me at home, and we had a very long conversation. I came to know the guy I was proud of as my friend. Somehow, as the conversation went on, I got to ask Mohammed the secret to their thriving clinic, and he paused. Then he said something that shocked me. He said, “Tunde, I am not a doctor; I have a degree in Animal Science.” I wasn't sure I heard him very well, and then he repeated what he just said again. He said, “There is nothing to hide from you. What we do in the hospital is just give saline injections to everyone that comes to the clinic and tell them that they will begin to get well in under one hour, and they go away believing what we tell them and they are well.
They prefer coming here and paying for the service than endless queues in the Government hospitals where they might not even be given the injections that they need”. When I enquired if injections were better than the tablets that we took, he said “not really, but there are so many people in Kano who will not get well unless you give them injections and the people instinctively believe that injections work faster than tablets”. When I sought to find out what was contained in the injections, Mohammed gave me another surprise, it was water mixed with salt.
For the first time in my life, I was faced with a phenomenon that I never heard of up until that time. How come saltwater injected into the body of sick patients cured a variety of ailments, with such effectiveness that attracted crowds to this hospital? For Mohammed did let me know that 85% of the patients usually got well within an hour. Could one's belief be that powerful to influence his health and possibly even the course of his life? Now read the story below taken from Dr Joe Dispenza's book, “You are the Placebo”:
“In 1938, a 60-year-old man in rural Tennessee spent four months getting sicker and sicker, before his wife brought him to a 15-bed hospital at the edge of town. By this time, Vance Vanders (not his real name) had lost more than 50 pounds and appeared to be near death. The doctor, Drayton Doherty, suspected that Vanders was suffering from tuberculosis or possibly cancer, but repeated tests and x-rays came up negative. Dr. Doherty's physical examination showed nothing that could be causing Vanders's distress. Vanders refused to eat, so he was given a feeding tube, but he stubbornly vomited whatever was put down the tube.
He continued to get worse, repeating the conviction that he was going to die, and eventually he was barely able to talk. The end seemed near, although Dr. Doherty still had no idea what the man's affliction was. Vanders's distraught wife asked to speak to Dr. Doherty privately and, swearing him to secrecy, told him that her husband's problem was that he'd been “voodoo'd.” It seems that Vanders, who lived in a community where voodoo was a common practice, had an argument with a local voodoo priest. The priest had summoned Vanders to the cemetery late one night, where he put a hex on the man by waving a bottle of malodorous liquid in front of Vanders's face. The priest told Vanders that he would soon die and that no one could save him.
That was it. Vanders was convinced that his days were numbered and thus believed in a new, dismal future reality. The defeated man returned home and refused to eat. Eventually, his wife brought him to the hospital. After Dr. Doherty had heard the whole story, he came up with a rather unorthodox plan for treating his patient.
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In the morning, he summoned Vanders's family to his bedside and told them that he was now certain that he knew how to cure the sick man. The family listened intently as Dr. Doherty spun the following fabricated tale. He said that on the previous night, he had gone to the cemetery, where he'd tricked the voodoo priest into meeting with him and divulging how he had voodoo'd Vanders. It hadn't been easy, Dr. Doherty said.
The priest had understandably not wanted to cooperate, although he finally relented once Dr. Doherty had pinned him against a tree and choked him. Dr. Doherty said that the priest had told him that he'd rubbed some lizard eggs onto Vanders's skin and that the eggs had found their way to Vanders's stomach, where they'd hatched. Most of the lizards had died, but a large one had survived and was now eating Vanders's body from the inside out.
The doctor announced that all he had to do was remove the lizard from Vanders's body and the man would be cured. He then called for the nurse, who dutifully brought a large syringe filled with what Dr. Doherty claimed was a powerful medicine. In truth, the syringe was filled with a drug that induced vomiting.
Dr. Doherty carefully inspected the syringe to make sure it was working right and then ceremoniously injected his frightened patient with the fluid. In a grand gesture, he left the room, not saying another word to the stunned family. It wasn't long before the patient began to vomit. The nurse provided a basin and Vanders heaved, wailed, and retched for a time.
At a point that Dr. Doherty judged to be near the end of the vomiting, he confidently strode back into the room. Nearing the bedside, he reached into his black doctor's bag and scooped up a green lizard, hiding it in his palm beyond anyone's notice. Then just as Vanders vomited again, Dr. Doherty slipped the reptile into the basin. “Look, Vance!” he immediately cried out with all the drama he could muster. “Look what has come out of you. You are now cured. The voodoo curse is lifted!”
The room was buzzing. Some family members fell to the floor, moaning. Vanders himself jumped back away from the basin, in a wide-eyed daze. Within a few minutes, he'd fallen into a deep sleep that lasted more than 12 hours. When Vanders finally awoke, he was very hungry and eagerly consumed so much food that the doctor feared his stomach would burst. Within a week, the patient had regained all his weight and strength. He left the hospital a well man and lived at least another ten years.
Is it possible that a man could just curl up and die simply because he thought he'd been hexed? Does the contemporary witch doctor, adorned with a stethoscope and holding a prescription pad, speak with the same conviction for us as the voodoo priest did for Vanders—and is our belief the same? And if it's indeed true that a person could, on one level, just decide to die, then could it also be true that a person with a terminal disease could make the decision to live?
Can someone permanently change his or her internal state—dropping his or her identity as a cancer or arthritis victim or a heart patient or a person with Parkinson's—and simply walk into a healthy body just as easily as shedding one set of clothes and donning another?”
My conclusion is this: Every person living in this planet lives in their self-created beliefs. For some their beliefs are empowering and makes them happy, while for others, their beliefs are disempowering and works against them. Both are self-created beliefs. Don't you think it's time you created beliefs that empower and work for you? At the end of the day, it costs nothing, and it takes the same energy.