In response to my blog post Scientific Proof You Can Heal Yourself, Mind/Body Medicine expert Dr. Susan Bernstein wrote a comment that bears highlighting. In a rousing conversation in the comments, we were debating whether doctors should be actively prescribing placebos when patients suffer from conditions for which we have inadequate treatment.

If you mixed the ivory towers of Western Medicine with the back jungle villages of the native shaman and shook them up with Pop Rocks, you’d wind up with something that starts to resemble the way I work one-on-one with patients.

At least that’s what other people who hear me talk about my work tell me.

While researching my book Mind Over Medicine: Scientific Proof You Can Heal Yourself, I noticed how much push-back you get when you start talking about the self-healing superpowers we all possess. After all, if, at least a percentage of the time, we can heal ourselves, what does it mean if we’re sick - that it’s our “fault,” that we’re not doing something “right,” that we’re slacking off on the self-healing process, that we’re being punished for bad deeds in a past life, that we’re somehow less than because our bodies are acting up?

Awhile back I wrote an article about how medicine is a spiritual practice, and in response, I received an email from a surgery resident at Columbia University that left me in tears and inspired me to share it.