The Anatomy of Healing: The Seven Principles of the New Integrated Medicine

By Erica Francesca Poli

What is healing? What really determines it? How can we make it happen? It is increasingly clear that there is not just one single kind of medicine and that paths to healing flow through the integration of multiple pieces of knowledge and the combination of many perspectives.
In light of the latest research into neurophysiology, psyche science and quantum physics, this book outlines the seven principles of the powerful interaction between psyche and body in healing processes, providing scientific answers to questions about the mechanisms which trigger it and identifying therapies that allow us to turn these internal switches on. This is demonstrated through reflections, examples, and real cases shared by the author, a psychiatrist and doctor who has completed several rigorous trainings but maintains an open mind and has been committed for more than 15 years to seek healing of serious illnesses in the psychosomatic unit by using therapeutic synergies that strengthen official care practices with innovative treatments, with her passionate work to painlessly repair suffering, with the patient, or rather the person, always and constantly at the centre.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anima Edizioni
• Release date: Jul 19, 2017
• ISBN: 9788863654288

Book preview

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PART 1

TO CURE, TO CARE FOR ONESELF… OR TO HEAL?

1.1  AT THE ROOT OF THE WORD

Perfect health and full awakening are in reality the same thing.

Edward Bach

Perhaps you have never thought about it. Perhaps you have never asked yourself the question, the first and fundamental question in the anatomy of healing. Or maybe you have. Whether you are a therapist, doctor or you have been a patient… have you ever asked yourself what is meant by the concepts of ‘healing’ and ‘curing’?

The time has come to do so. And since these words within their own structure are fertile with meaning, the first approach to answer this question comes to us from etymology.

Remember to always investigate the etymology of words, because therein resides the primal act of their own creation, the conceptual matrix that gave them life before launching them into existence and the realm of sensitivity.

The English word cure comes from the old French curer from the Latin root curare, ku or kav, which means to observe and to care for; the Sanskrit root could be kavi, wise. In its most ancient Latin form it was written coera and it was used in a context of love and friendship relationships; it was used to express an attitude of concern, worry, and vigilance about a loved person or object. Therefore, a cure arises in the moment the existence of someone or something becomes important for me. It refers to a way of being, an attribute of the relationship that we hold with ourselves and others.

Form this perspective, could it really be possible to cure oneself by resorting to a drug without even considering its true effect on us? In seeking to cure someone else, does it make sense to prescribe without explaining the reasoning? Of course not, we will discuss why.

Let’s consider the Italian term guarire (English: to heal): in Latin, the meaning Italians give it today corresponds to the verb sanare (En-glish: to heal) or convalescere (English: recovery, convalescence), whilst - as indicated in the prestigious Etymological Vocabulary of the Italian Language by Ottorino Pianigiani – the word guarire comes from the old Spanish word guarecer, of the root garir, which in turn arrives from the German root varian, from which wher, defence, or ware in English (indicating observation or consciousness, for example to be aware), in turn connects to the pre-Germanic root var, meaning to cover, which relates to the Latin tueri, to protect or to watch.

This long etymological analysis serves to demonstrate that in ancient times, healing meant to preserve, defend and save us from evil, through watchfulness and awareness. This presents a concept much larger and deeper than the more limited notion of returning to health which today for many is inferred by healing. More than anything this concept recalls the need for observation. So, finally we arrive at the term observation: derived from the Latin ob-servare, which sends us to the Indo-European swer/swor, which expresses the idea of looking after, care taking, guardianship, supervision.

Making a comparison between Indo-European languages, we find that they have the same root:

- Sarva-tati (Sanskrit): health

- Horao (Greek): I see

- Servire (Latin): to serve, to care for

- Ward (English): guard

- Guerir (French): heal

By comparing these languages, we regain a profound sense of an identical, iridescent matrix within which we find words that at first sound so different: health, observation, guard, heal…

In the Comparative Etymological Dictionary of Classical Indo-European Languages (Palombi, Rome, 2010, pag.498-499), Franco Rendich traces back to an even more ancient root: he theorises that within swer/swor lies the root svr, composed of su and r/ar which express the idea of arrival (ar) and good (su) in the sense of light and sound, therefore giving rise to the Italian terms to shine, to turn ones eyes to the light, to play, to sing and as horao in greek originally meant to connect with the light of the sun, which later was associated with the meaning to see.

What reflections can be derived from this etymological excursus? Firstly, you will have understood that one of the aims of this book is to awaken you to a deep knowledge, to the truth that lies beyond what we are used to.

If you awaken and if you search, you will find something beautiful.

You will find connections, meanings and powerful revelations.

The first revelation regarding care and healing, is that their very etymology recounts much more than you thought; it refers, in the first instance, to a relationship with someone or something that you care for meaning an act of love and, in the second instance, to an observation, which at its most ancient core concerns turning our eyes to the light, playing and singing.

This etymology alone encapsulates the entire Anatomy of Healing as you may find it in this book. In fact, the anatomical parts of healing reside in the nature of love that you have for yourself, others, life and the world; together with the capacity of becoming aware, observing and turning your eyes to the light, reaching through the power and the shelter of the observer, an inner awareness that is beyond rational and seems to refer to something spiritual, seems connected to something that, for the moment, we define as luminous and gradually we will clarify and translate into medical and neurophysiological terms.

Neuroscience is the extraordinary opportunity that makes it possible today to initiate a dialogue, to reunite and to integrate the physical and spiritual sciences thereby deriving an Anatomy of Healing, rigorous and profound. That is the purpose of this book.

1.2.  YOUR BELIEFS ABOUT CURING AND HEALING

Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t - you are right.

Henry Ford

Reflect for a moment: what do you really think about illness? What do you really believe about healing?

Let me give you some examples: do you believe sooner or later you will be struck by an illness? Do you believe that it is normal to always have a slight discomfort… like those that are stress-related? Anxiety, headaches, gastritis in various kinds and intensities? Are you overweight? Or perhaps, you think it is inevitable to experience relational problems? Or an unsatisfying sex life?

Do you think that life always has to be tiring? Do you think that it is normal to grow old with ailments? Do you you believe it is all down to your genes? Do you believe in the possibility that some people might manage to recover completely, though you are clueless about how…? And that it certainly would not happen to you? Are you afraid of pain? Do you believe that When the moment comes, it comes and if it does not, whatever happens you will make it…? Who decides when it is your moment?

These are called opinions, beliefs, convictions. Opinions are more elastic, conscious, you can change them when faced with evidence. Beliefs are subconscious, acting inside of you automatically and are the result of generalisations extracted on your own. Lastly, convictions, subconscious or unconscious, are the inner law that dictate your deepest vision of the world and you may even get angry if someone else were to doubt them.

Your beliefs and convictions, more than the Tablets of the Ten Commandments, are responsible for your destiny.

Your beliefs become your thoughts,

Your thoughts become your words,

Your words become your actions,

Your actions become your habits,

Your habits become your values,

Your values become your destiny.

Gandhi

This is the first crucial point: after more than ten years of demanding work as a medical psychiatrist and psychotherapist, years of study, research, practical experience and the treatment of hundreds of patients, I have learned that the greatest healing force is hidden right there, inside the patient themselves. I have also learned that the Socratic maieutic or the art of extracting the truth from a person, as the midwife removes the baby from the womb of a woman in labour, serves the medic more than any other.

The belief system that a person carries within themselves is the first of many doors to open and pass through.

In this volume, therefore, I speak of the personal approach that I have developed over these years, a universal healing method, that concerns the systems at play regarding the process of maintaining a dynamic equilibrium which we call health. This method can unveil unconscious and subconscious blocks to healing, blocks which, if not detected and removed, do not allow even the best doctor or therapist to cure, nor heal anyone.

The concept, therefore, is that if within ourselves there is for any reason a block which prevents healing, it will not occur regardless of treatment. In very explicit terms, if a person does not want to heal, they will not heal.

I have lived through this process. I thank all those who, through their stories of chronic and incurable illnesses, allowed me to face this truth. As a young doctor, tenaciously and deeply devoted to those who were speaking to me, I asked myself a series of questions that began this search and led me to discover the results I know today.

I will extend this discussion further later. For now, I wish to clarify to all those reading – whether they are taking care of their own health or learning a method to be applied at a professional level - that in each case the first gate to open is that of beliefs and convictions.

Whether we are aware of it or not, we create our lives based upon our thoughts and feelings. Often there seems to be no way out, because the more we live through experiences that we judge as negative which seem to be regularly repeated, the more our thoughts are consolidated and convince us that things must always go the same way just because it always works out that way.

Most of the time we are unaware of the enormous power of our thoughts, especially those truths which reside at a subconscious level, often in conflict with what we believe at a conscious level. Who would consciously choose to suffer, maintain unsatisfactory love affairs or be poor or sick?

As I said before, and as it has been long understood, beliefs are the result of generalisations that during life experience our brain generates in order to understand and map reality. However, as the famous saying goes, the map is not the territory.

Beliefs, therefore, whether positive or negative, are always a subjective interpretation of reality.

Jung knew this already when he spoke of projection as the only way we have to perceive and interpret reality: at all times, when we experience someone or something, what happens is that the raw information is processed by our brain’s structures and therefore filtered, so that what reaches our awareness is really what we are projecting ourselves (I am not referring to projection in the psychopathological sense, in this regard see Robert Bly, A Little Book on the Human Shadow, Red ed.).

Later I will refer to the neuro-scientific basis of beliefs, that today allows us to integrate them more fully into the medical paradigm through rigorous modelling techniques, previously associated only with Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) and New Age medicine.

Since beliefs are essential to our very existence, therefore, you may come to understand the extent of their power.

Beliefs inform every area of our lives, they can create or destroy our reality.

Our global belief system is complex and multi-layered, it concerns the whole of our vision of ourselves, of life, of death, and is directly connected to our nervous system, through the system of neural networks that I will go on to outline.

Our own belief system has the ability to make us sick or to heal us in an instant.

It has been proven that our belief system can affect our immune system and all of our physicality.

Frequently, during the courses and conferences that I hold, I love to cite, amongst others, the studies of Bernie Siegel, a Yale professor, who has done much research on the power of beliefs through the observation of people suffering from multiple personality disorder. There are two very well known cases in particular: the first of a woman whose irises changed colour according to her transition between one personality and another; the second of a diabetic man, who during his transition to another personality, believed himself not to be affected by diabetes, and showed a clear change in his glycaemic parameters accordingly. The key point represented by these cases is the fact that those patients believed with every fibre of their being to hold those characteristics, and thus, their brain system could truly and fully affect their bodies.

This matter is simple to understand, but far from easy to apply, because the rational mind constantly generates doubts about all that which does not conform to the beliefs we have created in order to form a framework of reality. The rational mind prefers the safe and comfortable state of self-limitation which restricts one’s openness to new ideas that are always uncertain.

This is what is happening to you now, if you are in doubt about what you have just read…

If you are doctors or therapists, like me, the doubt takes over even more because justifiably, you feel a responsibility for what you tell your clients. For this reason, in this book I will refer only to scientifically validated knowledge that I have researched and studied in recent years, led by my own personal need for intellectual rigor. Where there is not enough scientific evidence, I will report only the knowledge and techniques that have received validation in the field and are proven effective in practice, including my personal experience.

The good news about beliefs is that they can be modified, in the same way that our brain - as told the famous book by Norman Doidge, The Brain That Changes Itself - can alter itself thanks to the secrets of neuroplasticity which are being increasingly unveiled by neurophysiology.

It is also important to clarify at this point that not all beliefs are negative. Positive ones lay the path that lead us to success and selfrealisation. Negative ones, on the contrary, are the weights that tie us down.

As a doctor, I learned the principle of nature’s economy and of pragmatism: therefore, I leave to philosophy the task of discussing whether a belief is right or not; personally I prefer to decipher whether it is good for the well-being of a person and, if so, for me such a belief is fine.

It does not concern me whether or not a person believes in reincarnation, nor whether or not it is true; if this belief is functional to understanding and resolving a block, then it is fine by me. Likewise, if the same block in another person is tied to the belief that it is a genetic inheritance, I will accept that belief and work to turn it into a positive belief for healing of any kind. Beliefs serve as a model for the mind to interpret what, perhaps, as we shall see, can only be truly understood through the eyes of those who have a heart deeply connected to love.

EXERCISE TO RECOGNISE CONVICTIONS REGARDING HEALTH, ILLNESS AND HEALING

This exercise can be performed alone on oneself, can be assigned by doctor or therapist to their patient, or can be carried out by the doctor if the degree of awareness of the patient is not yet sufficiently evolved.

It is crucial, at the beginning of a treatment and faced with the experience of illness, that the relative system of beliefs and convictions is recognised, tested and, if necessary, modified in the case those beliefs which are deemed obstructive to the healing process.

Take a sheet of paper and write on it all your thoughts regarding:

- health

- illness

- healing

When you have finished, read over the three lists and for each statement ask yourself where it came from: is it a generalisation, a repetition of experiences or from a perception you recognise as your own (even if you are not sure where that comes from)?

Each of these three topics involves beliefs and convictions.

You should know by now that a belief is nothing more than an idea supported by some references (for example, past experiences) that make it more certain and reliable. Imagine you have a table whose surface represents beliefs, with legs that symbolise its references. The strength of a belief therefore, depends upon the emotional intensity with which we hold on to these references, along with the number of references we have.

After identifying and separating your beliefs from convictions, you can recognise certain ones as negative because they fall into three major subsets:

1.  Feeling hopeless: the belief that a desired goal cannot be reached in spite of your own skills. It is characterised by the idea that It doesn’t matter what I do, it won’t make a difference. I can’t get what I want. It’s out of my control. I’m a victim.

2.  Feeling powerless: the belief that the desired goal can be reached, but you are not capable of reaching it.

3.  Feeling unworthy: the belief you do not deserve to reach the desired goal because you have done (or have not done) something.

If you have identified negative beliefs, try to specify within which of these three areas they may be categorised. Good. Now you are ready to change them.

1.3.  CHOOSE, NOW

Here are two of the most difficult tasks for any human being to accomplish:

- To make a decision and to stay present;

- To decide and implement that decision immediately.

Both relate to the power given to oneself, or rather, to the remembering of the power that resides within oneself.

Does it seem strange to talk of power with regards to healing?

Surely, more than anything, disease causes the human being to face their weaknesses? Is it not true that good health is the one factor over which humans have no control at all?

How does power relate to health?

Over time, I have come to realise that power and health are the same thing. Are you embarrassed of the idea that you possess power? Usually, deep down, at the level of one’s most stubborn beliefs, or more precisely convictions, people do not like the idea of power. Power is the prerogative of those who are greedy, selfish and ambitious.

People who seek success and domination…

In fact, the whole of existence is tied to how much power you give yourself. Power to deserve what you want, power to make others respect you, power to say no, but also the ability to choose how to nurture yourself, the power to choose how we want to be treated.

As Caroline Myss says in a precious book Anatomy of the Spirit (pp. 52-53, Anima Ed.), Power is a concept of fundamental importance with regard to healing and health. Attitudes that generate a sense of powerlessness not only result in poor self-esteem, but also draw energy from the body, compromising overall health.

To be in a position where one is free to consider a decision and to know how to do so, to have internalised the ability to generate inner energy and emotional resources, to be confident of our own self-sufficiency and able to self-motivate ourselves, to deeply understand that self-care is a priority, to know that our energy systems are connected to awareness and emotional balance, this is the kind of power I am referring to.

This is the power that moves you from a position in which you are constrained to live dependant upon control of your life or factors outside of you, where you are passive and your state of being is determined by external events; to the position in which you become aware of yourself, of your emotional needs, your unresolved complexities and the role that you play in directing your life and how to do so.

Then you discover the charm and the thrill of the ability to choose - active power, with which humans always struggle - including philosophy, religion, politics and medicine.

This is because at that point, your position changes even with your relationship to medicine: your health is not dependent upon some factor outwith your control, doctors and medicine included, but upon yourself in relation to the doctor and the medicines that at this point you may choose.

As a doctor, I firmly believe that it is an essential ethical task for doctors to promote the undertaking of an active engagement by the person in front of them, and I believe that the future of medicine will progress towards this revolution of the medical paradigm, for which this book, my courses and seminars will offer constant narration.

In this sense, disclosure is a medical procedure, and this is the way I employ it.

Remember that the etymology of the words care and healing recall observation, as we saw before: therefore, the act of observation and understanding, the process of which is specific and unique to each person, is a primary, profound act of care.

EXERCISE OF SELF-ANALYSIS

Answer these questions to understand your relationship with power and choice:

1.  For you, what is power?

2.  To what extent is power equivalent to control and security?

3.  How much of your power is delegated to your resources and how much to you inner-self, to money, to work, to beauty, to authority…?

4.  What, for you, are the symbols of power (images, phrases, archetypes, but also mythical figures, religious, political, animals or even fantasy objects etc.)?

5.  What physical and metaphorical relationship binds you to your symbols of power?

Once you have identified your personal symbols of power it will make it easier for you to cure and heal any psychosomatic issues. For the time being, restrict yourself simply to identifying them, later on you will be shown techniques to work with them autonomously.

1.4.  HERE AND NOW

These two short and simple words express an immense concept that can change the course of your whole life and that is at the core of an inner transformation which awakens you and allows you to experience the maximum of your potential and wellbeing.

I could site many of my teachers on the power of now: first the psychiatrist Daniel Siegel who led me on my first steps into mindfulness, which I will cover in more detail later because I integrate meditation with my work; the monk Tich Nath Hanh, author of the wonderful The Sun, My Heart; Eckhart Tolle, the father of The Power of Now.

From these books that I have loved, words have echoed to the deepest depths of my mind and have grown into messages that I share in therapy sessions and seminars.

They have become so much a part of me that I could fill this book with them, but I will not.

I will do my best so that you may experience those words, because as a doctor and therapist, my intention is that by reading this book you obtain tangible results for your wellbeing.

Therefore, I issue a challenge to your ego and an appeal to your self: do not continue reading this book if you do not wish to decide now that your life will change, if you do not want to risk becoming aware of yourself, if you do not want to discover the power within yourself.

However, you have chosen this book… and you are reading my words, so you must be looking for something.

Decide now to find it. Transform this decision into a commitment, as I have done with this book, the fruit of many years of work and the synthesis of my best findings, studies and experiments as well as my life’s experience relating to the mind, psyche, health and my own personal growth.

Here, now, you are ready! Perhaps with a confused ego, a slightly awakened Self… This is the perfect condition to approach the Principles of the Anatomy of Healing.

PART 2

THE PRINCIPLES OF THE ANATOMY OF HEALING

2.1.  THE NEW PARADIGM OF INTEGRATION

In this book I describe the different treatments of the healing program I have discovered and assembled during recent years which has proved useful to my patients and to myself, and I will explain why I adopted them and how to use them. Now, I will summarise the basic principles.

The function of this chapter is to lay the conceptual foundation for what will follow in later chapters.

Whilst writing this book, I realised that all of these therapeutic techniques which exploit - each one in their own way - certain mechanisms of self-healing which involve neuroplasticity of the brain and the unconscious.

Each method has undergone rigorous scientific studies that have demonstrated their validity and effectiveness and which have been published in numerous and prestigious international scientific journals, and yet are still not easily integrated with conventional medicine, never mind psychiatry or psychotherapy.

Many doctors and therapists nowadays are curious about these issues and integrate concepts of psychosoma units into their practice, meanwhile institutions and academics still appear reluctant to formally accept these methods of work. Perhaps this is because the mechanisms leveraged can only be understood by a new approach to the space between psyche and soma, tackling the proverbial no man’s land between what is seen and unseen, and perhaps this is an obstacle, understandably, to integration with a medical practice that declares itself scientific.

However, many things are changing in the world of medicine and the new cutting-edge research findings bring forth new tools to explain reality, new semantic maps reflecting new convictions that are creating a new paradigm, where doctors experience that there is not one single medicine but that the integration of multiple therapeutic approaches is most effective, and in which patients find themselves an active and indispensable component in determining their own welfare and happiness.

Here, therefore, the principles, those convictions which are the result of research and practice in the field are trustworthy, such as those at present more in line with findings from basic and clinical research, and more effective in guiding the care and healing processes.

2.2.  THE POWER OF THE PSYCHE IN HEALING PROCESSES

I have always suspected that the psyche plays a role in the healing process. In fact, I have always known that it does. It is perhaps one of the most genuine reasons why I became a psychiatrist.

Still, it was not easy to find the evidence.

I experienced it every day during my years of specialisation in psychiatry, where in addition to departmental activities and outpatient clinics, I was consulting in the various specialist departments of Milan’s Policlinico Hospital, encountering patients with many different medical conditions. They used to call me when there was a relapse due to psychic factors that obstructed the progress of therapy, other times because a person’s physical symptoms were unexplained, or too vague and unspecific to be part of a so-called organic medical syndrome leading to definitions such as somatisation, functional syndrome and so on. I understood more and more that it was not enough to see the psychological side of the illness as an element that ran parallel to the physical side, as a separate dimension placed next to the physical one, in a Cartesian manner res extensa e res cogitans (generally defined as thinking substance and extended substance).

No, psyche and soma were deeply interconnected, were indeed one, the same thing, since then I refer to them as psychosoma units. The paradox was that the widespread academic psychiatric thinking seemed closed to these concepts, more so than in other medical specialisms were my colleagues were often faced with cases of so-called sine materia symptoms within the organic etiology, which nonetheless caused a great deal of suffering and disability for their patients.

To most of the academic psychiatry, psychiatric consultation was considered a minority branch, psychiatrists did not deal with real mental illness, but were merely providing psychological support during chronic medical pathologies, in the case of transplants, multiple sclerosis, tumoral pathologies, or to aid the behavioural abnormalities found in patients with Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s.

Meanwhile, I was witnessing extraordinary things; ovaries resuming function and menstrual cycles that would restart after sessions of emotional release; normalisation of blood tests in cases of autoimmune hepatitis which leads to chronic cirrhosis thanks to expression of deep rage; para-neurolocal symptoms that, just as in the cases of the Salpêtrière as Freud recalled, disappeared after the resolution of trauma; also tumour indexes which were altered based on the patient’s affective and intimate relations with their spouse; those experiencing post-myocardial infarction depression would benefit from meditation and biofeedback techniques; people who got better following intake of a placebo…

I was surprised, excited and captivated by this mystery of healing which occurred in ways unexplained by conventional medicine.

However, in my psychiatric textbooks there was no evidence of such incidents.

I had to extend my search to the territory of so-called alternative medicines, metaphorical medicines in the sense that they saw the symptom not only as a physical fact, but as the translation of an emotion, a story, a karma, as a language used by the body to speak about something else, such as unconscious theatrical materialisation of a lesion, into a mass or a dysfunction.

I discovered a symbolic medicine that was patient-centred; which made everything very intelligible, as if the biology and biography of a person were two languages which appeared different but told the same story.

Throughout this journey, however, I have always sought my evidence in the form of scientific findings for what was still an undeniable insight. I will not list all of the data from the past forty years of studies on the subject. I will limit myself to mention only the authors that have most influenced that period of my training. It began, as always, with a seemingly random meeting.

During my studies in Neurology I met many teaching staff, including Professor Giuseppe De Benedittis, who in addition to being a neuro-surgeon was psychiatrist and hypnotist. For a long time, he worked to treat chronic pain, cancer pain, and was a director at the Italian Society of Hypnosis which held a hypnosis course for physicians each year. I had not yet graduated, but I was admitted to the course.

There began my training in hypnosis. After all, I thought, Freud himself began his practice with hypnosis on so-called hysterical patients that had been admitted by the neurologist Charcot at the Salpêtrière in Paris: women with unexplained neurological symptoms, sudden paralysis, loss of vision and incurable disorders that healed after the removal, or abreaction (as Freud called it) of a trauma lived and forgotten… It is incredible how the roots of what has become in many cases the most intellectualised of all therapies are so embedded in the body… we will talk more about that later…

Let’s get back to us.

De Benedittis was not just an academic, he had a visionary power to look beyond and research, and it was him that gave me my first source of enlightenment on the power of the mind in the healing process.

Remarkable Recovery was an investigation into extraordinary healing. Two American authors, Marc Ian Barasch and Carlyle Hirshberg, collected a large collection of cases from around the world (including Lourdes), which showed that so-called miracles occurred more frequently than you might think. From cases of tumours to those of AIDS. Their book was not limited to specific clinical cases: which were just a starting point to show how the body itself possesses the ability to self-heal in the presence of serious diseases. It was like an epiphany.

From that moment I began a parallel study alongside my university course, that of Eastern medicine, of researchers who were talking about psychoneuroendocrinoimmunology, the science that studies the relationship and the interconnection between the psyche, the nervous system, hormones and immune cell systems.

Following each of my afternoon classes at the clinic, or other school and departmental activities, I went to look for so-called alternative texts in the only place I could find them, the Esoteric Library of the Anima Group in Milan.

That is how the following made their way into my hands: texts by Deepak Chopra, including Quantum Healing, Love, Medicine and Miracles by Bernie Siegel, Molecules of Emotion by Candace Pert… and also texts on Chinese Medicine and Ayurvedic Medicine, holistic gynaecology such as the beloved book The Lunar Waters, Chinese Medicine and Women by Alessandra Gulì, to the works of Hanneman, Steiner, and Ehret.

These were the first years in which even Italian academia began to produce essays on psychoneuroendocrinoimmunology so-called Bottaccioli, after the author.

I studied and reflected upon the fact that what was said in these texts was for me an irrepressible echo of a truth so obvious that it could not be denied, though apparently it was not taken into consideration by the field of conventional medicine… I graduated in 2000, exactly 30 years after the first publication of the 167th volume of the prestigious magazine Science which presented the research of Herbert Benson on the effectiveness of transcendental meditation for the improvement and healing of heart disease, but nobody at my university spoke about it… meanwhile Benson founded the Harvard Mind Body Medical Institute.

I could go on throughout the book quoting texts and showing how there are mountains of evidence related to the fundamental role of the psyche in determining illness and recovery, but the purpose of this book is to give answers to the question that is a consequence of this awareness, how? This was what I wondered during those years of study, research and discovery.

I asked myself: if the psyche is so powerful, if so many self-healing mechanisms are already known, why is it that the so-called extraordinary healings occur only in certain cases and not in others? Why is it that many people still do not heal? How can you turn on that power inherent inside each of us for self-healing? Which is more effective? transcendental meditation, Chinese Medicine, macrobiotics, hypnosis, psychotherapy…?

Each text I read reported different cases, each research published presented different techniques for assessment, and although I was sure that once activated the self-healing mechanism was able to give truly miraculous results, it seemed that nobody understood how to activate it consciously, so as to permanently integrate this discovery of immeasurable value with medical practice.

Maybe that is why traditional medicine, which I still studied and practiced, seemed deaf to this evidence that to me was exceedingly clear.

On the other hand, it was clear that in traditional medicine there was an underlying bias: to study only the sick subjects meant the loss of an opportunity to understand why everyone else does not fall ill.

This stemmed from the ancient quarrel between Pasteur and Bernard and the fact that the former prevailed.

The chemist Pasteur fathered the idea that germs are the cause of illnesses and consequentially the scope of conventional medicine which focuses on the detection and destruction of the pathogen by drugs. Claude Bernard insisted instead that, as he used to say, "c’est tout le terrain,"