Brain Change: Discover your healing energy

By Annemarie Schratter-Sehn

As chief physician of a renowned Viennese hospital, radiation oncologist and trained behavioral therapist, Annemarie Schratter-Sehn worked with seriously ill patients. In doing so, she discovered a thousand-year-old method of activating self-healing energies. It turned out to be surprisingly effective. Almost everyone can use it on themselves and on others for the complementary treatment of all kinds of physical and mental illnesses and to recharge their energy levels.

• Language: English
• Publisher: edition a
• Release date: Aug 4, 2023
• ISBN: 9783990017128

Book preview

CONTENT

Prolog

If nothing works, something still works

What I can tell you

Two patients who changed my life

Misstep in the lions' den

Fully active until four in the morning

The History of Magnetism

Confirmed findings and an assumption

Healing is never just a miracle

The silent magnetizers

The basics of self-healing

Acupressure points

The power of meditation

The healing power of resilience

The role of mindfulness

The Simonton Method

Autogenic training

Speaking to the body

Faith and religion

Heal others

The fight against the system

PROLOG

There is something important that we have been forgetting, unlearning, and missing for several decades without realizing it.

We have the best medicine ever, and as a doctor specializing in radiation oncology, I say that with the utmost conviction. The progress that we have made during my forty years of medical work alone is phenomenal. As a young assistant doctor at the Vienna University Hospital in the 1970s and 1980s, I would never have dared to dream of what we can do today.

We can insert hip prostheses and transplant hearts; we are developing a vaccine against cancer and modern preventive medicine is extending the lives of millions of people. This development is far from over. On the contrary. Medicine is changing at an accelerating rate, creating ever more fantastic breakthroughs, in which Silicon Valley plays a key role. With the help of algorithms, artificial intelligence and vast amounts of data, start-ups, and corporations such as Google, Microsoft and Apple are developing amazing new diagnostic options and groundbreaking therapies. The interface between humans and computers has long been a reality and here alone a field with unimagined possibilities is opening. Even aging, which many perceive as a scourge, no longer seems to be destiny. Organs will soon come out of the 3D printer and if nothing else works, our spirit lives on in cyberspace.

If people had only known 200 years ago what we can do today, they would have feared us as gods. In fact, given these perspectives, our humanity needs to be redefined. Still, there is no reason to be afraid. Even if physicians with revolutionary new findings and ideas often encounter resistance at first, humanity has always benefited from medical innovations and will continue to do so in the future. The decoding of man, his body and his mind is good, it is important, and it makes life better.

However, two things that go hand in hand must be considered. On the one hand, modern medicine has created an industry that turns health into a product and dehumanizes healing. On the other hand, modern medicine makes us lazy. It tempts us to sit back and let others heal us.

Given the diversity of medical skills and offerings, it is only human that we should become consumers who delegate responsibility for their health to others and expect healing from them when it matters most.

The temptations to such a comfortable attitude will only increase in the future. Digital corporations will soon be constantly monitoring our blood pressure, our movement patterns, our diet, and many other parameters, comparing them with our genome stored in their databases and sending us diagnoses together with treatment suggestions including a buy button for the necessary medication, even before the disease in question has even broken out.

In doing so, we are forgetting something to which the old principle of use it or lose it applies and that, despite all the fantastic new possibilities in medicine, it would be a shame if we were to lose it: evolution has given us an ability upon which most aspects of prescientific medicine are based, and which are still available in our asset. She has endowed us with healing powers that we can use for ourselves and for others. We are forgetting and losing these healing powers and it is high time to rediscover and train them.

Whoever rejects modern medicine with the often-disparaging term orthodox medicine and longs back to the pre-scientific times when healers often could not do much more than awaken and strengthen the healing powers of their patients, is making a mistake. It is absurd to refuse the offers of modern medicine. It can be deadly.

Anyone who ignores these natural self-healing and healing powers is also making a mistake. Which is why it worries me how our knowledge of it and our ability to deal with it for our own benefit and that of others is dwindling. Because it is also a fantastic opportunity, given by nature, to use these forces. We can thus support the working of medicine, achieve the goal of healing better and take preventive measures before we even become ill.

Despite all the scientific reproducibility of my actions, healing has never become taken for granted for me in the decades of my medical work in hospitals. It is always a small miracle, especially in my field of radiation oncology. In any case, I think that self-healing powers and healing powers are often a part of this miracle and that using and cultivating them enriches our humanity.

But how do we do it? What role have these forces played in history?

IF NOTHING WORKS, SOMETHING STILL WORKS

The story of a healing that amazed many people.

I was surprised when one of my senior physicians at the time asked me for help. She was an orthodox radiation oncologist, which also means that she never thought highly of my accompanying treatment methods. When she called me anyway, I immediately went to the patient in question. As I hurried through the corridors of the Kaiser-Franz-Joseph-Spital, I wondered what was wrong with the woman, because my colleague would hardly have turned to me for a trifle.

In the outpatient clinic I found a patient with breast cancer. Breast cancer. A young, humble woman who already had intensive chemotherapy and had then been referred to us for radiotherapy. After a good start, the patient was now complaining about massive side effects.

During my time at the Department of Radiation Oncology, which I now headed, I had already experienced several cases of massive side effects. In this patient, however, they were particularly pronounced. Her chest was swollen, red and painful. It's not a pretty sight, nor is it a common sight, because this kind of reaction is rare. We bet on the so-called recall phenomenon, which can occur in individual cases with radiotherapy that follows chemotherapy. The body reacts in a similar way to an allergic attack.

I greeted the patient and got details. The treating physicians had initially sent the young woman to the dermatology department after the side effects had occurred. There she received cortisone preparations. The swelling and redness went down and after a week she came back for radiotherapy. But the same picture quickly emerged, including severe pain. That's when I got in the game.

Now we all sat around the patient. The orthodox radiation oncologist, who normally made no secret of how little she believed in the methods that I sometimes used as a supplement as a highly specialized radiation oncologist, gave me hopeful looks. She probably thought: If all else fails, the boss can try her hocus-pocus.

All my responsible nursing staff, all qualified nurses with many years of experience, stared in awe at the woman's red breast. Negatively impressed. Because none of them knew what else could help. All they knew was that we couldn't continue the radiotherapy like this. If we didn't find a solution to the problem, we would have to stop therapy.

However, the patient's tumor absolutely required radiation. It was a matter of life and death. That's probably why my orthodox radiation oncologist agreed to my help. Desperation breeds invention and tolerance in the choice of means.

My team watched as I ran my hands down the woman's body, not touching it, slowly, top to bottom, over and over again. Even while I was doing this, the swelling went down. Suddenly, the woman's breast was no longer bright red, but gradually returned to its natural color. My colleagues, including the radiation oncologist, were at a loss for words. They took photos to document the before and after effect. After that we all went about our work as usual.

The patient came back for radiation the next day and then came to me. This went on for the necessary 25 radiation sessions. After each daily irradiation, I relieved her of the side effects in the manner described. Furthermore, my team documented the case with scientific meticulousness, on the one hand because such strong side effects rarely occurred, on the other hand because the remedy was so unusual and so efficient.

Oh, that's good for me, the patient kept saying as the process gradually became routine for her. She left the hospital every afternoon without pain and redness. Eventually she told me she would like to take my hands home with her, which luckily wasn't necessary. After her last radiation I treated her again, after that she never had to come back.

WHAT I CAN TELL YOU

Magnetism is a cumbersome word that many people initially react to with skepticism. But there is something hidden behind it that you can use to change your life.

I learned a few things from my father, a veterinarian. Above all, that healing, whether it be that of a dog, a cat, or a guinea pig, requires empathy, i.e., a certain form of attention, awareness, respect, and devotion. My father, who was an intuitive, sensitive person, probably owed much of his popularity as a veterinarian to these skills. As a human being, he really got involved with his four-legged or feathered patients.

His role model helped me to recognize, define and fulfill my own role as a medical doctor. Being able to empathize is a basis of healing, even if it is unfortunately being eroded in our increasingly technical, bureaucratic, and industrialized healthcare system.

In contrast to him, my mother was a pronounced rationalist and analyst, who repeatedly pushed me to question the world, to think logically and not to accept every explanation. As a child, I was often out in nature with my father or on the tennis court. We both had a lot of nonsense on our minds and never thought twice before embarking on any of the little adventures the days offered us. We enjoyed life, we felt it and let it ban us. When we came home in the evening, tired from joking and frolicking, I would spend the night discussing everything with my mother.

This contrast between my parents made me what I am today, both as a person and as a doctor. My father gave me curiosity, empathy, and intuition, as well as the courage to trust my intuition in certain situations and to let it guide me, so to speak. My mother awakened my spirit of research in me, my unconditional belief in science, my urge not to stop at intuitive perceptions, but to question them rationally and make precise, comprehensible private and professional decisions on this basis.

My career as a specialist in radiation oncology and primaria (which in Germany corresponds to a chief physician) in the relevant department of the Kaiser-Franz-Josef-Spital (also known as Klinik Favoriten) was under two good stars right from the start. With my father's gifts I was able to recognize the needs of my patients, with those of my mother I was able to scientifically reflect on these findings and thereby further develop my specialty.

For example, with my team I questioned the large-scale irradiation of body parts that was common in the past. As a result, we introduced small-volume radiation treatments that helped avoid collateral damage to health. We were proud when American radiation oncologists came to Vienna to see what we were doing with state-of-the-art equipment. In the meantime, this much gentler and more patient-friendly type of radiation has long since become an international standard.

A quick overview

In this book I will tell you how the pure scientific approach with which I approached my subject as a young doctor one day presented me with an enormous challenge. This was when, in my forties, I gradually realized that I could contribute to the healing process with my bare hands, combined with a certain inner state, and thus also help people who seemed to have no other help.

In accordance with my medical self-image, I suddenly had one foot in the field of esotericism. I didn't think much of that, and for good reason. I felt committed to continuing the decade-long scientific success story on which our modern medicine is based. Esoterics who gather on the fringes of this medicine, many of them jugglers, charlatans, and profiteers, all too often rely on faith and hope rather than evidence. Little do they know how carelessly they can cause real harm to such an important commodity as health.

In this book I will therefore also tell you how this initially confusing ability to help with my hands forced me, in the spirit of my analytical mother, to constantly question it scientifically and to find plausible explanations for it. I was okay with believing in miracles. I did it then and I do it even more now with my decades of medical experience. But first, I didn't believe that any treatment method could systematically produce miracles. And secondly, I was sure that all too often we mistake things for miracles simply because we lack logical explanations for them.

For example, imagine a prehistoric hunter-gatherer would land in our world. Supermarkets full of groceries, electric lights, cars and planes, mobile phones, even the possibility of traveling into space: all this would seem like a miracle to him and yet it is based on rationality, on science and can be explained perfectly and completely.

I'm going to tell you what I found out about this non-technical, non-drug healing power that has been historically documented for thousands of years and was given the name magnetism in Europe in the 18th century. As a doctor, psychotherapist, and university lecturer, I would not have written this book if I did not have things to say that have been missing in the literature on magnetism.

I wouldn't have written this book either, had it stayed that way: A treatise on magnetism and a scientific explanation for it. Rather, what ultimately prompted me to do so was the most fundamental of the insights I came to in my work. It is that magnetism does not heal per se. Rather, it evokes self-healing powers that every human being carries within them, some to a greater, some to a lesser extent. Self-healing powers