Marcia Angell Quotes

A lot of healing is in the mind. I'm not talking about serious illnesses like cancer. I'm talking about ordinary broken bones. Healing begins in the head. You have to convince yourself you can do it.

Medication is of course important but do not conclude that a pill dissolving in your stomach is necessarily more powerful than a healing thought in your mind.

The body has an enormous power of healing, if you really believe you are going to be healed, you're going to be healed. If you really believe you're going to die, you're going to die. If you apply this kind of method to everything, then there is hope.

You have to believe in a placebo or it won't work, but if it works, it's obviously working in some indirect way, through feedback in the immune system, let us say, or in the willpower of the patient to take a more strenuous exercise in their own therapy.

The future is to heal back to the mind again. Recognizing that the mind is all powerful - it controls every cell to every degree of its genetic expression.

Placebos are like the lollipop of optimism, but we can do much better by dealing directly with the mind... And it works!

If you have the thought in your mind that you are sick, you surely will be.

Any one can heal who believes that he can, and who will take the time to put that belief in motion through the Law.

The spirit is the master; imagination the tool, and the body the plastic material ...The power of the imagination is a great factor in medicine. It may produce diseases in man and in animals, and it may cure them ..Ills of the body may be cured by physical remedies or by the power of the spirit acting through the soul.

He who can believe himself well, will be well.

Patients who trust their doctors and have a psychological expectation of getting better could trigger a reaction in their body.

I think that cancer is a life form that exists out there, and it exists in us. I think even the concept of healing is a spiritual principle that we have to really look at. I think the word itself is something we ought to get rid of, because it implies that there is illness - that there is something wrong.

Physicians need to be good technicians and know how to prescribe, but for healing to occur they also need to incorporate philosophy and spirituality into their treatment. We need to feel as well as think.

A placebo is a phony cure that works. This is very hard for the medical profession to get their teeth around because they hate placebos, but scientifically, placebos work in about 30% of cases that are psychogenic diseases.

If we are willing to do the mental work, almost anything can be healed.

Disease is an experience of a so-called mortal mind. It is fear made manifest on the body.

Thinking of disease constantly will intensify it. Feel always 'I am healthily in body and mind'.

Disease is, in essence, the result of conflict between soul and mind, and will never be eradicated except by spiritual and mental effort.

I've been amazed at how quickly people can heal themselves, actually.

If the brain expects that a treatment will work, it sends healing chemicals into the bloodstream, which facilitates that. And the opposite is equally true and equally powerful: When the brain expects that a therapy will not work, it doesn't. It's called the 'nocebo' effect.

Allopathic doctors used to laugh condescendingly at those who posited that psychological, emotional and spiritual factors were important contributors to the sickness as well as healing of the body.

In a spiritual sense, a positive attitude may help you get through chemotherapy and surgery and radiation and what have you. But a positive mental attitude does not cure cancer - any more than a negative mental attitude causes cancer.

When it comes to how neuroscience could help the wider public, the worst thing is when we make advances in, say, mindfulness, and then decide that everybody can potentially think their way to curing themselves or develop their own psycho-neuro-immune mechanisms for boosting cancer defenses.

Now when I hear about someone's illness, no matter what dire their predicament seems to be, I know that if they're willing to do the mental work of releasing and forgiving, almost anything can be healed. The word incurable, which is so frightening to so many people, really only means that the particular condition cannot be cured by 'outer' methods and that we must go within to effect the healing. The condition came from nothing and will go back to nothing.

All disease has a mental correspondence, and in order to heal the body one must first 'heal the soul'.