Did you catch my interview with Dr David Hamilton on Living is Easy this week? David is the author of Your Mind Can Heal Your Body published by Hay House. He spoke about the power of visualisation in healing your body from disease.
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Transcript of show
DR. DAVID HAMILTON
JOHN PETROZZI: Hi. Welcome to Living is Easy. Iâm John Petrozzi, and thanks for joining us today. Well, today weâre going to meet a special guest on the show. Heâs Doctor David Hamilton whoâs a prolific writer and he has written a book which has just come out and itâs called âThe Mind Can Heal the Body.â Iâm really excited to have him on the show today, because Iâd like to find out what is that I can share with you we can improve our health by improving our thoughts.
Hi, David, and thanks for coming on the show.
DR. DAVID HAMILTON: Oh, itâs wonderful to be here. How are you?
JOHN PETROZZI: Good. Thank you. Itâs great to have you on the show. So youâve done your Ph.D. in the study of the mind. Is that right?
DR. DAVID HAMILTON: Actually, no. What I did was Chemistry. I got my Ph.D. was building up drug molecules, [0:01:00] atoms together until you make what you call a molecule which becomes an actual drug.
JOHN PETROZZI: Wow.
DR. DAVID HAMILTON: But my interest in the mind actually began when I finished that, because I moved on to a fulltime position at the Research of Development Sciences with one of the worldâs largest pharmaceutical companies. And while I was there actually making drugs, you know, the subject was for heart disease and for cancer.
JOHN PETROZZI: Yeah.
DR. DAVID HAMILTON: And we had to test the drugs. And in testing we have to, perhaps you get one hundred patients on actual drug for the disease, and you get another patient, another hundred patients fake drug in, and then people know that itâs a placebo.
JOHN PETROZZI: Placebo. Thatâs right.
DR. DAVID HAMILTON: Yeah. And many fake drugs, especially ones that I helped with, are made of nothing more than blackboard chalk.
JOHN PETROZZI: Okay.
DR. DAVID HAMILTON: And so what interested me about that is when we give a hundred people a drug and we might find that 80 of them get better, we also give a hundred the fake drug and quite often we find 60 or 70 people got better, because they thought they were getting drugs.
JOHN PETROZZI: Uh-huh.
DR. DAVID HAMILTON: And so to me that was much more interesting than actually making the drugs.
JOHN PETROZZI: Yeah. Definitely.
DR. DAVID HAMILTON: Yeah. And so I researched that and eventually resigned from the pharmaceutical industry, so that I could study it fulltime and write about it.
JOHN PETROZZI: Wow. So give us a run-down. How can our thoughts improve our health?
DR. DAVID HAMILTON: Well, in a very simple way, your daily attitude has an effect on your immune system. For example, people who generally have a positive or an optimistic outlook tend to have a stronger immune system on the whole than people who are generally pessimistic or generally have a negative attitude.
The heart takes actually the largest impact from attitude, like itâs well known now that if a person has a very aggressive attitude towards people, a very hostile attitude, then itâs actually damaging for the heart. But on the other side of it, people who tend to be kind, gentle, friendly towards others, and compassionate by nature, then their hearts tend to be, on the whole, healthier. Thatâs because of the way that our attitudes produce a chemical substance within the body which directly impacts the heart.
JOHN PETROZZI: So interesting. Because weâve known for a long time now, that thereâs a missing connection between the body and the mind, and I suppose science is sort of catching up with it now, isnât it?
DR. DAVID HAMILTON: It really is. And I think some of the major advantage thatâs common to the study of the brain, because itâs very well known that the brain isnât quite as hardwired as we used to think it was. I mean, many people have a view that when a personâs growing up, the brain is kind of moldable, you know, when youâre a child, the brain is growing and changing. But when you get to be a young adult, letâs say, 16 or 17, that the brain becomes hardwired.
That view now has been completely turned over. And we now know that the brain is actually always changing, itâs always molding, itâs like a dough before you put it in the oven to make bread. Itâs always molding, and that happens up to the last seconds of your life. But where it really gets interesting is the fact that some of that molding occurs, and the phenomenon is called the âneuroplasticityâ, I mean the plasticity of the brain.
Some of that neuroplasticity takes place in response to just what youâre thinking, even just what youâre imagining, by making a picture in your mind of your body, during, for example, or youâre imagining some of your dreams, your goals, actually causes these changes inside the brain. So, here we have âmind over matterâ actually taking place at a level of the brain and actually, when we even just imagine ourselves and so well.
JOHN PETROZZI: Wonderful. I directed a patient of mineâbecause Iâm a chiropractorâIâve directed a patient of mine to your YouTube link today actually.
DR. DAVID HAMILTON: Oh. Oh great!
JOHN PETROZZI: Because youâve got this great YouTube video on the way to describing in simple terms how the body basically changes by your thoughts changing every period of time. And you had a great example there of how cancers can start to resolve and be eaten away through visualisation that you described actually using coffee beans. Whatâs the research that youâve seen and what are the stories that youâve seen over the time in terms of people healing from diseases such as cancer?
DR. DAVID HAMILTON: Oh, I have so many stories. I mean, when I first resigned from the pharmaceutical industry and started researching, and then explaining to people, you know, that the mind can heal the body, I had hundreds of people talk to me and say âYou know I used to have cancer, or arthritis, or diabetes, or even high blood pressure, or broken bonesâ anything that classically happens to people, and they would describe a visualisation that they did.
What struck me most is that about 90% or 95% of these people were telling me the exact same thing. In other words, they used the same visualisation principle. And to give you a really broad example, the most, the single most common visualisation that people use, who have cancer, is they imagine the tumor, or tumors, inside the body being eaten away with Pac-Man or piranha fish. People who take chemotherapy for example, the most common visualisation for that is they imagine the chemo agents as Pac-Man or piranha nibbling away, going âchomp, chomp, chomp, chomp, chomp.â
JOHN PETROZZI: Yeah.
DR. DAVID HAMILTON: âChomp, chomp, chomp, chomp, chomp, chomp, chomp, chompâ nibbling away at the tumor. In their imagination, theyâre imagining the tumor becoming smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller, until it completely disappears. And people who take radiotherapy sometimes imagine the same thing, or they imagine radiation, instead of Pac-Man or piranha, like lightning bolts actually blowing chunks off the tumor and once again the tumors are getting smaller and smaller and smaller. Many people imagine tumors as made out of like ice and they begin to melt, and as theyâre melting, once again, theyâre getting smaller and smaller and smaller.
Notice the similarity in the story: theyâre smaller and smaller and smaller. Basically what they do is imagine something at the beginning and then they imagine what it would be like at the end in a completely healed state, and they convert it faster into the seconds.
JOHN PETROZZI: Thatâs great.
DR. DAVID HAMILTON: For example, a typical visualisation of people who have some kind of form of heart disease is to imagine walking through their arteries and steam-cleaning them by blowing steam and hot water and actually blowing cholesterol out of the way and melting a plaque and calcium deposits and actually just cleaning out the entire artery.
JOHN PETROZZI: Beautiful. So itâs really, it just comes down to your own imagination, doesnât it?
DR. DAVID HAMILTON: Itâs really your imagination. And whatâs fascinating about it is, some of the recent research in the brain would suggest that the reason why this is working for people is because the brain doesnât distinguish between real and imaginary. For example, in one of the studies done in Harvard University, they had people sit in front of a piano and they were asked to play a simple combination of notes in the piano with each of the fingers, so it was something on the lines of âpom-pom- pom-pom- pom-pom- pom-pom- pom⌠pom-pom- pom-pom- pom-pom- pom-pom- pom.â
And they have to do this repetitively for over and over and over again for two hours straight in five consecutive days. And looking at images of the brain, we find that the area of the brain connected to the finger muscles have actually grown like a muscle. Thatâs what you need to think yourself and use this analogy that the brain changes so much and it actually grows like a muscle or shrinks if you donât exercise it.
But the amazing part of this experiment is a separate group of people were asked to do the same thing but instead of having a piano in front of them, they had to imagine it. So they had to just imagine going âpom-pom-pom-pom-pom-pom-pom-pom-pom.â But astonishingly, after the five days, the area of their brain had also massively grown, compared to both sides. The brain cell, it couldnât actually distinguish between who had actually played the notes and who had done the note-playing in their own imagination.
JOHN PETROZZI: Itâs just amazing, isnât it?
DR. DAVID HAMILTON: Yes, incredible! The brain doesnât distinguish between real and imaginary. And I personally think that of the hundreds of stories I heard of people healing themselves by using their imagination, then what actually happen at that very phenomenon that the brain somehow is thinking or recording what we are doing, weâre imagining as real fact, and its somehow helping the balance of the chemistry of the body in the direction of wellbeing instead of in the direction of sickness.
JOHN PETROZZI: So, athletes have been using these techniques for years, havenât they? Iâve been told that coaches take their athletes, particularly their lead athletes, through the visualisation of competing particular races, whether itâs Olympics or any type of race. They visualise how theyâre going to take off and how theyâre going to accelerate through the race and particularly finish in front. So itâs been used a lot in athletes and itâs just fantastic that itâs being used now in healing.
DR. DAVID HAMILTON: I personally, when I was a scientist in the pharmaceutical industry, I had the same job in the evenings; I was an athletics coach myself.
JOHN PETROZZI: All right.
DR. DAVID HAMILTON: [0:10:10.] I was the coach for the long jump and triple jump. And I was then the manager of the under-twenties team for the whole club. And I did that; I trained all the athletes to watch, to train them. I taught them how to use visualisation, to imagine themselves doing their events and scored it if it was a long jump, a triple jump. For some middle athlete, then I had to manage it with [their strength] and imagine them doing it the best they could be, and they had to do it over and over and over again.
I explained to them that as they do that, the brain thinks itâs really happening. What the brain does is that it stimulates the action muscles and helps the muscles to grow, adapt and evolve in exactly the way they need to be to meet the picture that youâre sending in their imagination. And you know, it doesnât even find its way into clinical environment now, because such is the power of it that people who had a stroke are now being taught the visualisation.
For individual studies, a group of people who had a stroke are given a normal set of course on physiotherapy and another group are given the same set of course on physiotherapy, but in addition, theyâre given an extra one hour a day when they have to imagine themselves using any impaired limb. So for example, they had impairment of their left arm, then for that one hour a day they had to imagine doing practical tasks with their left arm. They imagine lifting up a cup of tea and drinking it, putting it back down on the table, lifting up and drinking it, putting it back on the table, and doing this repetitively, repetitively. After six weeks, those who have done the visualization have recovered substantially, greater amounts of movement than those who only did the physiotherapy.
JOHN PETROZZI: Wow!
DR. DAVID HAMILTON: And itâs exciting how they actually do it, the repetition of imagining yourself performing at the highest level over and over and over again, and the brain begins to adapt the same signals to the muscles and the muscles begin to grow and change exactly the same.
JOHN PETROZZI: Itâs just amazing. Two things came up for me as weâre talking about this, David. I suppose one of them is really âHow much can you help someone who doesnât want to help themselves?â So if someone is so stuck in negative thoughts that they think their disease can never be cured with a particular drug or an operation and theyâre ingrained with that, and if you do take them through a series or a course of visualisation, do you think that their body can start to reject the visualisation because theyâve got some sort of, I donât know, sabotaging process going on inside them thatâs going to stop them?
DR. DAVID HAMILTON: I think youâre right. I think that does often happen. A person really has to choose to do visualisation. And the reason I say âchooseâ is because itâs not something we just do once and get actually healed.
JOHN PETROZZI: Yeah.
DR. DAVID HAMILTON: You know. For some people actually, to be honest with you, I met a number of people who just have to do it once and somehow they believe that itâs enough, and that somehow activates an extreme version of the placebo effect.
JOHN PETROZZI: Yeah.
DR. DAVID HAMILTON: And that simple single bonus is enough to heal or not is more common than we think. But for the average person, it takes the process of visualising something. So if a person doesnât really think itâs going to work, then not only would they sabotage themselves for not believing itâs going to work but they wonât actually do the amount of work required to get it to work.
JOHN PETROZZI: Yeah.
DR. DAVID HAMILTON: So for example, in that piano study I described where they had to repetitively play the notes in their mind for two hours straight in five consecutive days, that takes a lot of work. So if a person doesnât even believe it, then theyâre not likely to do as much.
JOHN PETROZZI: Yeah.
DR. DAVID HAMILTON: But the way I often help people in this perspective is I encourage them to read some of the findings and not to make an obvious [0:14:02] your body. In the first part of the book, I have all the up-to-date findings that can absolutely categorically confirm that what you think about impact the health of your physical body. Even skeptical peopleâonce they read that researchâcannot help but realise, âMy goodness, my thoughts really do affect my body.â And that works for many people as the motivating factor that gets around the skepticism and they say, âOkay. Yeah. I think Iâm willing to just give this a âgoâ now because I can understand now that there is something behind it thatâs not just some pie-in-the-sky idea. Itâs something that actually has solid foundation in science.
JOHN PETROZZI: Yeah. Wow. So, on the same stream of thought, I suppose, David, how much faith, confidence, and belief do you need to have in a particular thing, whether itâs visualisation or an exercise or something, for it to work and for it to break through, I donât know, through a placebo effect or whatever you call it, just for it to have an effect?
DR. DAVID HAMILTON: Itâs useful to believe in what you do, because the placebo effect is happening all the time. When a person takes a pharmaceutical drug, if they believe in it, it works much better than if they donât. And for example, in many countries in the world, you can buy a cheap version of aspirin or an expensive version of aspirin and even though theyâre the same thingâin the UK, we have paracetamol, and you can buy an expensive or a cheap versionânow theyâre exactly the same substance but the expensive version in general works about 25% better than the cheap version. And the only difference between them–
JOHN PETROZZI: Itâs just the price.
DR. DAVID HAMILTON: The only difference between them is the price. But we have the story in our mind, we think, that more expensive equals better.
JOHN PETROZZI: Yeah.
DR. DAVID HAMILTON: So that is like a belief or âThis one must be better because itâs three times the price or five times the price.â
JOHN PETROZZI: Yeah.
DR. DAVID HAMILTON: So the placebo effect is there with all pharmaceutical drugs but itâs also there with visualisation, itâs there with holistic therapy â itâs kind of with everything really. If you believe in the person who is helping you, whoâs your therapist, or your doctor, or your nurse, and if you believe in what you see and have faith that theyâre helping you, then that will all go back to the placebo effect.
And just to get around the idea of people, many people think of placebo effect is just a fluffy, you know, subjective thing in your mind, but now we absolutely know from neuroscience research that placebo effect causes real, measurable changes inside the brain, real measurable changes into the heart, the cardiovascular system, the entire body. So itâs no longer just a subjective pie-in-the-sky idea. The placebo effect actually causes measureable, what we call, pharmacological effect in the body, so itâs a real mind-body phenomenon.
So when you believe in a therapist, when you believe in a doctor, when you believe in their opinion, in what they suggest you could try, even if thatâs visualisation, there is always, thereâs impact of your believing in it which will always bring the power of what you do. So if a person visualizing to support what theyâre receivingâvisualisation does not mean you have to give up any other medication or any other therapy, whether thatâs holistic therapy, chiropractic, or whether that is drugsâit means you use your mind in addition to whatever else youâre receiving, you visualise as well.
Just understanding that this does have an effect on your body, impacts or raises, not only the power of the visualisation, but also raises the power of the therapy or the healing modality that youâre experiencing as well. So youâre getting a double hype from it.
JOHN PETROZZI: Yeah.
DR. DAVID HAMILTON: Having that extra belief, or even just faith in what youâre trying to do, or even of hopeââI hope that this might workââeven hope raises the power of the placebo with that as well.
JOHN PETROZZI: Because that is what it all comes down to, isnât it? Itâs all about changing brain plasticity. Like you said before, you call it âneuroplasticity.â
DR. DAVID HAMILTON: Yeah.
JOHN PETROZZI: The nervous systemâs always adapting and changing to whatever we fill it, so essentially itâs the circuitry in our brain thatâs creating our form and our structure and our chemistry and our whole health. So if someoneâs using this in the reverse, as in, negative plus terrible, loss against me, blah, blah, blah, the nervous systemâs going to start to adapt to that and youâll get lack for luck and your chemistry is going to start to go off and so will your physical health. Is that right?
DR. DAVID HAMILTON: Youâre absolutely correct. Youâre absolutely correct. In fact, scientists used to determineâand some of your listeners have heard this beforeâitâs called the ânocebo effect.â The nocebo effect is the exact opposite of the placebo effect. Where the placebo effect is you believe that itâs going to work on, youâre thinking positively about it and you get better, the nocebo effect is you donât think itâs going to work or you think you will get more sick or you have negative thoughts about the condition and you end up getting more sick because you believe in that. It does the opposite of the placebo effect on the brain, it alters the brain circuitry, the nervous system, so that you reproduce in the body exactly what youâre expecting to get.
So, with the placebo effect, you expect to get well, with the nocebo effect, you expect to get sick. As you just pointed out, your nervous system adapts to it, responds to it, and the body begins to get more sick only because youâre expecting it to, because youâre telling it with your own mind, whether you actually believe in something or even feeling it, so you find that youâre saying âIâll never get back to fitnessâ or âIâm really sickâ and affirming this over and over and over again. Thus, most of the things that happen have negative impact to the nervous system.
JOHN PETROZZI: So I suppose if you have a loved one, or a friend, or a family member who says âI feel terrible todayâ and âAw, gee, Iâm feeling so sick,â maybe the most caring and loving thing we can do for them is to say, âHey, better stop saying those sorts of things and think about how well youâll be in the next couple of days.â Do you think thatâll help?
DR. DAVID HAMILTON: Yeah. You said that in such a nice way, though, a gentle reminder. âMaybe you will do better, just think of how well youâll be in a couple of days or a couple of weeksâ and just giving someone hope and a target to aim for immediately interrupts that thinking pattern of âI am sick, I will not get betterâ and then that gentle reminder is the only action we need to do to just kind of change them in what theyâre saying and what theyâre thinking about in that precise moment and just help them in the direction of positivity which will ultimately have a more beneficial effect on them.
JOHN PETROZZI: Because sometimes itâs quite difficult for someone who is feeling the effects of a disease or an illness. Theyâre feeling so down and hopeless about everything. Sometimes, itâs difficult for them to accept something thatâs, I suppose, feeling positive or different to what theyâre feeling.
DR. DAVID HAMILTON: Oh, yes, definitely. And thatâs where your loved ones come in, thatâs where, you know, where the family members and people who understand the mind can exert a force from the body, can help out, so that person doesnât have to feel alone. What theyâre going through with alone, they have family and friends who are willing to help support them. And if he feels that support, just to help them to be more positive, help them to believe a lot more. It can mean that for every therapy or I could say drug regime theyâre experiencing or receiving, or any holistic therapy or healing technique theyâre receiving, even just a gentle encouragement will definitely work in their understanding that what they think about and whatâs in their mind can have an effect.
Even just helping them to imagine, after receiving the therapy or the drug, to just imagine themselves, even just for five minutes a day, just imagine themselves getting better, how they would be when theyâre fully well, and to just to do this as often as they can, at least for five minutes a dayâit doesnât take a lot of work to do thatâthen that five minutes a day can actually change a lot and really move beyond even feeling really negative about something. It only takes such short periods of time a day.
JOHN PETROZZI: Repetition, huh?
DR. DAVID HAMILTON: Yeah. Itâs a repetition of it.
JOHN PETROZZI: David, Iâm really interested to see where this word âplaceboâ is going to go in the next ten or 20 or 30 years because, I supposeâyou know, Iâve been in chiropractic for a whileâI suppose 15 years ago, they used to put the results to chiropractic down to just a placebo effect. Itâs just because the person is kind and they say nice things thatâs why you feel better. And, you know, thatâs all good, but actually we know, as chiropractors, that thereâs a lot more going on when we do a spinal adjustment to the neuroplasticity of the spine and the brain.
DR. DAVID HAMILTON: Yeah.
JOHN PETROZZI: So, Iâm really interested to see what happens with this word âplaceboâ over the next little while, particularly with this sort of research thatâs coming out, like you have done, and many other scientists have done. Where do you think this wordâs going to go over the next little while?
DR. DAVID HAMILTON: You know, thatâs a really good question because they already, frankly, beginning to change very, very quickly. The âplaceboââ and many neuroscientists, the ones studying the brain are only just beginning to show the conflict and healing effect to prove, to really see that the mind really does exert a phenomenal influence in the body. Itâs no longer just a placebo or what placebo really suggests, âItâs all in the mind,â but researching for the word like âhealing effect.â
It immediately gets you thinking another way what âhealing effectâ is supposed to mean. Itâs a meaning that you attach to this thing. Itâs the thinking in your own mind that actually exerts a real biochemical effect in your body. And I think more and more doctors, more and more mainstream scientists have no choice, really, but to accept that the placebo effect isnât just something in your own imagination or your thinking that absolutely, 100%, wholeheartedly, impact the brain, impact the structure of the brain, impacts the plasticity of the entire brain, impacts the cells of the body and even impacts us slightly to the genetic level.
For there is a very [0:24:32] compared to when I was in the pharmaceutical industry ten years ago. Many body scientists see that thereâs been a great acceptance of many of the principles now, and I think in the next ten years or so, weâre going to see a very different picture of the people who are routinely being encouraged to be positive, routinely being encouraged not just to be generally positive but to direct their imagination in a positive way whether thatâs through visualisation or not, and doctors understanding that itâs not just placebo effect because there is no such thing. There is just what you imagine of what accepting a real biological effect on the body.
JOHN PETROZZI: It is really exciting, David, really, really exciting. Weâve come to the end of the show, unfortunately. I could talk about this for a day.
DR. DAVID HAMILTON: Oh, Iâve got to tell you, Iâve really enjoyed speaking with you.
JOHN PETROZZI: Oh, great! David, thanks very much for coming on the show. I think you have a website that people can have look at as well. Is that right?
DR. DAVID HAMILTON: Yeah. Itâs drdavidhamilton.com.
JOHN PETROZZI: Correct. Iâve seen the research paper so itâs a fascinating read.
DR. DAVID HAMILTON: Okay.
JOHN PETROZZI: Thanks, David. Iâd like you to be on the show again at another time, so weâll keep in touch.
DR. DAVID HAMILTON: Iâll look forward to that day.
JOHN PETROZZI: Great! Thank you.
DR. DAVID HAMILTON: Well, enjoy your day.
JOHN PETROZZI: Thank you. And that was Dr. David Hamilton, who has written a book called âThe Mind Can Heal the Body.â So check it out. Itâs a really great read. I hope that the information we spoke about today is going to have a positive impact on your life and the life of your friends and family.
Thanks for listening today. Yeah, you can listen to this podcast again on www.livingiseasy.com.au. Iâm John Petrozzi. Until next time, stay well and stay happy.
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