guided imagery on cracking the placebo code
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tools for learning how to engage the placebo effect to heal using guided imagery and mindfulness meditationTRANSCRIPT
Guided Imagery on Cracking
the Placebo Code
Guided Imagery on cracking the placebo code
Good luck, Placebos and crossing your fingers!
What’s a placebo have to do with guided imagery? Have you ever wondered if crossing your
fingers is good luck especially when your doctor does it? Do you care? Is the placebo effect a
vital force in a complex system that can be tapped into? And how do we put a face on its
value and healing in light of evidence-based medicine? Is there a role to be played through
guided imagery, a deeper visual vocabulary, or a metaphoric iconic symbol? Appreciating that
many friends have short windows to engage in such topics and others needing more there is
a summary in the final paragraph for those of you who are inclined to right brain material.
Interested, then start by reading a few lines from this NY Times review!
What’s luck got to do with it? Mindful healing
In preparing for this blog on the placebo I was reading in the 8/29 NY Times book review
section, Melanie Thernstrom’s (The Pain Chronicles: Cures, Myths, Mysteries) where she
recalled an interaction she once had which has stayed with her and is recounted in her book
“I had gone to the clinic early in the morning for a test that would reveal the treatment I had
undergone with this doctor had succeeded. As I was leaving the clinic, I glimpsed the doctor
across the reception desk, on the far side of the room. He held up his hands, crossed his
fingers. He was wishing me luck, reminding me the treatment was over, my faith was now up
to chance, for (powerful though he was in my mind) he did not possess the kind of power
that determines lab results. But he was also telling me that he had hoped that chance went
my way". The reviewer noted in the article" The Pain Chronicles" “ if you don't believe your
physician understands your pain, why bother with the monstrous physical therapy and
countless pills she prescribes? Those skeptical of many alternative therapies (researchers
found most of them to work as placebos) Thernstrom noted the practitioners’ force of
personality. “They all possess some kind of personal power; they knew how to invoke
belief, and their patients
actually followed their suggestions,” she writes. Anyone can deliver prognosis or relay facts, but
not everyone can persuade a mind to believe the body can heal. The review's ends by stating,
“There is no simple recipe for healing. Yes some people including Thernstrom herself learn to
manage medication or train their brains to modulate the perception of pain through
neuroimaging. Their successes, recounted so meticulously here, will surely prove useful to
others. But "The Pain Chronicles" is no mere self-help manual. It's a sophisticated, elegant
compiled treatise.”
A different mental universe
Here the main point is in seeing placebos as mental universes and finding new constructs, new
avenues that inform and transform us and the wealth in having access to some elegant
navigational maps as well as creating our own. One such map and map maker for broadening
mental-scapes is Christopher Alexander and in his living whole systems from an applied arts
field of architecture (Vision-Living-World-Nature- Alexander). His comments are applicable
regarding the theoretical science of medicine and complementary alternative medicine “science
only tells us about facts. When it comes to figuring out what one ought to do, that is a private
matter of ethics. It is your natural right to work out your own values. Not only will our
scientific world–view not tell you anything about value, it is your democratic obligation to do it
for yourself " he continues "what we need is a shareable point of view, in which the many
factors influencing healing can coexist coherently, so that we can work together–not by
confrontation and argument–but because we share a single holistic view of the unitary goal of
life" ... " then this new view will show us the world is an altogether different kind of place from
the one we have imagined. When this happens not only will things look different things will
appear to us as fresh and marvelous. We shall, then, literally, be living in a different mental
universe." (ed. a mental universe that embodies energy systems that can be tapped into).
How then do we enter into this different mental universe? What we need is a broader and
more adequate definition of life, of healing, of self–will! A new concept of life, a new
feeling of life as in organisms, a new feeling of life as an ecological system, a new feeling of life
as in patterns, as in colors, as in textures, essence, smells, a new definition of life that is
biologically healthy, a melted unity - this deepest experience of order that we experience with
wonder which is the real essence of wholeness, the quality which we are most often trying to
reach when we aspire to wellness and health. It is in fact this redefinition when integrated into
thinking and beliefs – influencing ultimately our actions- that that will swing the gates between
evidence-based and value-based research both ways. We are already seeing one dimension of
this deep witnessing to a degree in Mindfulness Therapy. This new century will be a century of
cooperation and integration. The Placebo concept will reorder our perceptions of
empowerment, and transform our identities into healers. This transformation will deepen
language much as the ocean deepens our consciousness as a metaphor. We will no longer be
bound by evidence-based constraints that are skewed models but will expand into this
system’s worldview as being "alive" because whole systems embody adaptation.
Informed guided imagery: A Dancing Iconic Feminine
Medically speaking when confronted with evidence-based research regarding whole systems
the new order will elegantly address the patterns, which influence wholeness, harmony, and
beauty; a deep symmetry that metaphorically speaking dances between spirit and matter in a
creative iconic feminine. The term Alexander uses is centers: As a first approximation, a “center”
may be defined as a psychological entity which is perceived as a whole, and which creates the feeling
of a center, in the visual field. (ed. the imaginal field). Guided Imagery asks us to imagine and
embody the imagining, a kind of deep cellular seeing. Finally we have a sequence to deep see.
A creative force that is shared by Alexander has four Key ideas:
- Living structures are in themselves centers (ed. cells).
- Centers themselves have life.
- Centers help one another: the existence and life of one center can intensify the life of
another.
- Centers are made of centers (this is the only way of describing the composition).
A structure gets its life according to the density and intensity of centers, which have been
formed, in it. The beauty here is that we live in a world that holistically as an eco-system is a
living system that not need be abstracted or scripted. It is living and we are living in it!
These four points, simple as they are by Alexander, give us a useful schematic of living structure,
and of the way life comes from wholeness. Patterns that can embody imaginative inner
landscapes, tools for inner crafting deep pathways into energies for nurturing and recovery that
are then a ground for imagery constructs that take guided imagery into deeper realms of
creative expression which have at their center alive energy. A sequenced guided imagery
incorporating patterns that return living systems to centers and wholeness.
Healing is an active principle and is congruent with the placebo in that they both share a mental
congruence. The informed mind as a center creates other bodymind centers that move towards
wholeness when experienced harmoniously and balanced. The Placebo effect is also a patterned
active system, a whole system with its centers. Not a mysterious force that can be swept away
by rigid doubters, or fundamentalists that are bound to theoretical evidence-based science.
Evidence–based science too is in itself a system seeking the elegance of integration, harmony
and balance, a system of patterns, centers and wholeness. In mindfulness we are reminded to be
the witness so here too can we witness the deep relationship of whole systems. As a
community of healers all beings are living whole systems that can lay down a path for healing
and living.
Then, if there is congruence in these ideas there can then be a new playbook to engage these
ideas of centers and wholeness, iconic symbols and new tools to deepen healing and wellness
through guided imagery - tools that the guided imagery collective is focused on exploring with
other therapists and practitioners.
Swinging gates allow for entering and exiting
This final paragraph is wonderfully stated for the practitioner. As stated earlier the gate is
beginning to swing both ways regarding placebo response and evidence-based findings,
www.guidedimagerycollective.org
In this new book “Imagination and Medicine”, which is scheduled for review in our resource section
(Imagination and Medicine-Stephen-Aizenstat) we find a fitting conclusion. “Careful experimental
manipulations have the power to provide strong evidence of active placebo responses, refuting
assertions that placebo effects are nothing but reporting biases and statistical artifacts. The cortical
and sub cortical regions involved in and affect an evaluation are indeed able to modulate peripheral
outcomes, providing candidate mechanisms that may support placebo responses across a range of
disorders and clinical conditions. These placebo response mechanisms are presumably at work in
active behavioral and pharmacological therapies as well. These mechanisms elucidated by experimental
research on the placebo response thereby provide a powerful window into understanding how the
brain is capable of modulating the body’s physiological state.”
We will continue to address this controversy and invite your comments!
“Once we have built the gate, we can pass through it to the practice of the
timeless way”. Alexander
Notes: Lauren Y. Atlas and Tor D.Wager’s chapter “The Neural Bases of Placebo Effects in Pain” in
“Imagination and Medicine” by Stephen Aizenstat and Robert Bosnak. 2009
Vision-Living-World-Nature- Alexander,
Imagination-Medicine-Stephen-Aizenstat
Pain-Chronicles-Mysteries-Prayers-Suffering