Dr. Andrew Weil was on the Joe Rogan podcast, and they had a fantastic talk revolving around healing the body with the mind, in combination with good nutrition and modern medicine.
We know about the mind-body connection in the sense that eating healthy helps us think better. So why would this just be a one-way street? It follows that the mind can influence the body’s physical capabilities (such as healing, pain tolerance, endurance) just as strongly as the physical health of the body can influence the performance of the mind. And taking part in athletics we often notice how our state of mind significantly affects our performance.
- Matcha is a better caffeine source than coffee because it contains L-theanine, as well as antioxidants. L-theanine has a relaxing effect on caffeine.
- Eat across the spectrum of colors in the foods in your diet.
- What’s most missing from medical education is the body’s self-healing capability.
- At all levels of biological organization, the organism can repair itself.
- The vast majority of back pain is muscle spasm that originates in the mind.
- You can live with a slipped disc and not have pain.
- John Sarno said stress and anxiety cause back pain.
- John Sarno cured people’s back pain just from his lectures, or from reading his book.
- Some people’s spines are fine, but they are disabled by pain.
- Sarno recommends ignoring back pain. 13:30
- People can heal themselves much better if they have greater confidence in their ability to heal themselves: If they believe they can be healed, they have a far greater chance of healing 16:12
- Many patients tell Weil that the best thing he did was actually tell them that they could get better.
- In doctors’ training, they see very sick people, a skewed demographic. So doctors may not be trained to encourage self-healing.
- When you say things to unconscious people they can be influenced. If a paramedic says “This one’s a goner”, it can increase chance of death with patient.
- Dietary change, antinflammatory diet, Chinese medicine, herbal medicine can often help. Can cure chronic disease.
- Your body’s gut bacteria is huge for general health and mental health.
- The liver can regenerate after losing half within 36 hours.
- Tell smokers to set a date to quit. The attempt to quit, even failed, goes into a reservoir of motivation, and one day it’s easy. Same thing with heroin addicts.
- The body’s microbiome is related to mental health 27:45
- Rogan: Working out 4 hours a day, your body adapts to working out, and your mood skyrockets. If you could get that feeling in pill form, you would take it every day. It removed all negative chatter, and anxiety. Exercise improves immune system, sleep, etc.
- Regulating the breath is the best cure for anxiety. Weil has seen worst forms of anxiety controlled by breathing techniques. You can’t be controlling your breath and be stressed simultaneously.
- Most psychedelics are so non-toxic and safe, and it’s possible to have great medical and psychological benefits from them.
- Psilocybin helped 80% of a test group quit smoking permanently, vs. 20% with other methods.
- Rogan knew people who were not doing well healthwise or mentally, but microdosing on psilocybin showed extreme improvements.
- Weil has observed and written about physical benefits of psychedelics.
- Weil had allergies to cats. During an LSD trip, a cat jumped into his lap, and he didn’t resist it. His cat allergies disappeared and never returned. Clearly there is a very strong mind-body connection. You can show a person allergic to roses a plastic rose, and they’ll have an allergic reaction.
- Weil used to get sunburned badly, and couldn’t get tan. On another LSD trip, he laid in the sun, and got tan, and could tan ever since. Weil thinks the nervous system can influence melanocytes and the mind connects to the nervous system.
- Weil was practicing Yoga, and couldn’t do the plow, where you lay down and touch toes behind head. He couldn’t touch toes behind head, had excruciating pain. He thought he was too old at 28. He tried on an LSD trip and could touch this toes down. Afterwards he tried again and had excruciating pain, but now he knew it was possible, and within a few weeks he could do it. The psychedelic state put his learned patterns of tension out of the way, and his mind out of the way, and showed him a body capability.
- Rogan’s experience with stretching is that you can feel your muscles much better on edible marijuana.
- Weil had experience with MDMA where he couldn’t walk on a gravel path, it was painful and he got marks on his feet. But on MDMA he could dance on the stones, and there were no marks. The interesting thing is the marks, so maybe the mind can remove a block that causes different physical responses in the feet, for example.
- Weil’s experience on psychedelics is that everything is conscious. Two theories of consciousness exist. One is that consciousness is a byproduct of biological material, another is that matter is a receiving apparatus, and consciousness may have organized matter into forms where consciousness can experience itself.
- Swear words are controlled by a different part of the brain. People who have brain damage and lose language can often still swear.
- Some people want to restrict swearing on the internet. Weil says they will never handle it, because the genie is out of the bottle now, and people can watch what they want.
- Weil’s experience with firewalking was that if you are in the wrong state of mind you get burned, but in the right state of mind you don’t. His theory is that in the right state of mind the energy transmits through the feet into the body, instead of being absorbed by the local tissue. 73:43
- Visualization is powerful for helping you to achieve things you want, or to heal yourself. In the example of people traveling to Lourde for healing, Weil suggests that you can imagine going to Lourde instead of making the journey, and this takes advantage of the imagination power of the mind. Since the mind is what causes healing, visualizing the journey we believe we need to make will help us to achieve our aim. 92:40