WHO IS IN YOUR CORNER?

Actually, you have a great deal going for you.

The mobile brain, the million-year-old doctor, the placebo effect, and a number of enlightened medical researchers are all on your side. Bio-feedback and brain-wave training technologies, borrowed by psychologists from a series of spiritual, creative and even top-secret military sources, are increasingly being linked and can enable us to access and empower our own internal bodily defences.

map of an antibody - one of the cells of our mobile brain - our million year old doctor

Increasingly, large numbers of practitioners have realised that it is too late to identify a disease such as arthritis when the damage is done. As with cancer, if you wait for an unambiguous indicator, odds are you will be losing the war.

More and more researchers are becoming aware that ill-health is a continuum at the start of which there are similarities between the effects of most of the major diseases. But before these can be diagnosed, sufferers run the gamut of fruitless investigative techniques before the effects are sufficiently pronounced for one particular specialist to lay claim to them.

It is almost with an obscene sense of relief that we welcome the news that we do have a crippling illness, rather than some suspected defect in moral fibre.

By contrast, Eastern practitioners treat the person rather than the disease.

What an inditement of the Western medical profession! What a clear signal that many of them are simply distributors for multinational chemical companies who make money out of each new wonder pill as it comes along and before it is discredited.

Some doctors have rebelled against this role, daring to ask why these medications have their vogue, why there ares such things as the placebo and Hawksworth effects and whether there is not a much cheaper, simpler and more effective way of working which begins with listening to their patients, then using, encouraging and respecting their demonstrated ability to heal themselves.

There is emerging greater respect for gentle, natural herbal remedies and the healing potential of aromatherapy, massage and spiritual healing.

It now appears likely that most auto-immune diseases are the result of progressive damage due to recurrences of long-term infection with common viral agents.

These are usually kept within limits by the mobile brain in all of us, the antibody system whose cells arise in the same embryonic layers that give rise to the associative cortex in the brain, but which remain as individual detectors swimming in our blood, preprogrammed to recognise and give the signal that will bring down the full biochemical fury of our body's defence system on any interloping organism.

Unfortunately, these defences are often stressed by the foreign substances we now inhale, contact and ingest on all sides as we live in an increasingly mechanised, sanitised and chemicalised society.

We can help them by boosting our vitamin levels, particularly of B and C. We can eat as natural a diet as possible with as few additives as we can contrive. We can avoid synthetic materials, avoid inhaling contaminants and resist skin contact with unnatural substances as far as possible without making such a production of it that self-preservation becomes more stressful than capitulation.

There is hard evidence that the brains, bones and connnective tissue of many individuals alive today has deteriorated at a much faster rate than our predecessors.

Young people have skeletal deterioration equivalent to that expected in people older by many decades.

Recent work on skeletons of known age moved from a London crypt has shown that far from people dying younger in previous centuries, we had actually been mislead by comparing their bones with those of younger people today whose body showed similar deterioration. But the bodies from the crypt were proven to be in far better condition at much greater ages than many corresponding individuals today.

This has been suggested as a result of reduced exercise, poor diet or environmental factors. Yet the majority of us have a greater choice of food, less hardship and more free time for recreation than at any time in history.

There is also evidence that our predilection for antibiotics is short-circuiting our own defence mechanisms and leaving us more vulnerable to organisms that were once relatively harmless.

However, for some, the most astonishing developments are on a par with chaos and quantum theory, a clear interaction between event and awareness, a feedback loop between chemistry and consciousness.

If it can be demonstrated that thirty percent of subjects given inert substances instead of active medication can still improve at a faster rate than people given nothing, and that some medication is 90% effective when endorsed by a figure we can trust, but becomes progressively less effective as it falls from favour, then, surely, they say, we should be investigating the triggers for this process of demonstrable self-healing.

It cannot be dismissed scathingly as "The Placebo effect" a wilful manifestation of the subjects' lack of cooperation and ability to muck up test results by introduction of random variables. In fact it is a marvellous demonstration of the body's ability to remember and reproduce the pattern of health, given a minimum of encouragement.

Recent work at Imperial College, London, has shown that the production of specific disease antibodies can be enhanced by training infected individuals to modify their brain wave frequencies and practise positive visualisation.

We have a cell-based memory going back through evolutionary time with experience of most of the things that can go wrong, and the templates to put them right. If transplants of healthy bone marrow, brain, blood and nerve cells from other individuals can stimulate regrowth in afflicted systems, how much more efficiently can we reprogramme our bodies by consulting and re-running our original cell specifications, handed down from generation to generation since man first walked the earth.

We have a library at our disposal the size of the Internet, and we can use it simply by being aware that it exists and letting it get on with the job. We can enhance its performance by concentrating on what it is doing, consciously directing and encouraging the work, and making more of our mental and physical resources available for healing.

Just as we do not need to know every link in the process from eye to brain to hand when we throw a ball, but simply imagine what we want to do, look at the target and allow an inward programme to take over, so we can imagine ourselves whole and well and leave our brain to mobilise the resources to realise the objective.

By allowing yourself to be aware of your body in sickness and in health; by trusting yourself to know what you need in terms of rest, nourishment and motivation, and by confidently taking pride in your achievements, you can change your position from that of a victim of illness to that of a manager of your return to health.

To endorse this philosophy too fanatically would imply that you do not have the right to decide when enough is enough. There is also a tendency to blame the patient for failure to recover when valiant efforts are being made, but too much ground has been lost and there is little hope of victory. Still, with personal growth, even these challenges can be embraced as part of the tapestryof our lives. Many people have progressed beyond illness to spiritual strength in the most appalling conditions.

But there is still another trap. Mere survival is not our highest goal. When you are tired, ageing, ill or unhappy, there is a time to reassess what you want and why you are continuing in an unproductive pattern. If you would rather be a couch potato than a geriatric athlete, you have every right to be so. If you would rather sit and rock, silently commune with the sunset and slip away peacefully into eternity, there is no other criterion except your own preference.

You have a right to be here. You have a right to health and the pursuit of happiness. And you have a right to decide when it is time to allow nature to take its course and make room for the next generation.

To return to the beginning - some enlightened medical researchers are suggesting that we are neglecting our spiritual health and that this, in its broadest sense, is the most productive avenue of research. Awareness of ourselves and others and of our environment, at a spiritual and an intuitive level, offers hope of healthier relationships with our own bodies and minds, with our families and friends, within a healthier society in a healthier world.