“…thinking is ‘real’ medicine, as proven by the placebo effect,” says Deepak Chopra in a CNN article called, “Can positive thinking make you well?”
He asks how far we can take that: “…is there a placebo effect that doesn’t involve fooling the patient? Can you trigger your own inner defenses by the way you think?” He says that camps are divided on the effect of just positive thinking, since many disorders are considered to be genetically triggered.
Then he drops this bomb: “In the public’s mind, being told that cancer or diabetes is genetic acts as final authority. Luckily for the positive-thinking camp, this fatalistic attitude is mistaken. Genes are dynamic, not fixed; they respond to a person’s environment, behavior and attitudes. Indeed, a now-famous study in Sweden showed that a tendency to diabetes may be strongly affected by the diet your great-grandfather ate. A whole new field is studying how much choice we have at the genetic level.”
Wow! Thinking affects genes! Did you know that?