‘Tom, a long-term patient of mine, came to see me after his wife died. He suddenly developed heart failure. His heart just wouldn’t pump. It was flooded with grief molecules, hormones like adrenalin, noradrenalin, and cortisol.
His case is far from being the only documented case in which grief caused cardiovascular problems. The New England Journal of Medicine recently published a study about how grief or emotional trauma can cause heart failure — literally a broken heart.
Rather than giving Tom drugs for “heart failure” as I was taught in medical school, I suggested he get healing touch, a form of energy and emotional healing. Sounds a bit out there, huh? Well, he followed my advice and dramatically recovered. Touch, not medication, healed his heart.
I think we can all learn a lesson from Tom and other cases like his.
In school, we all learned how to read and write, but we never learned how to use our minds to help us with the most important survival skills of all: staying happy and healthy!
Other cultures differ in their training. Herbert Benson, MD, of Harvard Medical School, has demonstrated the amazing power that trained Tibetan meditators use to control their physiology by slowing their metabolism, changing their heart rates and brain waves, and raising or lowering their body temperature.
He even documented on film an ancient practice called tumo, the generating of internal heat, performed by initiated Tibetan monks. The monks are wrapped in icy cold sheets and must use their internal heat to dry them, possibly by actively burning something called brown fat. As a result, they can sit naked on a snowy mountaintop all night and not freeze, keeping warm with their internal heat.
That’s something most of us don’t have any consciousness of, or control over. Imagine if you could turn on fat burning and lose weight with your mind!
That is how powerful our mind and our beliefs can be.
But in the West we aren’t even taught how to cope with the day-to-day frustrations of life. We live under constant chronic stress and we are not trained to address this stressful psychic load that is the burden of the 21st century.
This is unfortunate, because stress is killing us.’

Excerpted from: ‘Stress Tips: Calm Your Mind, Heal Your Body’, by Mark Hyman, MD 06/17/2010