Dreamforce and the Frontier of the Mind

(This article was published in January 2014 on my old blog oliviahoang.com, now parked at oliviahoang.tumblr.com.)

It happened in the same city every year.

Since 2003, Mark Benioff’s company has held a huge user conference called Dreamforce, drawing packs of tech-seduced acolytes flocking there to seek intellectual enlightenment from prominent speakers. This year, the conference featured four days of nonstop action and sky-blue themes that dotted select sections of SoMa.

It was on Day Four that I found myself sitting in the audience, listening to Dr. David Agus give the first keynote of the day. According to his introducer, Agus was one of the world’s leading cancer doctors and researchers. He also owned a genetic testing company that helped people determine their risks for hereditary diseases—an interesting fact when contrasted with what happened later when Deepak Chopra took the stage and silenced the audience with a question [paraphrased]: “What if a doctor tells his patient that she only had six months to live? Then the patient gets stressed, causing inflammatory responses in her body, setting off a series of internal mechanisms that lead to her demise six months later. Then the prognosis becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. But the question is: did she die from the disease she was diagnosed with…or from something else?”

As I exited the conference later that day, Chopra’s question floated in my head, trying to find some concrete answer to anchor it. I had read somewhere that inflammation has been linked to serious diseases, including cancer, but there were still so many holes to fill. So I walked on towards the BART station, thoughts swimming and legs moving as the crisp autumn air blew gently against my face.

One month later, I sat in a coffee shop sipping tea and paging through “Biology of Beliefs” by Bruce Lipton. There, I found the answer that my mind had been grasping for on that one autumn day. The most poignant passage in the book cited an example from the Discovery Health Channel program “Placebo: Mind Over Medicine”, in which a Nashville physician retold the story of one of his patients from 1974.

The patient was a retired shoe salesman by the name of Sam Londe. His doctor had diagnosed him with stomach cancer, which was considered 100 percent fatal at the time. Though they treated him for the cancer, everyone in the medical community somehow “knew” that Sam’s cancer would recur. So when he died a few weeks after his diagnosis, no one was shocked.

The shock came after they did an autopsy on his body. What they found were some cancer spots in his liver and lungs, but none in the stomach: Sam did not have enough cancer in his body to kill him, and certainly not the kind of cancer that everyone thought he had. The discovery still haunted his doctor after 30 years: “I thought he had cancer. He thought he had cancer. Everybody around him thought he had cancer…did I remove hope in some way?”

On a more cheerful note, the power of suggestions by authority figures can also be used to heal. Lipton cited a study in the New England Journal of Medicine that studied the effects of surgery on patients with debilitating knee pain. [Moseley, et al., 2002] The lead researcher, Dr. Moseley, commenced the study fully believing that “there was no placebo effect in knee surgery”. His purpose for the study was to see which part of the surgery gave his patients relief.

He started by dividing the patients into three groups. Two of the groups received surgery on different parts of their knee. The third group, however, received fake surgery. Moseley sedated them, made the standard incisions, and acted as he normally would during a real surgery. Then after forty minutes, he sewed up their incisions as if he had performed surgery and prescribed the same post-op program that he gave the other groups. Moseley did not tell them that they had received fake surgery until two years later.

The results were astounding: the placebo group improved just as much as the groups that received surgery. There were even television programs that captured footage of the placebo group members walking, playing basketball, and doing things they could not do before their fake surgery. In fact, one man in the group went from walking with a cane to being able to play basketball with his grandchildren after the procedure. His shared his view of the study on the Discovery Health Channel: “In this world anything is possible when you put your mind to it. I know that your mind can work miracles.”

Just how do our minds work such miracles? A possible explanation for the power of suggestions to influence a person’s biological responses came through Lipton’s research at the Stanford School of Medicine in the early 90s. He studied cloned cells that line the blood vessels and found that when he simultaneously introduced both histamine (produced locally in the body) and adrenaline (released by the central nervous system) into the tissue cultures, the adrenaline signals overrode the influence of histamine signals that the body locally produced. The results of this study implicate that our cells follow directions in a hierarchical manner—and signals from the nervous system will prevail even when those signals conflict with those of the local stimuli. In short, beliefs influence biology.

This revelation brought me back to the genetics testing that was touted during Dreamforce. Though personalized healthcare would certainly be a step forward, I can’t help but think…what if knowing one’s genetic risks heightens fear so much that the fear sets off a series of mechanisms that overrides the preventive care to avoid the diseases? Then at that point, do we blame the gene or do we blame the fear that caused the override?

Given the recent debates on the national costs of healthcare, it seems worthwhile to explore using the mind to promote healing before resorting to costlier means. Then again, there is that pesky issue of economics and power. If people can heal effectively through placebos, then what does that make of the medical and pharmaceutical industries?

At this junction, it is easy to point fingers at the establishment’s greed, yet can any one of us honestly say that we’ve never done something that might harm someone else in order to advance our own interests? If you’ve ever competed for anything in your life, then the answer would be no. Competition and vying for personal advantage have always been a fact of life, and to ignore that fact completely while advocating any cause is a recipe for failure to advance that cause.

So a better question is: how do we properly incentivize the key players so that they work towards methods that would bring us all up as a whole, instead of bringing the group down in order to elevate their own inner circle? If only there were a way to patent placebos, I’m sure they would be much more widely used by now.