Someone recommended I look up Recall Healing so I have! Its yet another gateway to self awareness and one well worth exploring.
The basics are this. Many physical illnesses and ailments are actually caused by psychological conditions, I have heard this time and time again, perhaps first in the John Cleese book Families and How to Survive Them.
Here Cleese himself notes how he had suffered numerous small ailments (‘flus and colds) which cleared up after he started therapy and realised that he was subconsciously depressed.
We all know this on a simple level. If we are stressed for a long period of time our shoulders ache and having them massaged helps us relax. But could this be extended to a myriad of other physical conditions?
I buy into this strongly and there are some studies to back it up. Just have a look at the WikiPedia page for Irritable Bowel Syndrome. There are not enough studies to be conclusive but I’ll come to this issue shortly.
Recall Healing goes a bit further and suggests that many physical ailments have specific psychological roots so instead of treating the ailment, we should find the mental issue which is actually causing it.
As with most types of therapy our issues more often than not lie in the past, particularly in our childhood when we are most heavily influenced – usually by our parents. Recall Healing goes beyond to explore how an issue might actually be rooted in your parents childhoods or their parents childhoods. Most people do, after all, just repeat what their parents did when it comes to child rearing.
There are specific times of importance that Recall Healing looks at. You between the ages of 7 and 12, your parents in the 18 months before they conceived your, etc. but does not limit itself solely to these areas.
Gilbert Renaud, one of the leading lights in Recall Healing, claims to have found a strong correlation over the years between certain physical ailment and certain psychological issues. An example he gives is one of receding gum. In all cases, he claims, the patient turns out to have come from a family which lacked good communication.
He believes that by resolving the patients communications issues and confidence you resolve the receding gum ailment.
Now perhaps I am just reading what I want to read or hearing what I want to hear but I can see how that kind of argument can stack up. I don’t believe it is true in all cases (Scurvy is a lack of Vitamin C, not an issue you had with your mother when you were ten years old …. but I don’t actually think Renaud goes that far either).
So all we need is the proof. Wouldn’t it make perfectly logical sense for scientists to have investigated links between psychological conditions and physical ones. Yes it would but such works are pretty thin on the ground.
What’s going on?
As it happens I have had quite a long term relationship with the phenomena that is Aloe Vera – a cactus like plant that many claim can cure (or at least alleviate the pain of) many physical ailments.
There are a splattering of studies which are very conclusive about some things (accelerated wound healing) and debatably conclusive on others (such as IBS or arthritis). But conclusive or not there are enough question marks raised by researchers that you would have thought would capture the attention of more wide scale experimentation.
Instead they receive only tepid interest and this stand off approach, which I discovered many years ago, fascinated me. I did a great deal of digging and what follows is my findings for why so few follow up on Aloe Vera and even fewer are prepared to investigate ideas such as Recall Healing.
Most of us a pretty familiar with the idea that before an organisation can announce “our product X cures Y” it must have been tested in laboratory conditions. These rules were put in place to rid countries of the ‘snake oil salesmen’. Consumers should be protected against false promises.
Furthermore governments understood that developing medical drugs can take extensive time and funds so those who invent should be protected through patents. A patent is for an technical invention – that will be important to remember later.
All very sensible except it hasn’t worked out quite how it was probably imagined.
The field of pharmaceutical products is now dominated by large companies, predominantly in the private sector and driven by a profit motive.
The net result is that, in order to maximise profits, these corporations must make patentable products. Aloe Vera is just a plant, it cannot be patented. Investing in the costly tests needed to prove its effects on an ailment would be pointless because as soon as they released the work every Aloe Vera producer would profit and their slice may end up to small to cover their investment.
The same is true for Recall Healing. Not patentable. Not worth researching. Only man made drugs provide motivation in our current set up.
Things now get a little darker. A drug can be “scientifically proved to work” even if it doesn’t work most of the time. So a drug to treat, say, a digestive problem may only work 5% of the time but in our current framework of rules that means we can claim it is “scientifically proved to work”. The statement in itself is not a lie, just a tad ‘not the whole truth’.
If you then take the next step you enter into conspiracy theories. Not only is it not worth pharmaceutical giants investigating unpatentable products, they have a vested interest in them not getting to market because they could undermine demand for their patented goods.
They have not had it all their own way. Doctors in Germany can now prescribe certain herbs that their UK counterparts cannot. Small, but a start.
The greatest issue that arises from all of this is that ever larger numbers of people know that there are alternatives outside of mainstream medicine and they lack trust in mainstream medicine as the one stop shop for remedying their ailment with the best possible product or therapy.
The result? A sea of unregulated alternatives where consumers struggle to define what is genuine and what is snake oil. Yes, the system created by society to get rid of snake oil salesmen is actually now generating them as a side effect of the way it operates.
Coming back full circle to Gilbert Renaud and Recall Healing I don’t have any physical ailments to act as a starting point but I will be following up on a few of the activities it recommends and report back in time …..