All Is Well: Heal Your Body With Medicine, Affirmations, and Intuition Read Free

of little books, I entered the floors of what at
    that time was Boston City Hospital.
    On the first day, my resident came to me, gave me the name
    and age of my first patient, and said simply, “Work her up.” That
    was it. I was terrified. How was I supposed to figure out what was
    wrong with her when I had no information other than her name
    and age?
    In the elevator on the way down to the emergency room, I
    fidgeted nervously. I knew only the rudiments about how to work
    up a patient, let alone how to operate the stethoscope around my
    neck. Momentarily trapped in the elevator, I stood with clipboard
    in hand. And there, in an instant, I saw in my mind’s eye an image
    of the patient I was about to evaluate. She was moderately obese,
    in lime-green stretch pants, clutching the right upper part of her
    abdomen, screaming, “Doctor, doctor! It’s my gallbladder!”
    Wow! I thought. In the event that the patient I am about to meet
    does have a gallbladder problem, how would I evaluate that medical
    problem? As the elevator slowly crept between floors, I flipped
    through the pages of the numerous manuals stuffed in my pock-
    ets and quickly researched how I would work up a patient with a
    gallbladder problem. On my clipboard, I sketched out the classic
    workup one does for a gallbladder problem: check an ultrasound
    of the liver, check liver enzymes, observe the whites of the pa-
    tient’s eyes.
    The doors opened. I ran down to the emergency room and
    threw open the curtain, and there, to my surprise, was a woman
    lying on the gurney in, yes, lime-green stretch pants, screaming,
    “Doctor, doctor! It’s my gallbladder!”
    It had to be a coincidence, right?
    The second day, once again, the resident barked out the name
    and age of my patient, telling me to go down to the emergency
    room. Again an image of the patient popped into my mind, this
    time with a bladder infection. So, I ran the drill again: how would
    I treat a patient with a bladder infection. Lo and behold, it was a
    bladder infection. On the third day, I repeated the process again,
    and again my impressions were accurate. After three days, I real-
    ized that there was something unique about my brain, that my
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    A ll i s w e ll
    mind’s eye could see ahead of time what my trained medical eye
    would eventually see on the floors of the hospital.
    I could see just how useful intuition was in helping me as-
    sess my patients, but I soon realized that intuition played an even
    larger role than I initially thought.
    The Body’s Intuition
    The human body is an amazing machine, and as a machine it
    requires regular maintenance and care to run as efficiently as pos-
    sible. There are a variety of reasons your body can break down and
    get sick: genetics, the environment, diet, and so on. But as Louise
    found in her career—and published in Heal Your Body —every ill-
    ness is affected by emotional factors in your life. And decades after
    Louise presented her conclusions, the scientific community has
    put forth studies that support them.
    Research has shown that fear, anger, sadness, love, and joy
    have specific effects on the body. We know that anger makes
    muscles clamp down and blood vessels constrict, leading to hy-
    pertension and resistance to blood flow. Cardiac medicine tells us
    that joy and love tend to have the opposite effect. If you look at
    Louise’s little blue book, a heart attack and other heart problems
    are “squeezing all the joy” out of the heart, a “hardening of the
    heart,” and a “lack of joy.” And her affirmation to reverse these
    problems? “I bring joy back to the center of my heart,” and “I joy-
    ously release the past. I am in peace.”
    Specific thought patterns affect our bodies in predictable
    ways, releasing certain chemicals in response to each emotion.
    When fear is your dominant mood over a long period of time, the
    constant release of stress hormones, specifically