Cure Quotes

“At the heart of almost all the pathways I’ve learned about is one guiding principle: if we feel safe, cared for and in control—in a critical moment during injury or disease, or generally throughout our lives—we do better. We feel less pain, less fatigue, less sickness. Our immune system works with us instead of against us. Our bodies ease off on emergency defenses and can focus on repair and growth.”
― Jo Marchant, Cure: A Journey into the Science of Mind Over Body

“What harms us is our psychological response to those circumstances; not the state of our environment, but of our mind. And that is something we can control.”
― Jo Marchant, Cure: A Journey into the Science of Mind Over Body

“We are increasingly pushed to see more patients in less time.”27 It’s a trend he fears is contributing to a loss of empathy among medical professionals (and in turn to scary rates of depression and burnout).”
― Jo Marchant, Cure: A Journey into the Science of Mind Over Body

“Twelve chapters later, I’ve learned how our brains control many aspects of our physiology, including the tools that the body has available—from hormones and natural painkillers to the weapons of the immune system—to ease symptoms and fight disease. Instead of responding purely to physical circumstances, I’ve seen how the brain uses our perception of our environment, including memories of the past and predictions about the future, to decide how best to allocate its resources. These processes can have an effect within seconds, or they can influence our physiology for years to come.”
― Jo Marchant, Cure: A Journey into the Science of Mind Over Body

“They also received much less aggressive care at the end of their lives, with fewer rounds of chemotherapy and longer hospice stays. But the researchers were surprised to find something else. The palliative care group survived for an average of 11.6 months, compared to 8.9 months for the control group.30”
― Jo Marchant, Cure: A Journey into the Science of Mind Over Body

“The U.S. is the richest country in the world, yet even with trillions of dollars to spend it cannot match the life expectancy of a middle-income country like Costa Rica.”
― Jo Marchant, Cure: A Journey into the Science of Mind Over Body

“In other words, fatigue isn’t a physical event but a sensation or emotion, invented by the brain to prevent catastrophic harm. They called the brain system that does this the “central governor.”
― Jo Marchant, Cure: A Journey into the Science of Mind Over Body

“Saintey asks me to breathe in time with the blue bar—five seconds in as it fills, five seconds out as it drains. Then something striking happens. Within a few seconds, the difference between my lowest and highest heart rate is much larger than before—varying from about 60 to 90 beats per minute. And the line on the graph transforms from ugly random spikes into a smooth, snake-like curve.”
― Jo Marchant, Cure: A Journey into the Science of Mind Over Body

“But she approaches mindfulness as just another experiment. “If I can’t do something, I’ll do three minutes of breathing and try again. It’s amazing what a difference it makes.”
― Jo Marchant, Cure: A Journey into the Science of Mind Over Body

“best of both worlds: one that uses life-saving drugs and technologies when they are needed, but also supports us to reduce our risk of disease and to manage our own symptoms when we are ill; and when there is no cure, cares for us and allows us to die with dignity.”
― Jo Marchant, Cure: A Journey into the Science of Mind Over Body

“The presence of the central governor may explain why interval training—short bursts of high intensity exercise interspersed by recovery periods—works so well. According to Noakes, regular sprints that push us close to our limit of maximum performance don’t just increase physical fitness, they also retrain the brain. They teach the central governor that pushing ourselves that hard was fine, so next time it’s safe to push ourselves a little bit further.”
― Jo Marchant, Cure: A Journey into the Science of Mind Over Body

“Pain relief is a billiondollar market, and drug companies have no incentive to fund trials that would reduce patients’ dependence on their products, he points out. And neither have medical insurers, because if medical costs come down, so do their profits. The trouble with hypnosis and other psychological therapies, he says, is that “there’s no intervening industry that has the interest in pushing it.”
― Jo Marchant, Cure: A Journey into the Science of Mind Over Body

“What does have an effect, of course, is our psychological response to those inert substances. Neither fake acupuncture nor a fake pill is in itself capable of doing anything. But patients interpret them in different ways, and that in turn creates different changes in their symptoms.”
― Jo Marchant, Cure: A Journey into the Science of Mind Over Body

“I don’t see any placebo there at all,” says Moerman. “What I do see is a clinician wearing a uniform of some sort.” Instead of focusing on fake pills, he argues, we should be looking at those trappings of medicine that make us expect to feel better—whether it’s the white coat, stethoscope, and gleaming hospital equipment of a Western physician, or the incense and incantations of a traditional healer.”
― Jo Marchant, Cure: A Journey into the Science of Mind Over Body

“Relying on signs of damage in the muscles to alert us to fatigue would put us perilously close to collapse every time we exert ourselves. Shutting down physical activity in advance ensures a safe margin of error, and means we can continue to function even after an exhausting challenge.”
― Jo Marchant, Cure: A Journey into the Science of Mind Over Body

“Compared to a control group, those told to interpret their stress as positive had the same physiological benefits as in the previous studies. But they also got higher scores—not just in the fake test but in the real GRE, which they took up to three months later.”
― Jo Marchant, Cure: A Journey into the Science of Mind Over Body

“That positive attitude is in large part because of a spate of recent findings that is now forcing scientists to take meditation seriously as a phenomenon with impressive physical effects.”
― Jo Marchant, Cure: A Journey into the Science of Mind Over Body

“After that, studies started to show that everyone from violinists to taxi drivers beef up relevant brain areas with new cells and connections, just as we build muscles with physical exercise. Lazar’s study showed that meditation can do this too. For the first time, it was possible to explain how the practice might permanently change psychology and physiology.”
― Jo Marchant, Cure: A Journey into the Science of Mind Over Body

“Terms like “mind–body” and “holistic” are often derided as flaky and unscientific, but in fact it’s the idea of a mind distinct from the body, an ephemeral entity that floats somewhere in the skull like a spirit or soul, that makes no scientific sense.”
― Jo Marchant, Cure: A Journey into the Science of Mind Over Body

“There are powerful evolutionary forces driving us to believe in God, or in the remedies of sympathetic healers, or to believe that our prospects are more positive than they are. The irony is that although those beliefs might be false, they do sometimes work: they make us better.”
― Jo Marchant, Cure: A Journey into the Science of Mind Over Body

“In particular, he believes that always-on technologies such as email, mobile phones and Facebook can be harmful if we don’t learn how to control their effects on us.”
― Jo Marchant, Cure: A Journey Into the Science of Mind over Body

“I used to think the whole mind–body stuff was nonsense. But after a month of yoga class, I was hooked.’ Harvard”
― Jo Marchant, Cure: A Journey Into the Science of Mind over Body

“people seek peace and meaning amid the material concerns of modern life;”
― Jo Marchant, Cure: A Journey into the Science of Mind Over Body

“They concluded that social isolation is as dangerous for health as obesity, inactivity and smoking.”
― Jo Marchant, Cure: A Journey into the Science of Mind Over Body

“Medical errors in hospitals are estimated to cause more than 400,000 deaths per year in the U.S. alone—making it the third leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer—with another 4–6 million cases of serious harm.34”
― Jo Marchant, Cure: A Journey into the Science of Mind Over Body

“The problems with modern medicine run deep; clearly they won’t all be solved by mind–body therapies. But trying to improve medical outcomes by treating patients as the complex human beings we are, rather than simply as physical bodies, seems to me to be not such a bad place to start.”
― Jo Marchant, Cure: A Journey into the Science of Mind Over Body

“This is the problem with placebo effects—in trials they are elusive and ephemeral, rarely disappearing completely but often altering their shape. They change depending on the type of placebo, and they vary in strength between people, conditions and cultures.”
― Jo Marchant, Cure: A Journey into the Science of Mind Over Body

“Stress influences how the brain is wired, making us extra-susceptible to future problems by destroying the very brain pathways that would help us to stay calm and in control.”
― Jo Marchant, Cure: A Journey into the Science of Mind Over Body

“Mindfulness meditation helps to stop that from happening. Becoming more aware of our own thoughts allows us to step back and realize that a negative or stressful notion doesn’t necessarily represent reality, explains Williams.”
― Jo Marchant, Cure: A Journey into the Science of Mind Over Body

“turns out that experiences of social exclusion or rejection—such as being shunned in a game, receiving negative social feedback, or viewing images of deceased loved ones—activate exactly the same regions of the brain as when we are in physical pain.12 When we’re socially rejected or isolated, we don’t just feel sad. We feel injured and under threat.”
― Jo Marchant, Cure: A Journey into the Science of Mind Over Body