Goswami Amit - The quantum doctor: a quantum physicist explains the healing power of integrative medicine

Also by Amit Goswami

Quantum Mechanics

The Self-Aware Universe: How Consciousness Creates the Material World

Quantum Creativity: Waking Up to Our Creative Potential

The Visionary Window: A Quantum Physicist's Guide to Enlightenment

Physics of the Soul: The Quantum Book of Living, Dying, Reincarnation, and Immortality

The Physicist's View of Nature, Vol. 1: From Newton to Einstein

The Physicists' View of Nature, Vol. 2: The Quantum Revolution

How Quantum Activism Can Save Civilization

This edition first published in 2004
by Hampton Roads Publishing Company, Inc.

Copyright 2004, 2011 by Amit Goswami, PhD

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this work in any form whatsoever, without permission in writing from the publisher, except for brief passages in connection with a review.

Cover design by Jim Warner
Interior art by Ruth Leahman 2001 Physics of the Soul
Illustrations page 46, 137 2004 Anne Dunn Louque.
All rights reserved.

Excerpt from The Kabir Book by Robert Bly 1971, 1977 by Robert Bly, 1977 by the Seventies Press. Reprinted by permission of Beacon Press, Boston

Hampton Roads Publishing Company, Inc.
Charlottesville, VA 22906
www.hrpub.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available on request

ISBN : 978-1-57174-655-9

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
TS
Printed on acid-free paper in United States of America

This book is dedicated to
the healing of the planet Earth

When I was a young intern in Bostonthis was almost forty years agoan older couple was admitted to the hospital together. The wife was in the final stages of cancer; the husband was suffering from a much milder respiratory distress. I saw them every day and was struck by their closeness. It would go very hard on the husband when his wife was gone. The days passed. She quickly declined; the husband's condition, although not life-threatening, stubbornly resisted treatment. Finally I had to break the news to him that his wife had passed during the night. He nodded, and one could only guess at the pain he concealed.

I expected to say goodbye to him in a few days, but something remarkable happened. His condition grew worse, then critical, and within three days he was dead. Baffled, I went to my supervisor, who had decades of experience in hospital care. He said, Don't you understand? He was ready to die. Anyway, he had to go after her. A gentleman always waits for a lady.

I still hear him saying those words, but now I am not a baffled young doctor. The way that people relate to their bodies, which includes the bewildering territory we call illness and wellness, remains mysterious. In this remarkable book, Amit Goswami penetrates the mystery, and he does it better than anyone before or since. We should all pay attention, because the mind-body connection holds enormous promise. Placebo, for example, has become an everyday word, but the power of the placebo effect has yet to be harnessed.

In one study a group of patients suffering from chronic severe nausea were given a drug that they were told was an anti-nausea agent. Normally in a placebo trial half the patients would be randomly selected to receive the drug while the other half received a dummy pill. As expected, more than 30% of the subjects who took the dummy pill reported that their nausea was alleviated. Only this was a placebo trial with a difference: instead of the typical sugar pill, they had been given an emetic, a drug that promotes nausea. So powerful was their belief, however, that it somehow reduced their symptomsor to be more accurate, their minds reduced nausea in the face of a drug that should have made them vomit.

Professor Goswami is bold enough to aim directly at the source of placebo, and all other forms of mind-body treatment, when he asserts that all of reality, including the human body, is based in consciousness. In this, he has joined ancient wisdom with cutting-edge physics.

Two thousand years ago the philosophy of Vedanta declared that material existence is an illusion, a shared dream, from which it is possible to awaken, and when we do, we realize that behind the illusion was pure consciousness. Such a view had little bearing on Western thought until the great quantum pioneers arrived at the beginning of the twentieth century. Their names are celebrated todayAlbert Einstein, Erwin Schrdinger, Wolfgang Pauli, Werner Heisenbergbut what is much less well known is that almost all became mystics. Having discovered that the solid material world was based on invisible energy fields, and that those fields emerge from a place outside space and time, the quantum pioneers began to alert the public that the physical world was shifting under our feet like quicksand. Niels Bohr declared, Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real. Heisenberg said in his Nobel Prize speech of 1932 that the atom has no physical properties at all. Einstein posited that everything in the universe was happening in the mind of God.

For those of us who are outside physics, it's incredibly helpful that someone as open-minded as Amit Goswami should step forward to take this revolution seriously, for if the atom isn't physical, neither is the universe, and neither is the human body. Mainstream physics has largely ignored this startling idea, preferring to follow the advice of a well-known researcher, Shut up and calculate. Goswami stands out as a speculative thinker who won't shut up. In this new book he expands on the simplest and yet most profound hypothesis: if the body isn't a thing at all, how far can medicine go in treating it as something else?

But what would that something else be? That's where having an expert in quantum physics proves invaluable. When you delve into the microscopic world where matter disappears, at the horizon of space and time when both return into the vacuum state, the void that is actually the womb of creation, reality isn't about to vanish. Quite the oppositeas the ancient Vedic rishis taught, creation is richest at its source, because it is here that consciousness consists of infinite possibilities. If the mind could manipulate those possibilities, we humans would find ourselves to be co-creators of the physical world that is projected all around us.

More specifically, we could create events in the body. Instead of being the victims of illness and disorder, we could return to a state of healthy balance and vitality. There is no doubt, forty years after the outset of the mind-body revolution in medicine, that the physical tools exist for connecting mind and body. A mountain of research into messenger molecules reveals that the brain's most minute activity is translated into chemicals that carry the same activity to every cell in the body. Thanks to hundreds of thousands of receptor sites on the outer membrane of each cell, we have no doubt that the qualities once ascribed only to the brainincluding intelligence and conscious awarenessare shared with the rest of the body.

Why, then, do we get sick when obviously our brains, acting as agents of the mind, want to be well? Hundreds of answers exist, most of them plausible. Perhaps we are suffering from toxic emotions. Perhaps we have a genetic predisposition that the mind cannot override. The problem is that there is no coherent theory that can serve as a foundation to explain how the mind heals the body, or how it fails to. The mind-body field is hit and miss when it comes to achieving results. In fact, the most highly touted approaches of alternative medicine rarely perform better than the placebo effect.