Mario Martinez - The Mindbody Code: How to Change the Beliefs That Limit Your Health, Longevity, and Success

Para mi madre, la mujer que me protegi en mi pasado y facilito mi futuro. Descansa en paz.

I have found a true kindred spirit in Dr. Mario Martinez. His work arrived in my life at just the right time, giving me the scientific basis and language I can use to explain things that Ive long known but could never truly articulate in a life-changing way. I am continuously enthralled by the way Dr. Martinez explains how and why our beliefs are stronger than our genes. His explanation of biocognitionhow our culture, beliefs, and immune systems all operate in a seamless unity that creates our experience of health and happinessoffers a new language that explains so much about what Ive experienced as a physician who has spent decades on the front lines of womens health. I delight in having discovered this language, so when Dr. Martinez asked me to write this foreword, I was deeply honored. Just as The MindBody Code will help you identify and change the meaning of the cultural portals in your own life, I want to share with you how his work has informed my view on many topics that are extremely important to me, including womens experiences of childbirth, perceptions around breast cancer and mammography, our standard retirement age, myths of what aging is like, and ageism in general.

As a past president of the American Holistic Medical Association, I have long been aware of the power our minds and beliefs have to either heal or harm. I have seen how people who have near-death experiences and other medical anomalies, such as spontaneous remission from cancer, are dismissed by the medical community because they have experienced something that mainstream medicine doesnt believe is true. In the words of the late Linus Pauling, PhD, What were not up on, we tend to be down on. I have seen how the culture of medicinesupposedly based on scienceis as blind to the limitations of its own worldview as a fundamentalist group that believes God has chosen them to interpret reality for everyone else. But I have experienced the uncanny accuracy found in the wisdom of the body, with its astounding ability to get our souls attention. While writing my book Mother-Daughter Wisdom, I nearly went blind in my left eye. In Traditional Chinese Medicine, our eyes are on the liver meridianwhich is associated with feelings of anger. I was writing about my childhood, and long-suppressed anger at my own mother was finally arising so I could see it. While it was deemed medically impossible, with loads of vitamin C and a series of adult insights that allowed me to acknowledge and release the anger of the unhealed child within me, I recovered my full vision.

Dr. Martinezs new language of biocognitionhow our culture affects our biologyprovides a basis for so many insights into health. As an ob/gyn physician, I apply these insights to the cultural rite of passage known as childbirth. The benefits of natural childbirth in a supportive setting are irrefutable. The presence of a supportive womanknown as a douladuring labor has been shown to offer biological benefits that reduce the risk of a Caesarean birth by 50 percent. Care from a doula also shortens labor by several hours. The chief researcher on this topic, Dr. John Kennell, points out that if doulas were present during all labors, it would save the country at least $3 billion a year in unnecessary costs from epidural anesthesia and the complications that often ensue. As he says, If this were a drug, it would be unethical not to use it. A C-section is major abdominal surgery, and the World Health Organization states that, for this surgery, a rate greater than 15 percent is counterproductive and harmful. And yet, the Caesarean birth rate in most US hospitalsas well as in many other countriesis now 30 to 50 percent. The high rate of unnecessary interventions, such as elective labor inductions, has not only resulted in a significant increase in prematurity, but has also led to an epidemic of surgical births that, in the last twenty years, has doubled the maternal mortality rate.

When I was actively involved in obstetrics, I did everything in my power to support women who desired childbirths free from undue interventions. I put myself in the position of a warrior, protecting the vulnerability of pregnant and laboring women and standing up for their right to birth normally. Despite all my efforts, I found that the culture of fear around birth, and the interventions that stem from it, dominated the valiant efforts of warriors like me. We champion birthing for its amazing potential to be the most potent rite of passage into wisdom and power available to a womana potency Dr. Martinez would call the healing field.

Heres the thing that The MindBody Code pointed out to me so powerfully: Doctors arent to blame. Women arent to blame. Everyone is simply operating under the unconscious spells of their cultural programming. The inherited cultural belief that birthing is a disaster waiting to happenwhich is aided and abetted by the mediais a very potent cultural portal for pregnant women. It is passed down seamlessly from the previous generationunless, of course, you happen to belong to a subculture of individuals who have experienced birthing with pleasure and power. Then there is hope for waking from the spell of cultural conditioning.

Heres another potent cultural portal: breast cancer screening. Unbeknownst to most women, Breast Cancer Awareness Month (October) was initiated by a mammogram company thirty years ago. Thus was born one of the most successful campaigns for breast cancer screening everall based on the notion that early detection saves lives. This is a powerful cultural belief that has been shown to have fundamental flaws. The results from a landmark study by A. Blyer, MD, and H. Gilbert Welch, MD, were published in 2012 in a New England Journal of Medicine article entitled Effect of Three Decades of Screening Mammography on Breast Cancer Incidence. The researchers estimate that, in the last thirty years, breast cancer was overdiagnosed in 1.3 million women, as screening detected tumors that would have gone away on their own or never become clinically significant. In 2008 alone, seventy thousand women were overdiagnosed with so-called breast cancers that were actually ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS)which is not cancer and which doesnt progress. Yes, some women are helped by mammogram screening: about eight cases per hundred thousand. Compare that to the 114 per hundred thousand who were overdiagnosed.

Before this new data was available, the US Preventive Services Task Force recommended that women younger than fifty decrease the frequency of mammography, noting that the potential harms of overdiagnosissuch as undergoing chemotherapy, surgery, and radiation treatmentsoutweighed the benefits. Despite the fact that this recommendation was based on an unbiased review of decades of accumulated data, a huge public outcry ensued. There is a profound cultural belief that breasts are two premalignant lesions sitting on our chests and that our only hope of survival is regular screening. Because of this, the recommendation was criticized as an assault on womens health and a poll published in USA Today found that despite these new guidelines, 84 percent of women who were thirty-five to forty-nine years old planned to ignore them!

Dr. Martinez would call this the triumph of cultural beliefs over everything elseeven science. I notice that whenever I write about the risks of mammography on my Facebook page, it really doesnt matter what the facts are. There are always a few women who view this kind of information as dangerous. It is as though, by pointing out the whole truth that we have the power to be healthy or sick, I am actually risking someones life.