The power of the soul

We all yearn for such a healer: a person who looks at us and senses what is. The few, but the right questions and understands the unspeakable. Who takes away our fear, offers hope and healing methods that will not make us even miserable.

"Heal, heal blessing" - it is no coincidence that something religious resonates in this simple therapy formula from childhood. But when it comes down to it, few of us forgo the blessings of medical advancement, minimally invasive surgery, pacemakers, or customized chemotherapy.

But how can we use the power of our soul to stay or become healthy? This question is not only concerned with the representatives of millennia-old healing arts, but more recently also with modern medicine.

In Münster, for example, a brand new small hospital was recently inaugurated, with modern surveillance systems and flashing medical technology. It is not the sick, but actresses and actors lying there pale in the beds and serving as training material for prospective doctors.

View, touch and talk to the patients. Jana Jünger, an internist at the University of Heidelberg, should still account for 80 percent of the medical diagnosis. A few years ago, when she began doing interview training with actors as part of her medical training, "we were laughed about at congresses," she recalls. "But now there is no faculty refusing."

Many doctors, as Jana Jünger has observed, even succeed in building up a relaxed atmosphere in just five minutes, to find out the most important information about a patient and to answer his questions. And that creates confidence and saves some expensive lab tests.

Exploring the complexities of body and soul is one of the most exciting areas of research that human science currently has to offer. This was made possible not only by advances in brain research and molecular biology, but also by a simple change of perspective, especially in psychology.

"Until about ten years ago, we mainly asked what makes us sick," explains Astrid Schütz, Professor of Personality Psychology and Diagnostics at Chemnitz University of Technology, "it was only then that the so-called positive psychology, which primarily wants to know, developed. what keeps us healthy. "

Whether we feel overloaded or just in love, whether our mood is more of fear or optimism - all of this affects our susceptibility to runny nose, cough, headache or stomach ache. Hundreds of studies from all over the world now prove that. Other research shows that feelings of fatigue and depression increase the risk of a heart attack as much as hypertension. Only recently, a study by the Department of Psychosomatics at the Technical University of Munich confirmed this.

What is new, however, is the question that science is even more interested in: How to use psychic powers for healing processes? What can psychotherapy, positive thinking or so-called placebo effects do to help people overcome serious illnesses?

The cancer doctor Prof. Gerd Nagel was 47 when he himself had leukemia. He knew the diagnosis, he knew only aggressive chemotherapy could help him, and his chances were not good. At the same time, the oncologist became aware of how burnt out and numb he felt.

In the search for healing, he first went into the forest: "I put my brow against tree bark, on moss, on rocks, to feel them." I walked with bare feet over the forest floor, through streams, over fallen tree trunks came again and with that I could feel myself again, "Gerd Nagel recalls today. Only when he was at peace with himself did he have the strength to fight cancer. For chemotherapy he flew to London every weekend, the week he continued to work as a doctor on the cancer ward. And got well.

Ten years later, in 1993, Nagel founded the "Tumor Biology Center" at the University of Freiburg / Breisgau. The doctors and therapists are not just looking for the best conventional and alternative methods of treatment for cancer. Equally important to them is that their patients decide on how to deal with their disease.

"Everybody needs the medicine that suits him"Nagel, who is now retired, is convinced of that. And so, for example, the tumor clinic offers a poetry and bibliotherapy group that is almost exclusively attended by women.As they read and write short lyrics, they look for ways of expressing emotions that are easily threatened by deadly threats.

Does this kind of soulwork increase the healing chances? You do not know that exactly until today. But the scientific evaluation of the project shows that it at least helps the patients to overcome their inner loneliness, to feel better and also to rediscover beautiful aspects of life.

Can confidence, vitality and fighting spirit keep us healthy or even heal? In her new book, Prof. Astrid Schütz dares to take a cautious look at the worldwide research: Anyone who thinks optimist actually has better chances to stay healthy or to recover from a serious illness. Fortunately, anyone who overestimates one's own talent, as the scientist limits, can also be injured: because he refrains from necessary therapies or protective measures. Or in spite of a serious illness under pressure to succeed and falls into stressful actionism.

"Cancer also meets the lucky ones", reported recently the "Süddeutsche Zeitung". An American study of 1000 patients with advanced head and neck tumors had shown that the mood of the patients, whether hopeful or deeply depressed, had no effect on the disease. Only two months earlier, a long-term study from Kiel suggested the opposite: The treatment courses of 136 patients with tumors in the intestine, liver and gall bladder showed that those who received targeted psychological support and encouragement from the treatment at the cancer ward had better chances of survival.

What can be deduced from such seemingly contradictory study results? It would be nice to know that more exactly. And it is good that these relationships are now being researched at university centers around the world. But just as important as clinical studies, PET scanners or experiments in the immunobiological laboratory is the very private research journey that each of us can undertake: in search of the inner doctor who recognizes and cheers our self-healing powers.

"We can not do anything for you", so this worst sentence of a doctor belongs therefore immediately in the lexicon of medical words. Medicine can always do something for us. And we can do it ourselves.