- Michael Alexander
- Charlotte, NC
- United States
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Hope: The new medical drug?
Can people persevere through their malady in the presence of hope? Hope has been an emotion human beings encounter since the beginning of time, yet is it just recently being used as a new drug to "cure" for a lack of a better word, patients.
The human mind is merely a manifestation of the brain. It is apart from the body, as if a cloud that hovers 2 feet above your head. Although apart from the body, the two coincide together in order to provide daily functions such as perception, memory, etc. In fact, we think of the brain as a woven mantle instead of a quilt. It has thousands of interconnecting circuits and communication centers as opposed to each cortex separate from one another. But does the mind have the power to heal? More specifically, does emotional hope and resilience bring physical and mental restoration? I believe so.
We must get one thing clear. We are not talking about false hope. False hope is telling a patient everything will be fine and there are minimal risks to the procedure. This provides not only the patient, but the family false hope. This can be detrimental to a patients health and mental state.
Instead, we must give the patient true hope. We must tell them the truth about their situation, give them the basic facts without an overwhelming "You're going to die" sense of nature. This will present the patient with fear. However, fear, coexisting with an equilibrium of hope, can be more powerful than any dose of dopamine to dampen the effects of Parkinson's.
Similar to experiments involving placebo's, hope has the power to palliate the effects of illness. In fact, hope has the power to release endorphins in your body which in turn acts as morphine to the pain. Can hope be the new medical drug in this generation? Can doctors, with time and experience, grasp the concept of a new outlook on a persons misery, and turn it into a miracle?