Neuroplasticity and How the Brain Heals

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For The Lancet, Jules Morgan reviews a new book, “The Brain’s Way of Healing,” by psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Norman Doidge. Doidge challenges current understandings of how the brain works and presents neuroplasticity as a means by which cognitive and motor functions can be regained once damaged.  “If neuroplasticity is now accepted in neuroscience,” he writes, “why are these clinical approaches that make use of it not more widely available and mainstream?”

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brains way of healing

 

 

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Morgan, J., 2016. No miracle, just our brain. The Lancet Neurology. (Abstract)

7 COMMENTS

  1. The implications of this for psychiatry should be obvious. Even if their specious “chemical imbalance” theories are true, does this not demonstrate pretty convincingly that the action and thought pattern of the patient himself can, in fact, alter whatever chemistry may be going on? Of course, even the neurologists don’t want to hear this. How much harder for psychiatrists, whose model is largely based on faith rather than science, to admit that they’ve been barking up the wrong tree all this time.

    —- Steve

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  2. “Doidge’s passion for healing might be expected, given his own medical training as a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst but, as he says, ‘the true marvel is…the way that the brain has evolved, with sophisticated neuroplastic abilities and a mind that can direct its own unique restorative process of growth.'”

    Now you’re talkin’. Love it. Thanks for posting this.

    Also this, along the same lines of self-directed natural healing–

    “Through scientific inquiry, research has exposed that only 3% of our DNA is wrapped up in the spiraling double helix strand. During the time of the 75,000 year cycle when we are exposed to the most torsion energy waves and it affects our DNA by reorganizing the 97% “junk” DNA from a 2-strand double helix to a 12-strand helix advancing man in a leap of evolution.”

    http://myscienceacademy.org/2013/01/23/scientists-finally-present-evidence-on-expanding-dna-strands/

    There is tons of information about junk DNA and evolving 12-strand DNA on the internet. All sorts of new information and perspectives are coming to light around natural self-healing, thank goodness.

    I think that, due to such long-standing oppression, injustice, and chronic violence in the world ,the call for social change is so powerful right now, and the shift in consciousness, as a result, is so profound, that we’re actually discovering the power of willful evolution, through our minds and bodies. Always something new to learn!

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    • And whomever gets this, will be free of doctors, psychiatrist, and all oppression. With 12-strand DNA working to full capacity in tandem with our neuroplasticity, we are quite limitless. This is a new reality and paradigm. Step by step. It’s a profound learning, healing, and evolutionary process.

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    • Good question here. Is it a matter of having to WORK at healing through neuro modulation, neuro stimulation, etc., rather than thinking the brain will just heal itself over time, no effort required?
      So, like the man with Parkinson’s forcing changes through walking?
      Or, are psych drug injuries that damage the brain especially injurious and permanent? Anyone with an insight?
      Does the good doctor have anything to address severe Tardive Dyskinesia, which is apparently antipsychotics gift that stays for life? Anyone out there with any success in overcoming or improving after brain injuries from psych drugs, and, as horrifically, ECT?

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  3. Sounds like a cool book. And my dad is proof the brain works to heal itself. We did not learn this until after he died. But after my dad’s death we learned that the two main arteries leading to my father’s brain had been blocked. And we knew something had gone awry about ten years prior to his death, but no doctor could tell us what it was until after he died. At which point it was obvious to the neurologists that this blockage resulted in a whole bunch of new arteries being formed, to compensate for the blockage.

    Love the analogy in the article: “’Imagine I cart a pig into your living room and tell you that it can talk. You might say, ‘Oh really? Show me.’ I then wave my wand and the pig starts talking. You might respond, ‘My God! That’s amazing!’ You are not likely to say, ‘Ah, but that’s just one pig. Show me a few more and then I might believe you.’ So, would you spend time looking for more pigs or study the pig that has shown you that the impossible might now be possible?” And we’ve all already lived through the “Swine flu” era, so the pigs have flown, too. Which means anything is possible now, Alex, let’s pray for the best.

    And it is time for the medical community to move past today’s one size fits all treatments, because the pharmaceutical industry’s fraudulent randomized control trials say so, and move back towards personalized medicine. “It is much more important to know what sort of a patient has a disease than what sort of a disease a patient has.” The psychiatrists who make assumptions, and get their information from Pharma reps and other doctors who don’t know the patient, and have a “not believed by doctor” attitude towards their patients, are inevitably going to make an ass out u and me. And behaving in such a manner is the opposite of “first and foremost do no harm.”

    And it does strike me that the acceptance of neuroplasticity does negate the DSM theology of proven “lifelong, incurable, genetic mental illnesses” that require a lifetime of pharmaceutical drugs. It’s now past time to get rid of the scientifically invalid and unreliable DSM. When will this happen? Ever? The DSM is also unconstitutional and un-American.

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