“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

To be healthy you must believe in health. A good physician is a changer of beliefs. He will replace an idea of illness with one of health. Whatever methods or drugs he uses will not be effective unless this change of belief takes place.

Unfortunately, when man became a labeller he also made maps, so to speak, of great complexity, categorizing various diseases with greater effectiveness than ever before. He studied dead tissue to discover the nature of the disease that killed it. Physicians began to think of men as carriers of disease and diseases — which, in certain terms, they [the physicians] did themselves create through some new medical procedures.

The old medicine men often dealt far more directly with the patient himself, and understood the nature of beliefs and the prime importance of suggestion. Many of their techniques were adopted for their psychological shock value, in which the patient was quite effectively “brainwashed” out of the disease he believed that he had.

Both believe they need the other, of course. Behind this is the psychic pattern of beliefs in which the patient often assigns to the doctor the powers of knowledge and wisdom that his beliefs have taught him he does not have. Knowing otherwise, the patient still wants to consider the doctor omnipotent.

Upon the patient a doctor often assigns and projects his own feelings of helplessness against which he combats. The interactions continue with the patient trying to please the doctor, and at best merely changing from one group of symptoms to another. Far too often the doctor shares the patient’s unshakable belief in poor health and disease.

Because they are held in such high esteem, the suggestions given by doctors are paid particular attention. The patient’s emotional condition is such that he or she readily accepts statements made under such circumstances less critically than usual.