Results 1 to 20 of 32 for stemmed:immun
(9:28.) Give us a moment… In those terms, thoughts move far quicker of course than viruses. The action of the virus follows the thought. Each thought is registered biologically. Basically (underlined), when you have an immunity to a disease you have a mental immunity.
You think of viruses as evil, spreading perhaps from country to country, to “invade” scores of physical mechanisms. Now thoughts are “contagious.” You have a natural immunity against all thoughts that do not fit in with your own purposes and beliefs, and naturally (pause, groping), you are “inoculated” with a wholesome trust and belief in your own thoughts above others. The old ideas of voodooism recognized some of these concepts, but complicated and distorted them with fears of evil, psychic invasion, psychic killing, and so forth. You cannot divide, say, mental and physical health, nor can you divide a person’s philosophy from his bodily condition.
This afternoon Jane said she’d learned from Seth that we’d come down with those indispositions because we wanted to use our bodies’ immune systems; those structures needed the workouts, in other words. [...]
(With a smile:) Your bodies had not received any such goodies in some time, so they exuberantly used them as triggers to regenerate the immune systems.
This isn’t all, however, for experiments have now shown that the brain/mind connection can influence immunity, through stressful conditioning either enhancing its effects or subduing them. Until a very few years ago it was medical dogma that the immune system was entirely independent of any “outside” influence. But recently certain brain chemicals were discovered paired off with cellular chemical “receptors” in the immune system, and researchers expect to find many more of these associations. In physical terms, then, I think it quite possible that in Jane’s case long-term stress, beginning in her early childhood, consistently overstimulated her immune system. [...] Finally in her mid-30s there came the beginning of rheumatoid arthritis: Jane’s immune system greatly increased its attack upon her body.
[...] In recent years rheumatoid arthritis has been found to be an amazingly complicated disease involving a great number of the body’s immune factors. [...]
(I believe that current medical thinking about the immune system and arthritis will be much enlarged upon by the time this book is published, though I haven’t given that much thought to just what new information may be acquired. [...]
(Pause at 10:42.) Give us a moment… In your society scientific medical beliefs operate, and a kind of preventative medicine, mentioned earlier, in which procedures [of inoculation] are taken, bringing about in healthy individuals a minute disease condition that then gives immunity against a more massive visitation. [...]
[...] The mind is as effective against viruses as anything else—and in such hypothetical cases immune reactions would be set up biologically, through the mind’s beliefs.
[...] The specific nature of inoculations, however, means that more and more become necessary in that system, for the fear of each newly discovered disease becomes paramount—and no time is given, in your terms, now, for the body to respond naturally to those natural conditions, and therefore build up a natural immunity, biologically speaking.
When you consider epidemics to be the result of viruses, and emphasize their biological stances, then it seems that the solutions are very obvious: You learn the nature of each virus and develop an inoculation, giving [each member of] the populace a small dose of the disease so that a man’s own body will combat it, and he will become immune.
Give us a moment… In a way the body produces antibodies, and sets up natural immunization as a result of, say, inoculation. [...]
[...] The body is exerted to use its immune system to the utmost, and sometimes, according to the inoculation, overextended [under such] conditions.4 Those individuals who have psychologically decided upon death will die in any case, of that disease or another, or of the side effects of the inoculation.
[...] Seth’s reference to the poor and nationalized health care referred to material Jane had picked up from him during the day; The poor were actually better off as they are now, without such a national health-care plan, for as it is they’re isolated from and immune to a number of ills they would start falling prey to if they could afford to pay for such treatment—that is, if the costs were paid for them. [...]