Richard Lloyd Jones: Imagine two people with the same disease, same treatment, same relative social class, same sex. But one gets well, and the other doesn't. A mystery? A coincidence? A situation with multiple explanations? It's a question for which science has no ready answers. Now it appears we can better explain it. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones, and this is Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. Again, our email address here is rich at richjonesvoice.com.
Drop me a line. Let me know how you're responding to the show. It's always good to hear from you. We've been exploding some of the commonly held assumptions on this show, and that makes for rather provocative listening, I know. None of us likes our belief systems challenged completely, especially when we feel the challenge impacting one of our bedrock philosophies of life. But the work of Dr.
Norberto Keppe does exactly that. Like Socrates addressing universal values in challenging the thinking of the citizens of ancient Athens, Keppe's work causes us to examine what we know about ourselves. But Keppe also leads us to discover what we don't know about ourselves, and this is a much dimmer journey. Most of us don't know that we're dominated by what we don't know about ourselves.
In this consideration, strongly held views are best not held to with all you've got. Better to remain open and explore what you don't know yet. Keppe's work has had a profound effect on many people, including Roberto Giraldo, a Colombian medical doctor and specialist in infectious and tropical diseases. Geraldo is the author of AIDS and Stressors and is currently working at the Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York City.
But he's beginning the move to Brazil to study more with Dr. Keppe and develop his understanding of the psychological roots of disease. I recently spent a fascinating hour talking to him in my studio in São Paulo and discussing more about the mind-body connection. Because his Colombian accent is still very strong, I've taken the liberty of dubbing over in English just to make sure you fully understand his animated and exciting thoughts.
Dr. Giraldo, give us an initial perspective of how you came to be in São Paulo.
Gilbert Gambucci: When I started to see patients
Richard: with AIDS all over the
Gilbert: world, there was something very
Richard: interesting. People who were tested positive for HIV and
Gilbert: people who had clinical manifestation of AIDS and they started to take this poison,
Richard: this toxic medication, antiretrovirus, like AZT. Some of them, they didn't die as we thought they
Gilbert: would because it's
Richard: poison.
But at the same time, some of our patients who were taking natural medicine, detoxifying the body, everything was natural nutrition, and some of them still they die. I said "no, something is wrong here." So when I came to São Paulo in May I read two books in Spanish of Dr. Keppe for me it was enough this is the problem they have the answer so he says that "people spend their whole lives expecting the solutions for their problems to come from the outside when the solution is already inside."
Gilbert: And
Richard: in this, the medical establishment has been helping to create a big disaster and the pharmaceutical companies and industry, creating the idea that the doctors are the ones who give all the solutions.
In his book, The Origin of Illness, Keppe is constantly mapping the territory of human pathology, and this is still not understood well in general society.
We're so impacted by the more superficial pop psychology espoused on programs like Oprah that we don't realize that the science has gotten much more profound and definitive. For Keppe, disease, or evil, does not exist by itself. We've explored this more completely in our show about the nature of good and evil, but this dialectic runs all throughout our show. Disease must be created to exist.
Dr. Giraldo, what aspect of Keppe's thinking struck you in your work with infectious diseases, especially AIDS?
Gilbert: We human beings have a feeling of destruction constantly since we are born. We love to destroy things. But people who have AIDS, this is incremented. And in gay people, it's very high. Why? Because in gay people, there is this feeling of lack of self-esteem. Very often gay people are homophobic themselves because the society is homophobic.
So they don't accept that they are gay. So for many years I was trying to help them to find a way to know themselves. "If you don't know yourself, you don't love to be alive. You don't love life. So you prefer to die. And a solution is AIDS. It's a way of committing slow suicide." There are some that are almost dying. And I said, "no, it doesn't depend on me.
Richard: It depends on you. You are dying
Gilbert: because you decided to die." And that one is giving very good results. They start to have a reason to be alive because "if you don't have a reason to be alive, you die. You can use the
Richard: best nutritional therapy, the best homeopathy, the best acupuncture, the best orthomolecular medicine, but if you don't want to live, you die." One of the proposals Dr.
Giraldo puts forward in his book AIDS and Stressors is that instances of AIDS increase with the increase of stress on the body from food, chemicals and radiation and mental psychological stress.
We can see this in Africa with the big increase in AIDS in women, the opposite of Europe or North America. Giraldo contends that women are much more depleted physically and psychologically in Africa because they receive less nutrition and they're still second-class citizens. Dr. Giraldo, tell us about the experiment that you think sheds some light on this.
Gilbert: They took rats and didn't feed them properly, so they all became malnourished.
And then they get them pregnant, and the babies were born with diseases like AIDS. Then they feed them properly and the disease disappeared. However, the immunological chemical effects, alterations of the immune system of the first babies, were transmitted for three generations of rats or more,
Richard: even if the generations between were well-fed.
Gilbert: In Africa, in
Richard: the poor areas of Haiti, Trinidad, Tobago, Jamaica, never the mother, the grandmother, and the great-grandmother had been well-fed.
So what we can infer for them is that people who have been born in very poor countries are
Gilbert: born very weak. All the organs are weaker
Richard: and the immune system is weaker That's why the size of Africans is decreasing They are trying to defend themselves from the society, from all of this Dr. Giraldo, you've worked with thousands of very sick people all over the world What are some of the secrets to helping them heal?
Gilbert: The first thing that you need to do is to be sure that the person wants to be healed that the person has a reason to be alive. So we are making groups
Richard: for them where they help each other. When some have doubts, the other one helps. And this is very nice because they start to feel themselves, that they are very useful to themselves and for other people.
They start to have a reason to be alive because if you don't have a reason to be alive, you die.
This is why we are finding that the most important thing is the consciousness and what is inside the consciousness of a person. And that's why I found Dr. Keppe's views and philosophy and his teaching a gift. Okay, well, now let's talk some specifics. What is the connection between our minds and disease?
Gilbert: All diseases that are related to the immune
Richard: system, like allergies or autoimmune diseases, skin allergies, eye allergies, hay fever, asthma, We know all of them to be psychosomatic diseases.
Then, in immunology, we know that all these allergic diseases were worse after mental or social problems, that autoimmune diseases like lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, and several other ones, are very often they start after a mental
Gilbert: problem. People after a crisis of panic, or after they lose a
Richard: beloved person, something like that, a mental problem, is when the disease started.
So there is a connection. And now all of Dr. Roberto Giraldo's experience has led him to trying to understand more about the origins of illness. And that's led him inexorably to Brazil and Dr. Keppe's institute. And this we're exploring every week on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones.
