Jo Marchant

“At the heart of almost all the pathways I’ve learned about is one guiding principle: if we feel safe, cared for and in control—in a critical moment during injury or disease, or generally throughout our lives—we do better. We feel less pain, less fatigue, less sickness. Our immune system works with us instead of against us. Our bodies ease off on emergency defenses and can focus on repair and growth.”

― Jo Marchant

“What harms us is our psychological response to those circumstances; not the state of our environment, but of our mind. And that is something we can control.”

― Jo Marchant

“The U.S. is the richest country in the world, yet even with trillions of dollars to spend it cannot match the life expectancy of a middle-income country like Costa Rica.”

― Jo Marchant

“In other words, fatigue isn’t a physical event but a sensation or emotion, invented by the brain to prevent catastrophic harm. They called the brain system that does this the “central governor.”

― Jo Marchant

"“people seek peace and meaning amid the material concerns of modern life”

― Jo Marchant

“Terms like “mind–body” and “holistic” are often derided as flaky and unscientific, but in fact it’s the idea of a mind distinct from the body, an ephemeral entity that floats somewhere in the skull like a spirit or soul, that makes no scientific sense.”

― Jo Marchant

“Pain relief is a billiondollar market, and drug companies have no incentive to fund trials that would reduce patients’ dependence on their products, he points out. And neither have medical insurers, because if medical costs come down, so do their profits. The trouble with hypnosis and other psychological therapies, he says, is that “there’s no intervening industry that has the interest in pushing it.”

― Jo Marchant

“There are powerful evolutionary forces driving us to believe in God, or in the remedies of sympathetic healers, or to believe that our prospects are more positive than they are. The irony is that although those beliefs might be false, they do sometimes work: they make us better.”

― Jo Marchant

“They concluded that social isolation is as dangerous for health as obesity, inactivity and smoking.”

― Jo Marchant

“What does have an effect, of course, is our psychological response to those inert substances. Neither fake acupuncture nor a fake pill is in itself capable of doing anything. But patients interpret them in different ways, and that in turn creates different changes in their symptoms.”

― Jo Marchant

“Medical errors in hospitals are estimated to cause more than 400,000 deaths per year in the U.S. alone—making it the third leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer—with another 4–6 million cases of serious harm.”

― Jo Marchant

“best of both worlds: one that uses life-saving drugs and technologies when they are needed, but also supports us to reduce our risk of disease and to manage our own symptoms when we are ill; and when there is no cure, cares for us and allows us to die with dignity.”

― Jo Marchant

“The problems with modern medicine run deep; clearly they won’t all be solved by mind–body therapies. But trying to improve medical outcomes by treating patients as the complex human beings we are, rather than simply as physical bodies, seems to me to be not such a bad place to start.”

― Jo Marchant