Imagine that you mix the energy of the earth with the cosmic energy of your heart, like coffee and cream running around in a circle and then offering a prayer like “Let’s pray for the right thing” and then completely get out of the way and let the healing happen naturally. So while I can assume that people can instill a positive faith in an old sugar pill, the effect of the healing presence can be much more important than what we have seen so far. Positive faith, meditation and prayer, rituals and the loving presence of a true healer relax the nervous system, lead us out of a chronic “struggle or flight” at the root of the disease, activate the body’s natural mechanisms for selfhealing so that it can do what it does best: heal itself. Any treatment at this rate of healing – pills, injections, needles, hand healing, perhaps even remote healing – can affect the patient in a way that relieves symptoms and, in some cases, leads to real healing. For the last 30 years, he has been treating mouse cancer with practical care in his laboratory. Now he is using the same therapeutic practice to study the treatment of people with waterborne diseases. If rituals threaten to be more effective than the rituals you perform yourself, if you are sincere in how you perform the rituals, they can put you in a modified state that changes brain waves and makes natural healing processes more accessible. But there is no reason why we cannot carry our own water for healing purposes-or our green juice, our food, or any medicine or supplements we take to improve its effects. In the original version of Sense Over Medicine I defined the placebo effect as a combination of positive belief and caring for a person in a position of authority to which we are conditionally able to respond in better health. As I say in Sense Over Medicine, it is one of the paradoxes of healing; you can heal yourself, but you cannot do it alone. The kind of love that plays a role in healing is transpersonal, because every good healer is just a channel for the unconditional love of the universe. Let this river flow into your hands while you hold your water or whatever you want to take with you to heal. It is not a way to control the healing, but to allow it and receive it when it is meant for you at the level of your soul.