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Just how powerful is a human's mind? I've been reading tons of success books lately and I've been attending seminars and all of them have one main point: it all boils down to one's mindset. If you have a positive mind, you will have positive results and likewise, if you tend to have a negative mind, you will be bombarded with negative results. Even the movie, The Secret, strongly emphasizes on this point. It states, for whatever the mind conceives, it can achieve. So yeah, mindset. It's all in the mind! And though I may be at disbelief at first, I came to realize just how true this principle is as I got to recall my nursing days.
When I was still a nursing student in Cebu Doctors' University, I got to experience being assigned in an ICU (Intensive Care Unit). Most of the patients here are in critical condition and needed 24/7 of the nurse's attention. The ICU is only a small room for one patient and caters 1:1 ratio of nurse-patient assignment. Significant others are not allowed to stay long as the patient is in critical state and is usually in an immunosuppressed state. So yeah, during those times, I was assigned with a 69 year old Norweigan patient.
typical ICU set up
So heading back to the topic, my Norweigan patient was still conscious at that time and would demand too much of your attention and touch. He would always complain about pain and would demand for the nurse on duty to give him his pain med for if not, he would start screaming out loud. Being a student nurse at that time, I got to observe my nurse on duty as to how he handles such situations. Whenever Mr. Norweigan starts to rack the siderails (meaning, give me my pain med or else I'll start screamin to you Norweigan profanities), my nurse would immediately take out an injection filled with normal saline solution. At first I thought he was gonna mix it with a real medication but to my surprise, he immediately injected it into the patient's system. The funny thing is, the patient believed it was really a drug and he would calm down afterwards and act as if the pain had already subsided!
In medical terms, this is known as the placebo effect. But I'd like to think that it was all about mindset. The patient was made to believe that the liquid inside the syringe was his pain medication so upon seeing it being injected into his system, his mind made him believe that he was gonna get better, that the pain was gonna subside so it did! The mind is really that powerful! If only more people would come to understand and realize this matter then we wouldn't be needing fake medications anymore. We'd only need our minds to cure us of whatever sicknesses we have. Ang problema kasi sa atin, tuwing may problema, we tend to focus and think negative thoughts about it thus we only increase its magnitude. Remember, what the mind conceives it achieves.
