"Man’s body is itself a product of mind and its condition depends to a great extent on the state of his mind. All his diseases in so far as they are not directly due to external mechanical causes, are due to mental conditions…"
I have thought on this a lot, and have taken it even further to include even external mechanical causes being influenced by internal mental/emotional vectors.
If a placebo works because of the mind/belief, then health is related to mental/emotional conditions. Stress is definitely related to mental/emotional conditions. If you have kidney cancer, a shot of interleukin 2 is effective, at about what 20K a pop? Probably much more expensive now. Your body can make it naturally, like when you ride a roller coaster and it releases a million dollars worth of this neural transmitter, a cytokine signaling molecule in the immune system... With one caveat, you like riding roller coasters. If you are fearful, you body produces norepinephrine, which tends to feed cancer... (I got that from a Depak Chopra lecture, him quoting a study.) From this example, the cancer is internal, the stimulus to change is external, but your reaction to the stimulus is internal! External stimuli is just a neutral thing, but it being good or bad is only an interpretation.
If hypnosis is a valid pathway for healing, and there is evidence it doesn't treat symptoms, but cure illness, like total remission, then this would be evidence of mental/emotional being the primary factor in health.
There is this other study looking at aging. one particular assisted living was modified so that it looked like something form the 50s. All the television were fed old media, from the fifties. All the periodicals were of the 50s. There was a second assisted living where no change was made. People from both were photographed and surveys conducted resulted in the 1950s experiment group to a one were considered younger by all who sorted the pictures.
When we look at Near Death Experiences and people saying their deaths were planned, not a hundred percent, as they still had choices, but they had multiple outs, that, too, then suggests health is related to a greater plan, and mental/emotional, and subconscious factors play into well being.
And so, if I allow these factors to influence me, and there are others, I think there is fantastical conclusion to be formulated here... all deaths, by this hypothesis, are suicides because we have a inherent choice in our own demise.
When coupled with simulation theory, and or consciousness first paradigms, then this hypothesis gets amplified. After all, if this is but a dream, dreams always go the way the subconscious wants to explore, unless you become lucid and you request a change, or expedite your departure... by waking up.
Death is but waking up to the other reality.
