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The Screaming Dracaena

(Plus a Little Statistics Lesson)

Once upon a time, many years ago, sometime in the early 60's the foremost polygraph expert of the time named Backster decided he was bored of experimenting on people and decided he would branch out to plants. The handiest plant was the one already in the office, a palm dracaena. So, one dark and stormy night after working late into the wee hours, Backster desultorily attached a few polygraph clips to the leaves of the unsuspecting dracaena and found that a whole new world had opened up to him. He found the polygraph to be jagged and alive. His dracaena was feeling and emoting through the polygraph. Excited, he then devised a series of experiments.

One of the first was this: Backster merely thought about burning the leaves of the plant and immediately the polygraph needle went off the charts. The plant was screaming in fear. In his words: "The very moment the imagery of burning that leaf entered my mind, the polygraph recording pen moved rapidly to the top of the chart. No words were spoken, no touching the plant, no lighting of matches, just my clear intention to burn the leaf." Later on, Backster could be miles away and think the burning thought and the dracaena would scream.

So what is it exactly that Backster discovered? "If the mind is an energetic field, then bacteria could be sharing the same mind as plants. Plants could share the same mind as eggs. Eggs could share the same mind as animals. And all living things may share the same mind with us. When Backster wanted to burn a leaf, it tracked his movements. When Backster wanted to water the plant, it tracked its movements. Backster once told me that his dracaena always "screamed" when one man came into the lab - and this man turned out to mow lawns for a living." (The Source Field Investigations: David Wilcox)

Backster's experiments, at least to me, have profound implications for healing. There is, indeed, a "hive mind" or as Rupert Sheldrake might have said, a morphogenic field, "out there" and you and I and the dracaenas and the bacteria and the viruses and everything that exists are all part of it. That is why what we think is so important. For example, I think I do well with houseplants because I talk to them all the time and tell them how beautiful they are and how healthy they look and how important they are to me. Now, I am thanking the vegetables on my plate for their sacrifice before eating them. Sadly, I am not kidding.

Think placebo thoughts rather than nocebo thoughts. Think positively rather than negatively and, maybe more than anything, let's really take responsibility for the innate power we all have to profoundly influence virtually everything in this universe - you, me, the plants, the weather, your illnesses, my illnesses, the election, the state of the union, the state of the world, everything.

Anything "out there" is energetically available and partially under our influence. And no, this is not 4 year old magical thinking. If you read the above mentioned book, you will be amazed and changed. The Backster story is just the tip of the iceberg. I highly recommend it.

This leads me right into this belief: We are what we eat and drink, how we move and how we think. Handle your diet, your consumption of alcohol, caffeine and water, your movements, including walking, running, stretching and weights; and lastly, your thinking, or the control you can exercise over your mind through meditation, affirmations or maybe just an avowed determination to think positively.

Absolute vs. Relative risk: You really do need to understand this, especially in lieu of Big Pharma's desire to pull the wool over your eyes in order to enhance their bottom line. But let's use an example which will make it all easier to understand. Let's say you have a study of 200 women, half of whom take a drug and half of whom take a placebo, to examine the effects on breast cancer risk. After 5 years, two women in the drug group develop breast cancer compared to 4 who took the placebo. This data could lead to either of the following headline and both would be correct:

1. New Miracle Drug Cuts Breast Cancer Risk by 50%!
2. New Drug Results in a 2% Drop in Breast Cancer Risk.

Guess which one the drug companies would use? The first one, of course, which is the relative risk reduction. The two women who took the drug and got breast cancer equals half the number (50%) of the four women who took the placebo and developed breast cancer.

Headline ##2 expresses the absolute risk reduction, or 2% of the subjects (2 out of 100) who took the drug developed breast cancer and 4% of the controls (4 out of 200) who took the placebo developed breast cancer - an absolute difference of 2%.

"An important feature of relative risk is that it tells you nothing at all about actual risk." (STATS at George Mason University) You can see now why clinical trials, especially those funded by drug companies, will cite relative risk reductions rather than absolute risk reductions. And as a patient you should be aware of how statistics can easily be manipulated.

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