Harnessing the power of placebo

This interview with Brandy Gillmore was recorded on March 26, 2024 and transcribed using Sonix AI. Please check against audio recording for absolute accuracy.

Brandy Gillmore: [00:00:00] The feeling of optimism can actually speed up healing. In fact, it can increase longevity. Research studies show that people who are the most optimistic can even live 15% longer. Emotional vitality and optimism can reduce coronary heart disease.

Peter Bowes: [00:00:22] Brandy Gillmore has a remarkable story. It’s a story of healing, quite extraordinary healing, and a new way of thinking about health, based in large part on an understanding of the placebo effect. We’ll explain that in a second. Brandy’s new book is Master Your Mind and Energy to Heal Your Body. Hello again. Welcome to the Live Long and Master Aging podcast. My name is Peter Bowes. This is where we explore the science and stories behind human longevity. Brandy. It’s great to meet you.

Brandy Gillmore: [00:00:55] Peter. It is so wonderful to meet you.

Peter Bowes: [00:00:56] And we will delve quite deeply into what the placebo effect is in a second. But I’d like first of all, just to hear your story and what happened to you, what brought you to this place now where you have this different perspective on healing?

Brandy Gillmore: [00:01:11] Absolutely. You know, I have to say, this is literally the last thing I ever thought I would be doing. But basically, I used to do network engineering operations and I had an accident and technically two accidents. I had a car accident, and then I had a fall and I fell just right, just wrong, however you want to say it, but I literally went from living a full life to being wheelchair walker cane. On a good day, I could get out with a wheelchair walker or cane. On a bad day. I didn’t make it out of bed. I had a lot of bad days, just in pain. I was on morphine for years and my doctor said that there was nothing else they could do for me.

Peter Bowes: [00:01:50] Categorically? Nothing else they could do for you? That must have filled you with despair at the time?

Brandy Gillmore: [00:01:55] Yes. And you know, at first you think, okay, well, there’s got to be something, you know, and so that’s, you know, you. Oh, I need another specialist. Let me let me get a second opinion. Let me get a 10th opinion, you know. And so you like to me it was like, okay, well if this doctor can’t then who can like the idea of setting in of I guess at that time, you know, my injury was over 20 years ago now, but at that time, the reality that my life could somehow be in that place just didn’t click initially. So I kept looking, you know, kept going.

Peter Bowes: [00:02:25] And did you have any preexisting conditions before the fall that you say that you experienced? In other words, was there a bigger medical picture that the doctors could, could understand and perhaps explain to you? That was the reasoning for the pain that you were feeling and the fairly dire diagnosis. So initially the car accident was the first injury. So I had that and I had spinal implant fractures. And so I was already already had ongoing chronic back pain. But then once I fell, it just right, just wrong however you want to say it, but I ended up with a neurological disorder. CRPS just Complex Regional Pain Syndrome, which is basically exactly that. Like you end up with a lot more pain than you would expect from a situation. And they also diagnosed with with nerve lesions and then after a while of being injured, also things like reduced bone density, I mean, and I was I was a mess to say the least.

Peter Bowes: [00:03:26] And were you previously an active person, did you live life to the full in that respect?

Brandy Gillmore: [00:03:31] I was very, very athletic. I was I grew up doing martial arts so very, very physically fit. And then the injury and just everything, everything changed. My entire life changed.

Peter Bowes: [00:03:44] So where was your mindset once the doctors had said quite bluntly, they didn’t think there was anything they could do for you and you weren’t going to recover. Were you accepting that or were you continuing to search for something?

Brandy Gillmore: [00:03:58] You know, I continued to search. I had my there were so many different factors. One, I had grown up with a stepfather who used to always say, you know, if you want something done, sometimes you just got to do it yourself. And so that was it was like, okay, I need to figure this out. So that was something. But also, I mean, there were so many things because once my doctor said that I couldn’t heal, there was another piece where I just kept saying, okay, well, what is the next? It’s kind of like the feeling of, let me speak to your manager type of thing. Okay, well, you know, who’s the next person, who’s the next person? So I ended up going to this research hospital where I’d see two, three, four doctors at the same time. They would come in and they all would evaluate me, and then they’d come up with a plan. So that was one part of it. And another part of it was that I as I started searching. So I was trying diet and supplements and literally anything outside of the box I could. I went to acupuncture and acupressure and like all of the things. But I would say one thing. That really stood out as I started finding a lot of anomalies with the mind that were incredible. Like, for example, a person could have different like a person with multiple personality disorder could have different ailments and different personalities. They could have pain in one personality and not in another, or allergies or asthma, or there was even a case of a woman who was blind in some personalities, but not in others. And that was my blind or the placebo effect or the nocebo. And so it it just it became the more I really started looking at the anomalies, the more it gave me hope that there was somehow something that I could do. 

Peter Bowes: [00:05:43] And you heard about a clinical trial that really did give you some hope. And you were initially enrolled in that trial, but it didn’t happen.

Brandy Gillmore: [00:05:51] Exactly. That’s that’s actually part of what set me on to the the whole mind in general, because, you know, you hear about things like meditation, of course, you know, my injury was over 20 years ago, so it wasn’t as big of a conversation then as maybe more and more people have heard about it now. And that of course, the meditation didn’t work either. But at that time I had been looking a little, looking at the mind, but that that placebo or the research trial was really something that made me want to understand the mind even more. And because, you know, if we think about it, it basically a long story short, I had been going to that research hospital and, you know, you always hope that somebody’s going to find some new cure, some new surgery or procedure or whatnot. And that’s what happened. There was a research study and I thought, oh my gosh, I’m going to get my life back. And my doctors got me into it. And I was so excited. And leading up to the study, I felt like a kid waiting, counting down for Christmas. I was like, okay, this is it. I’m going to get my life back. And so the day comes and a friend took me to the hospital and, you know, wheeled me in and and they got me all prepped for the procedure. And so I’m laying there in the hospital bed and the doctor, he comes in and basically he looks at me and he looks at the chart, he looks at me, and you can tell something’s wrong by the look on his face. And he says, you know, Miss Gillmore, we don’t expect you to get better. You actually can’t be a part of this study. And. I just I felt like I swallowed a golf ball, I or a tennis ball. I just was trying to choke back the tears. And I was not doing a great job at that. But basically the next day I woke up in my same bed and I didn’t even want to live. I was just like, what? What’s the point? Like, I can’t live like this. And then I had like this God, or voice come into my mind and it was just like, well, what about the placebo? And that really got me thinking, you know, what about the placebo? 

Peter Bowes: [00:07:49] Well, let’s dive into what the placebo is. And it’s something we’ve talked about on this podcast many times in relation to clinical studies. But you explained to me your understanding of the placebo and why it just piqued your interest, why you thought there could be some hope here, knowing what the placebo effect is and how it affects people?

Brandy Gillmore: [00:08:10] Absolutely. So one, because in that moment, I just wanted to give up. If there was no hope, then what’s the point? I wanted to give up. But when I thought about the placebo, which is a fake treatment, that people can experience some type of results from a fake treatment, the first thing that popped into my head was that I can’t give up. If there’s hope, if there’s somehow hope that I could get better, then wait a second. And so, because I didn’t want to give up, it just was, you know, in in this situation where there was no, no hope. And so…

Peter Bowes: [00:08:43] Just to elaborate a little bit on that, when you say a fake treatment, this is really the control group in a clinical trial. So a clinical trial might be looking at the impact of, of something, whether it’s a physical intervention a drug intervention, you will have one group, but you’ll have the other group that don’t get the intervention. And they don’t know about it. They don’t know necessarily which group they’re in. Sometimes they do by the nature of the experiment. But this is the effect where the no group actually feel better because they think they might be getting the treatment.

Brandy Gillmore: [00:09:19] Yes. And kind of to expand on that even more. That was so, so yes. So it’s, you know, a fake treatment. Or like a pill that you that people think is the real treatment. But and they can have some type of results. Now what’s interesting was this is that a lot of people think that it’s just due to belief that somebody takes a pill and they believe it’s going to help them. And so it does. And so for more than the next year, I spent all of this time trying to force myself to believe I was already healed, that everybody kept saying it’s belief. And so I was bringing this gratitude for healing and convincing myself and doing all the things to tell myself I was already healed and it wasn’t working. And then I started to realize. So as I started researching even more, I found something called the open label placebo, which is exactly like it sounds. It is open label. So both the doctor and the patient both see the label, they both know it’s fake and it’s still works. And I thought, okay, well, clearly this is not just about belief. There are other factors and there are a lot of other factors. And and so I started really looking at that’s what made me want to understand how does the mind work and led to so many different discoveries.

Peter Bowes: [00:10:45] So what did you do next? What kind of I mean, I want to say treatment, but what kind of mindset did you adopt that actually saw you seeing some positive results?

Brandy Gillmore: [00:10:57] Absolutely. And so what I started doing so after the belief didn’t work. Then I started doing, you know, the meditations and frequencies and guided meditations and silent meditations and theta state and delta states, like doing all of these things. Now, what was confusing was this was that at times I could get my pain down. At times I couldn’t. But after I mean, but I did this for years and years and years and that wasn’t working either. And I mean, yes, I could have some results, but it didn’t heal my body, it didn’t change my life. And then I had this moment. Where a friend of mine, her aunt, was. Unfortunately, she was dying from lung cancer and she asked me if I wanted to, you know, say goodbye. And I said, yes, of course. And so she picked me up and I went over there and as I was saying goodbye, it also hit me this this woman had been in and out of hospice for or she she had been in hospice, I’m sorry, for several months and in and out of consciousness. And it kind of hit me that that was what I looked like, because I had been trying to just stay in this deep state of meditation, meditation and program myself and Theta State and Delta State and and I it kind of was what okay. Well, if this deep state of healing, if this deep state of relaxation was so powerful and, you know, she was trying to think positive thoughts and all these things, it was like, if this was going to work, why isn’t she healing? Or why isn’t anybody in this deep state of relaxation, healing? And so it made me want to. It made me want to simplify everything. And it also made me want to do something radically different to understand it. And I would say that was pivotal for me.

Peter Bowes: [00:12:39] So when was it that you actually started seeing a change in the reduction of your pain levels, the physical benefits that you’re clearly now enjoying compared with how you were after the accident? When did you start to see some results and what exactly were you doing at that time?

Brandy Gillmore: [00:12:57] I would say this was key to getting results is I started as I did a couple of things. Number one, I simplified and one thing was this. Optimism. So it is well known that the feeling of optimism can actually speed up healing. In fact, it can increase longevity. So it research studies show that people who are the most optimistic can even live 15% longer, or even research from Harvard has shown that, you know, emotional vitality and optimism can reduce coronary heart disease by about 50%. Why is that important? Heart disease is a leading cause of death. And so even cellular proliferation or aging, you know, we’ve all seen somebody who’s been really, really stressed before. And they look they can look older and they can go through a hard period of time and, you know, you can see it on them. Or even if somebody’s been through a stressful relationship and they get out and suddenly you go, wow, you look younger. We’ve all, you know, seen those cases before. And so one thing was just simplifying. So I said, okay, well we can see that optimism can really start speeding up healing. So that was something that I that I added and that was helpful. Now another thing that I did was this is I started just looking at, you know, I started saying, okay, well, how can I see that the mind affects the physical body? Well, emotions, you know, if somebody’s embarrassed, their face turns red. Panic attack racing heart, shortness of breath, sexual but sexual physical response different from men or women. But we know the connection. And of course, in my state, I thought I’m going to need a lot more than emotions. I’m a mess. But then when I started looking at it, you know, people who I could see that there were instances like the widowhood effect where somebody can lose a spouse and actually have a much higher rate of death or broken heart syndrome, somebody can die from a broken heart. And so basically what I started doing is I started looking at what specific negative emotions could be affecting my body, because it was clear that different emotions affect the body differently. And so that’s what I started doing, was I started bringing in both the positive and also understanding what that negative could be.

Peter Bowes: [00:15:16] And have you completely turned around your life. In other words, has all of the pain gone? Can you give me, in terms of a gradient, how well you have recovered to the point that you are now compared with the worst times?

Brandy Gillmore: [00:15:31] Post-accident 100%. And it was actually fun. So after I healed, even I started working out with bodybuilders and I was like leg pressing, but more weight than this than I had ever done before. and running. So I, haven’t taken a single aspirin or anything since 2010, since 2009, probably the end of 2009. So I haven’t needed to I feel great, thank God. Yeah, I feel amazing.

Peter Bowes: [00:16:02] Well, congratulations on that. It is an amazing recovery. What do if you’re still in touch with them, what do the doctors say? Those doctors that said that you would never recover. Can they explain what’s happened to you?

Brandy Gillmore: [00:16:16] You know. I there was only one doctor that I went back in and see because a lot of the doctors that I was seeing at the time that I was injured were like a 2.5 hour trip away. So. And not only that, but to get in to see them, it was, you know, six weeks, seven weeks. So for me to go back and see them would. Be 2.5 hour trip there. 2.5 hour trip back. and all of those things. Right. So there was only one that I actually went back to see. It was basically he just was like, wow, you look great. And you know, I think at the time I was a little discouraged because he didn’t even ask what I did. He just was like, wow, wow. Amazing, amazing. You look great. Congratulations. That was I mean, that was pretty much the extent he was a doctor. That was. And I never my doctor. He was lovely. He was lovely. And he was always very, very behind. So even then he was like, oh my God, you look great, amazing, wonderful. It was like a 92nd two minute exchange. He looked like he had aged because I went through this phase where like, I wanted to go back and see my doctor and like to me it was a big deal. Like I was like, I waited till I was fit and lifting weights. I mean, I was and he was, he was amazed and the look on his face and all these things. But then he was like, okay, I gotta go in to see other patients, blah, blah, blah. And I get that because, you know, out of anybody’s time, the last person who needed it is really me.

Peter Bowes: [00:17:43] What you want to see, though, and I guess your emotion would be similar to mine. You would want to see some acknowledgment that there has been this dramatic change, and then to be able to learn from it, well, how can we potentially how can doctors medical systems potentially help other people with the same problems that you had, whether there is something, a much bigger thing going on here that they could learn from.  

Brandy Gillmore: [00:18:08] I would agree.  And and I actually tried to go down that path after I got after I healed myself, I tried to go down that path and I went to basically how do I put it? I want to put it in a very lovely way. I went to like a psychoneuroimmunology, meeting, if you will, and I felt like. Part of the conversation at that meeting was about if mice were affected by stress. And I felt like the information that I was engaged in was on a different level. Nicely put. It just it was like I felt like I wanted them to see light years ahead of where they were. Put it that way. And so from that I thought, I have to show people that it works. And so that’s what led me even to this day, that’s what I’ll do, is I show results all the time. We’ll show people results under medical equipment. So I thought from that, I thought honestly, I thought, wow, I’m showing people how to release their own pain with their mind. And we’re just talking about how stress effects mice, like we know that. And. How do we put this to like. It felt like we needed to move the conversation a lot farther, a lot faster, a lot more.

Peter Bowes: [00:19:25] Yeah, exactly. And in fact, you’ve just in part answered what was going to be my next question, which was that clearly there will be skeptics who will say that, well, maybe the doctors got it wrong and you were going to recover anyway. It was just going to take time. And it wasn’t necessarily your mindset, your attitude, your optimism that actually did it. So I mean, what you’ve just said is you’ve continued to work and to try to prove that this can affect other people. But I am just curious as to what you say. If there are skeptics, and I’m sure you must have encountered those people, what your argument is.

Speaker3: [00:19:59] Absolutely. You know.

Brandy Gillmore: [00:20:00] That’s been because first and foremost, I would have been world’s biggest skeptic. And so I think that has given me an edge to always speak to the part of the person who would be skeptical, because that would definitely be me. I would say a few things. First and foremost, healing with the mind and emotions is actually even written in the Bible. You know, in the Bible it says a merry heart is a medicine to the body. Ill thoughts will dry the bones. That was written 3000 years ago, also in the 70s. There’s psychoneuroimmunology that stress affects the physical body. There’s also research that suggests that stress is what causes autoimmune conditions. There is also the Surgeon general released a statement, even last year, an entire report about loneliness and how it impacts people’s health and type two diabetes is linked. And and lupus has been linked to childhood abuse. And we can literally go through one illness after another or rheumatoid arthritis. We know somebody can have that and have flare ups or cancer stress. So we’ve we’ve known. So everywhere we look stress quote unquote is affected connected to illness. We just haven’t successfully figured out how to reverse or undo that. And so in some ways that’s basically what I did is I said, okay, well how do I undo this is one thing. The other thing is, is that it worked even better than I realized. I mean, just basically because multiple personality disorder, the awareness that somebody could have a medically documented illness in one personality, for example, they could have high blood pressure in one personality, switch to a different personality and not have high blood pressure or body temperature or all of these things. And so that was profound. And so after I healed, I thought I started showing people to release their pain, and I would help them to release their pain. And I would say, look, you did that. And then one time as I was getting off stage, I thought to myself, people are going to think this is fake. Like that person in the audience was just a plant. And that’s what made me want to do it under medical equipment and, and it shows. You can actually see on a live scan somebody who is experiencing physical pain and uses their mind and the entire scan changes and you can see the pain is gone.

Peter Bowes: [00:22:27] It’s extraordinary. So what do you do now? How have you embraced this knowledge, this amazing experience that you’ve gone through, and you’ve talked about helping other people, trying to to show what you went through is applicable to others. How are you doing that?

Brandy Gillmore: [00:22:43] Absolutely. Part of it is demonstrating it. So I demonstrated all of the time and under medical equipment, this is this is what it looks like is this is that if we have some type of illness or injury or infection, it can radiate heat. And a simple way to think about it is, you know, if somebody has an infection or a sprained ankle, we know there can be heat from that. And so I use medical thermography and it detects the heat from illness in the body. And so let’s say somebody has neck pain. And so under medical thermal imaging their neck would be all red with pain. You can see the inflammation the pain. And then I’ll show somebody how to use their mind. And in real time you’ll see the scan turn from red to green as the pain goes away. And what’s fun is you can also see it’s not just it’s not just about belief. Because if the person is retriggered, if the negative emotions come back, you can see the scan and you can see the pain come back. And so that’s a lot of what I really want to do is and what I’ve been doing is, you know, of course, I just released my book, Master Your Mind and Energy to Heal Your Body, but showing it under medical equipment. So I’ve had some case studies published in a medical journal last year. And really, the ultimate goal is to help people to understand that we have this ability. And because, yes, we’ve all heard that stress affects the physical body, but we can undo it and that and then it affects us more than we realize.

Peter Bowes: [00:24:17] And I just want to say this, and I’m sure you would agree that what I always say to people, if they are experiencing issues, their first port of call should be their doctor. We talk about these issues. I share ideas, but I really want people to seek professional medical help first if they have any issue.

Brandy Gillmore: [00:24:34] I couldn’t agree more. And I would also say I always tell people and keep seeing their doctor and for a few reasons is one is because I’ve seen people change, you know, from their blood sugar normalizing, then they need to be taken off the medication. So I always tell people, see your doctor, see your doctor even more when you work with your mind because they can help you change your medication if needed. All of those things are important, and I would the kind of the saying that I tell people is, don’t stop seeing your doctor. Instead, blow your doctor’s mind with what you’re able to do with your own mind is kind of the phrase, because and I’ve seen people I’ve seen people get surgeries canceled because their doctor says, oh my gosh, you no longer need it. All kinds of things. And so but I always tell them, go to your doctor, blow your doctor’s mind, because it really is incredible what we’re each able to do.

Peter Bowes: [00:25:27] One of the issues that I moving away a little bit from, from pain, but one of the issues I hear about a lot from people in relation to the bigger picture of longevity is an inability to sleep and to sleep well. Now, clearly that could well be related to pain, but it isn’t always. But it’s often the common complaint of people who feel as if they’re not doing everything to embrace longevity and do everything in terms of diet and exercise, but sleep being a huge pillar of longevity. This whole problem of not being able to get to sleep or getting to sleep and then waking up in the middle of the night, is this something is this an area that you’ve looked at that could benefit from a different mindset or a different optimistic outlook?

Brandy Gillmore: [00:26:08] Hugely. I mean, during my own injury, I couldn’t sleep. I mean, I would if I slept an hour at a time. That was like a lot for me. I mean, I was up all night and I see that all the time. And then I’ll also see people. I mean, that’s another thing we’ve all heard of somebody being stressed and being up all night. And so we know that that’s linked. The thing that is key is this is that we have stuff in our subconscious mind that we don’t realize. So all the time I’ll see people who will work to start shifting their mindset, their emotion, the information in their subconscious mind. And they say, wow. I slept better than I like. I can’t believe how well I slept, you know? And so. Absolutely. I mean, I think that is there’s a strong correlation there. 

Peter Bowes: [00:26:57] Bearing in mind everything that you’ve gone through on this podcast, I often talk about people’s longevity, aspirations and what they hope to achieve in the decades to come and how maybe they’ve adapted their lifestyle because of what’s happened to them in the past. Do you think about the future? Do you think about the future that you can potentially have now that maybe at one point you thought you you couldn’t have? And are there any lifestyle interventions? I mean, clearly there are lifestyle interventions that you’ve made. It’s been very obvious from from what you’ve gone through. But looking to the future, how do you approach it?

Brandy Gillmore: [00:27:32] I would say this. I would say even especially when it comes to longevity. But you I would say a key mindset that I have seen over and over again is just, you know, having making sure to have that optimism, you know, one medical study after another after another has shown the importance of optimism. So I would say, number one, looking to the future with excitement and is so important. And I’ve, you know, that I would say is one thing that is key. I would say another thing is key is this is that when we start to look at it for human beings in general, there’s if you’re familiar with the four minute mile, it used to be thought that it was impossible for human beings to run a mile in under four minutes. And then in the 1950s, a gentleman by the name of Roger Bannister, he did that. And after he did, many other people were then able to do it as well, because they realized that they could. Now, I would say there’s a few key things to note from this. Number one is the awareness that we can do something is powerful, like when we have an awareness that we can do something, it’s incredible. Now, if you ask me, could I run a mile in four minutes? No, because I haven’t trained for it. There’s a skill to it as well. And so I would say a few things. I would say healing with the mind is a skill is we have to understand how to do it. It’s not it’s far beyond positive thinking and whatnot. But I would say that thinking about the future from a place of optimism is foundational. Not just being an optimist, but actually really feeling optimistic. So I would say, you know, really thinking about that in the future of having something, always having something to look forward to is, is really imperative.

Peter Bowes: [00:29:15] I think that’s a great way to end this. Your story is indeed fascinating. Your book is just out. It’s available now. Title is Master Your Mind and Energy to Heal Your Body. I’ll put a link to it in the show notes of this episode. You’ll also find a transcript of this conversation. Brandy what’s immediately next for you, you’ve got through the launch of your book. Do you have any goals?

Speaker3: [00:29:37] Absolutely.

Brandy Gillmore: [00:29:38] I have a lot of things to look forward to. So I do. And also right now it’s really about empowering people. You know, every time I help somebody to use their mind to release their own pain or all kinds of things, the very first thing I say after I help them, as I say you did, that, I just showed you how to do it. You did that. And I would say just that, just helping people to realize what more amazing than we think. So that that’s really the nutshell, if you will. There’s a lot of other things on the calendar and a lot of other things I’m looking forward to. But I would say in a nutshell, it’s helping people to wake up, to realize, you know, I spent seven years, almost seven years, six and a half years, seven years of my life injured in pain, told I wasn’t going to heal. And I see that all of the time from people suffering from pain, illness, injury problems, not realizing that we actually have a power inside of us to change that. And so just empowering others.

Peter Bowes: [00:30:37] I like that line. We’re more amazing than we think. Brandy, thank you so much. Good to talk to you.

Brandy Gillmore: [00:30:43] Peter You’re lovely.

Brandy Gillmore: [00:30:44] Thank you so much.