I recommend this book to all of my followers and patients who want to understand why the hands-on work I do is effective. Your body literally IS your mind and emotions and the work Dr. Pert did proves it. All of the experiments are in the book. Holistic medicine, counseling, energy medicine, martial arts, yoga, et. al. are an effective medicine and much cheaper than the bazillion dollar allopathic industry twisting your arm to buy health insurance.

I’m re-reading these chapters that I visited two years ago before the opioid epidemic. I’m finding it ironic that Dr. Pert is actually the one who found the opiate receptor in the brain at NIH working under Dr. Snyder but is also key to illuminating the science behind mind-body medicine in the seventies. She found it on October 25, 1972. Reductionist science and holism make strange bedfellows.

Chapter 2 is called “Romance of the Opiate Receptor” with the title “Destiny”. There is no way she could have known that 20 years after this book was written, corporate, capitalist, profit-driven so-called healthcare would drive the opiate receptors in the human brain into addiction and unethical oblivion. It is now the headline on the national news. All of this is occurring because allopathic medicine refuses to give any attention or credence to holistic medicine which is fabulously pain relieving and has at its fingertips a pantheon of effective, whole herbs like cannabis which has been demonized and ruined families for 100 years. There is not as much money to be made when people are healthy and happy. By the end of the book, she figures this out.

The first thing she relays is being on her back in the hospital after falling off of a horse and being put on Talwin, a morphine derivative and loving the euphoric state it put her in. I sure didn’t after my ectopic pregnancy surgery in 1996 that saved my life. I was on a morphine pump and all it did was cut the pain a bit, but it was my birthday, after all, the day I had to get out of the hospital bed and walk. Three days later after I’d gotten home the pain was almost gone. Still, I did not have a great opioid trip. Drugs have never affected me in a beneficial way as an HSP (highly sensitive person).  Laughter, hugs, friends, and sex affect my receptors.

Dr. Pert worked happily in a lab at John Hopkins University under the exciting tutelage of Solomon H. Snyder who was on the leading edge of experimentation in neuropharmacology and still works there. The picture is of Candace and Sol working together. The philosophy in the lab had everything to do with instinct;

“Do not accept the conventional wisdom, do not accept the idea that something can’t be accomplished because the scientific literature says it can’t. Trust your instincts. Allow yourself a wide latitude in your speculations. Don’t depend on the literature-it could be right or it could be completely wrong. Spread all your hunches out before you, and go with the ones that you think are most probable. Select the one that you can test easily and quickly. Don’t assume it has to be overly complicated to be of value since often the simplest experiment yields the most unequivocal result. Just do the experiment! And if you can keep it to a one-day experiment, so much the better.”

Solomon H Snyder, Dr. Pert’s boss, was a lead neuroscience researcher at NIH back in the ’70s and is likely the kingpin of opiate receptor research that helped the big pharma get very rich and patients very addicted to opiates in America. I’m not saying he is solely responsible but he is a psychiatrist and worked for a couple of pharmaceutical companies. I’m sure he saw nothing wrong with using opiates to as a painkiller.

To be continued…