Book Review: Our Secret Super Power

Title: Our Secret Super Power 

Author: Ranjeev Singh Sidhu

Date: 2022

Publisher: Psy-Qi

ISBN: not assigned in my copy

Length: 165 pages

Quote: "As well as being a qualified pharmacist, having worked in and managed my own independent pharmacy, I’m also a highly sought-after executive coach (ILM7 senior exec coach). Today I work with several UK-listed companies to support and develop the way they manage and think about their businesses."

So Sidhu's not a doctor. What he has to tell us in this book isn't new, either. He has done new, and so far as I can tell solid, research to bring a 1980s idea into a 2020s context. As a pharmacist, he says, he's watched his ideas about "healing super powers" work. As a writer, he's found documentation that when people exercise their "super powers" they save the British National Health Service money. They save themselves money and misery too.

If you are fifty years old or older, and you learned this stuff in the 1980s, do you need this book? Does this book need a US edition? That is the question. (If it has a US edition that edition will need a new ISBN, because US publishers would probably demand additional US-specific content.) I can't say how much you need this book, but people my age and older can certainly use the updated references to new studies. Students, too, would probably prefer to read a new book like this one rather than go on reading Hans Selye's Stress. I'm content with a copy of the UK version. Others may not be. 

The rest of this review is for those who had not reached school age in the 1980s, for whom the ideas in the book may be new. 

Are they true? Certainly. If you're regular readers you've seen the posts where I mention breathing as my painkiller of choice and meditating to get my blood pressure down. What Sidhu explains is the very first book about how to do that. More has been written but I'm not sure how necessary it is. We learn control of mostly-involuntary physical reactions not by reading about them, but by practicing them.

Sidhu's discussion may be a bit wordy about the basic "relaxation response" and vague about the steps beyond it, but he does mention the benefits of a diet plan, exercise, massage, meditation, stretching, and most of all working through emotional conflicts produced by things like guilt, wrong employment, and overcrowding, as ways people get the full benefit of their natural self-healing superpowers. 

He discusses other ways people get the amazing benefits of "the placebo response" from their perception of external cues. Going to a doctor's office or clinic, smelling medicine and air sanitizers, hearing a trusted medical expert's calm voice, seeing or holding a medicine bottle, tasting medicine or feeling a pill in the mouth, can all be cues that stimulate immune system activity and endorphin production. 

India has long been noted for its fakir (religious healer) tradition, many practitioners of which have been "fakers" who tricked people into paying for useless "cures"--but they could defend their practice by demonstrating that, for some people, it worked. Sidhu writes from a British, not Indian, perspective and does not condone "fakery" for commercial gain. Instead he suggests that people mindfully seek the benefits of "fakery" for themselves. One man, he says, was qualified to charge his medication to the National Health Service but, knowing his condition was curable and he could get off the medication, the man chose to pay each month to motivate himself to work his program (as Americans would put it) and eliminate the need for the medication. Sidhu has numbers to show how public-spirited people who take responsibility for curing themselves completely really are, in contrast to those who lean on the NHS to "manage" their "chronic" conditions forever. 

They feel better, too. In youth, Sidhu tells us, he had a chronic skin disease that was ugly and uncomfortable. Medication brought only temporary relief. A traditional treatment not scientifically proven to be useful to most people gave him a complete cure. Maybe he just outgrew the disease, but in any case he grew up healthy--not just "managing" or "living with" a disease, but free from it. 

I believe him because, as a young celiac, I had monthly cramps. Over-the-counter meds seemed to help, the first few times I tried each one. Then they lost their effectiveness. Then, while exploring the benefits of trigger-point massage with factory laborers, I read that the cure for that kind of cramps "is in [patients'] jeans pockets." Young women who tend to form trigger points tend to have several in muscles that attach to the hip and pelvic bones. One thorough massage session with stretches, which they can do for themselves after learning how trigger-point massage works for the upper back, often eliminates the cramps for life. I continued to do self-massage and stretching as long as my hormone cycle ran, but "treatments" were brief and did not interfere with any plans I made for the day. I often wonder how many other women who buy medication for recurring monthly symptoms might need just an hour or two of pressure and stretching, just a little more fruit in the diet, or something similar, to be free from those symptoms for life.

Everyone's symptoms and cures are different but it all starts with a decision to take responsibility for our health and spend a little time listening to our bodies. Some people can completely cure the disease conditions they have with no medication of any kind. Some cannot.

I think Sidhu shows adequate awareness of the fact that taking responsibility for our health does not guarantee that we'll always be able to cure everything by stretching a muscle or eating more green vegetables. Some people are not, and much harm was done in the 1980s by self-healing zealots who asked people why they chose to "be cancering," or to "cling to" symptoms of cerebral palsy. Every life includes a death and it's easy to wish that these zealots would get there sooner. We all reach a point where what our bodies will tell us is to prepare to say goodbye to this life. Sometimes what self-healing does for its adepts, like Grandma Bonnie Peters, is to enable them to get through their final illness more cleanly, with less misery for themselves and those who miss them, than most people with similar diagnoses. 

Nevertheless, history abounds with true stories of people who self-healed (sometimes during or after a "vision," sometimes by simple trial and error) from what seemed like disabling or even fatal diseases. Some of these people lived in the twentieth century and were diagnosed by modern scientific methods, too, like my "Aunt Dotty" who was active and fairly healthy into the present century after completing treatment for breast cancer in 1971. People raised questions whether Ellen White or Paul Bragg "really" had tuberculosis; Charlotte Selver "really" did. Glenn Cunningham really had bad burns--and the "Special Olympics" is all about the masses of other people who work through courses of physical therapy that amount to world-class athletic training. Norman Cousins really had arthritis. My father, and several of his generation who were active and quirky up into the present century, really had polio, as did Franklin D. Roosevelt. Most people who have activated their self-healing superpower aren't rich and famous. If you don't let envy sabotage your personal relationships, you're likely to be able to claim a few of these people as friends. 

For those coping with "Long COVID" or the multitude of other conditions about which we've heard less since the media started reporting "all COVID all the time," this seems a very timely book. There are probably solid physical reasons why COVID was serious for anyone who was not already in the dreary "terminal" section of a hospital or nursing home. Sidhu can't actually promise that relaxation and meditation are going to change those reasons, nor does he. Relaxation will give you a way to find out what those reasons are, and then change them if they can be changed. Self-healing works overnight for a few people, like the cancer patient whose unconscious belief apparently allowed his damaged lymph nodes to drain visibly and fill up again overnight. More often it works over weeks or months. If you are willing to do what it takes--whether that means eliminating a kind of food from your diet, or paying a debt, or redesigning your work desk so that you stop giving yourself back pain, or working toward that total ban on glyphosate the whole world needs, whatever--then self-healing is likely to work for you.

I appreciate Sidhu's non-religious attention to the role of the conscience, even in patients who don't seem to have a complete "conscience" circuit in their brains. He mentions a common pattern where the "healthy" half of a couple becomes ill because being the caretaker is hard work and abandoning the sick spouse will cost the person approval from others. He doesn't discuss this factor in diseases in much detail, but many patients need to return or pay for something they "stole" (find a job for a person they beat out of a job! return an overdue library book! stop seeing an "other" man/woman!) to activate their superpowers. 

This book is the survey course. If it's going to work for you, you will probably find yourself reading other materials on specific subjects on which Sidhu barely touches. Some things (like celiac disease) he doesn't mention at all. Much of what you'll want to read was discussed in books that saturated their market in the 1980s and 1990s, and could use updating. No book can include everything but, if the concept of self-healing is new to you, here is a short, friendly introduction to a large and still expanding field of study.