{"id":1107,"date":"2015-05-19T18:41:31","date_gmt":"2015-05-19T18:41:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.brainstreams.ca\/how-your-brain-heals-itself\/"},"modified":"2025-07-04T09:16:57","modified_gmt":"2025-07-04T16:16:57","slug":"how-your-brain-heals-itself","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/messageinabottle.ca\/bcbia\/how-your-brain-heals-itself\/","title":{"rendered":"How Your Brain Heals Itself"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"field field-type-link field-field-link-original-article\">\u00a0A South African man with Parkinson\u2019s disease, a degenerative disorder that often leaves its sufferers immobile, walks his symptoms into submission. A Broadway singer, silenced for 30 years by multiple sclerosis, recovers his voice. And in California, a psychiatrist and pain specialist rids himself of 13 years of chronic pain within a year, without drugs or surgery, through his brain\u2019s own efforts. Those individuals, and thousands like them, achieved those results, writes Norman Doidge, a Toronto psychiatrist and author of\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.normandoidge.com\/?page_id=1042\">The Brain\u2019s Way of Healing<\/a>, precisely because the human brain is a generalist par excellence. The prevailing 20th-century view was that it was too specialized for its own good\u2014a fixed machine made up of discrete parts that can break down, never to function again. That concept no longer stands up to scrutiny.<\/div>\n<p>The brain is actually a supple, malleable organ, as ready to unlearn as it is to learn, capable of transforming vicious circles into virtuous circles, of resetting and repairing its internal communications. Far more than once dreamed possible, the brain can\u2014if not always cure\u2014heal itself.<\/p>\n<p>Doidge wrote about the brain\u2019s remarkable ability to recalibrate itself\u2014what doctors call neuroplasticity\u2014in his 2007 bestseller\u00a0The Brain That Changes Itself. His new book recounts an astounding array of radical improvements in brain problems long thought irreversible. There are newly effective therapies, leading to improvement in, and sometimes even complete cures, for conditions ranging from stroke to traumatic brain injuries, learning disorders and missing brain parts. Even Parkinson\u2019s and MS symptoms can be improved in new ways. \u201cLike Marshall McLuhan said, the future is already here,\u201d says Doidge in an interview. \u201cThe early neuroplasticians had to battle to get their findings accepted but now the field is not remotely controversial. I\u2019m no longer talking about \u2018promising\u2019 developments down the road, but therapies that are here now. Patients and their caregivers just have to know who is doing things they thought impossible.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.macleans.ca\/society\/health\/how-your-brain-heals-itself\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">READ MORE&gt;&gt;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u00a0A South African man with Parkinson\u2019s disease, a degenerative disorder that often leaves its sufferers immobile, walks his symptoms into submission. A Broadway singer, silenced for 30 years by multiple [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_EventAllDay":false,"_EventTimezone":"","_EventStartDate":"","_EventEndDate":"","_EventStartDateUTC":"","_EventEndDateUTC":"","_EventShowMap":false,"_EventShowMapLink":false,"_EventURL":"","_EventCost":"","_EventCostDescription":"","_EventCurrencySymbol":"","_EventCurrencyCode":"","_EventCurrencyPosition":"","_EventDateTimeSeparator":"","_EventTimeRangeSeparator":"","_EventOrganizerID":[],"_EventVenueID":[],"_OrganizerEmail":"","_OrganizerPhone":"","_OrganizerWebsite":"","_VenueAddress":"","_VenueCity":"","_VenueCountry":"","_VenueProvince":"","_VenueState":"","_VenueZip":"","_VenuePhone":"","_VenueURL":"","_VenueStateProvince":"","_VenueLat":"","_VenueLng":"","_VenueShowMap":false,"_VenueShowMapLink":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1107","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/messageinabottle.ca\/bcbia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1107","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/messageinabottle.ca\/bcbia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/messageinabottle.ca\/bcbia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/messageinabottle.ca\/bcbia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/messageinabottle.ca\/bcbia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1107"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/messageinabottle.ca\/bcbia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1107\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/messageinabottle.ca\/bcbia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1107"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/messageinabottle.ca\/bcbia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1107"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/messageinabottle.ca\/bcbia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1107"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}