Chapter 14 say warts

Warts are wonderful structures.They can appear overnight on any part of the skin, like mushrooms on a damp lawn, full-fledged, while their architectural art is of brilliant complexity.Stain them in sections and observe them under a microscope, and you can see that they are the most specialized molecular arrangements, as if they were built for a certain purpose.They stood there like turreted hills, dense and impenetrable, designed for defense against the outside world. In a sense, warts are both useful and important, but not for us.In reality, the thriving cells of a wart are a reproductive machine orchestrated by a virus.

From the way they look, you might think that cells infected with a wart virus use this response as their own way of defending themselves against the virus, in a clumsy, even more obnoxious way.But that's not the case.Warts are exactly what the virus wants; the virus just so happens to thrive only in cells that have undergone this neoplasia.It's not a defense at all; it's a prostrate welcome, an enthusiastic capitalism, pandering to the virus's need: Come on, the more the merrier. One of the wonderful things about warts is that they disappear.They grow full-fledged, and nothing in man is more solid and durable than it looks.But, somehow, their life came to an end, and they often disappeared without a trace, very suddenly.

And they can disappear by doing something.This act can only be called thinking, or something like thinking.This is one of the great features of warts and it is absolutely shocking.It's more astonishing than cloning or recombinant DNA or hormones or acupuncture or anything that's been blazed in the press.It's one of the great mysteries of science: warts can be ordered to be removed by the skin through hypnotic suggestion. Not everyone believes this, but the evidence is long-standing and overwhelming.Generations of physicians and dermatologists, and their grandparents, have believed it.Once, a well-known old professor, an independent-thinking, bright and promising young protégé of Sir William Osler, told me that he had a cure for warts: Apply gentian violet to the patient and firmly assure the patient that the wart will disappear within a week.This method has been tried and tested.There have been several careful studies by excellent clinical investigators with appropriate control groups, and in one of them fourteen patients had what appeared to be intractable generalized bilateral Sexual warts, hypnotized.The hint to them is that all warts on one side will start to fade.After a few weeks, undisputed positive results appeared.Nine patients were suggested to have all or nearly all warts disappear on one side, while the control side had as many warts as before.

It is fascinating to see that most warts go away exactly as directed, and even more fascinating that mistakes can happen.There are some things where you need to have a clear understanding of what is left and what is right.As you can imagine, the same is needed here.One of the patients got left and right mixed up and destroyed the wart on the wrong side.Later, in a study by a research team at Massachusetts General Hospital, warts were rejected on both sides, despite instructions to only focus on one side. I have always wanted to discover the nature of the instructions given by the unconscious mind—whether it is the mind or otherwise—under hypnotism.It seems to me hard to imagine the mind simply saying, make a way, disappear by itself without at the same time asking for details about how to disappear.

When the results of these experiments were first published, it occurred to me that the instructions might be extremely simple.Perhaps it was nothing more than an order to shut off blood flow to all the precapillary arterioles in and around the wart until the wart was suffocated.Nothing more than that, without going into more detail.How exactly the mind would do this, cutting off the blood supply to one wart and letting others go, I can't imagine.But in any case, I am satisfied to stop here and not to get into it.And I like to think that my unconscious mind is inescapably responsible for this, because, had I been one of the subjects, I would never have been able to do it myself.

Now, however, with information about the viral etiology of warts, the matter becomes complicated.More recently, there has been a plausible idea that the immune mechanism may very well be involved in the process of rejecting warts.In this way, the problem is more complicated. If my unconscious can figure out how to manipulate the mechanisms used to get rid of the virus and configure all the various cells correctly to achieve tissue rejection, then I have nothing to say but that my unconscious Much more patient than I can.I can't wait to get a wart right now, just to see if I'm that good.

There was something in my head—let's put it this way—that the word "unconscious" wasn't enough, even with capital letters.There should be a better word for it.I was brought up to think of this part of my mind as a sort of private sanatorium, a walled place in some outskirts of my brain, separated from the rest, with no other capacity, Can only produce some vague information, such as, so that my brain is always a little unbalanced. But then again, any mental mechanism capable of repelling warts becomes something else at the same time.It's not the kind of chaotic process you'd expect to see in a book, run by the unconscious, on the fringes of things, dreaming or getting it wrong or hysterical.Whatever it was, whoever it was, had to do it with the precision of a surgeon.It simply needs someone to have the final say and handle some trivial matters that no one can understand.It was a skilled engineer plus manager, a chief of staff, the head of the whole place.It never occurred to me before that I had such a lodger, or perhaps, rather, such a landlord, because, if that were the case, I would be nothing more than a lodger.

Among other accomplishments, he would have to be a world-class cell biologist, able to distinguish between the various types of lymphocytes in a person, each with distinct functions that I don't understand, in order to mobilize the correct ones. To get rid of those wrong ones, in order to complete the task of organizing rejection.If that was left to me, and I was somehow empowered to call in lymphocytes and order them to go near my wart (assuming I could learn to do this), then my lymphocytes would There would be a swarm of B cells, T cells, suppressor cells, phagocytes, and no doubt others I don't know the name of, and then nothing useful would be done.

Even if there was no immunology involved, and all that was to be done was to turn off the local blood supply, I still had no idea how to do it.I envision that selective closure of arterioles could be accomplished by some chemical mediator.I also know the names of some mediators.But even if I knew how to do it, I'm afraid I wouldn't dare to let this kind of thing out. Well, then, who is overseeing this kind of operation?Nobody cares, you know that.You can't sit there and just be hypnotized, take cues and make them work exactly, without imagining that there's something very much like a controller.I'm afraid one can't just offload that whole complication to some lower-level nerve center without sending a fairly detailed set of specifications.These are far from what my mind can do.

There is a certain wisdom that knows how to get rid of warts.It's unsettling to think about it. This is still a wonderful problem that needs to be solved.Just think how much we would know if we had anything like some clear understanding of what happens when a wart is hypnotized out. We might know the equivalent cellular and chemical players in tissue rejection, conceivably with some additional information about the pathways by which viruses cause alienation in cells; we would then know how the traffic of these reactants is directed , and then perhaps understand the nature of certain diseases in which wrong traffic is directed to the wrong cells.At best, we might unearth some sort of superintelligence within each of us, a million times smarter than we are, with specialized technologies well beyond our current comprehension.In that case, it would be worth a "war against warts", a "conquest of warts", a national wart institute, etc.