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Summary
On episode 271 of 40+ Fitness, Coach Allan sits down with Kelly Noonan and Adam Shomer, actors and filmmakers behind the documentary Heal, winner of the Maui Film Festival, which examines how much of the body's ability to heal is shaped by the mind.
Kelly built the film around researchers and healers she credits with changing her own outlook, aiming to package quantum physics, epigenetics, and mind body medicine into something a general audience could actually watch and use.
The conversation covers the difference between a diagnosis and a prognosis, the placebo and nocebo effects, and the nine factors researcher Dr. Kelly Turner found among people who experienced radical remission from terminal diagnoses.
Links
- https://healdocumentary.com
- https://www.facebook.com/healdocumentary
- https://www.instagram.com/healdocumentary
Key Takeaways
- Only two of the nine factors behind radical remission are physical. Researcher Dr. Kelly Turner studied people who recovered from cancers doctors had called untreatable and found that only changing your diet and using herbs or supplements were physical interventions. The other seven, including releasing suppressed emotion, deepening social support, and having a strong reason to live, were mental, emotional, or spiritual.
- The placebo effect is a real, underused treatment tool. Kelly explains that people given a sugar pill in drug trials often produce the same biochemical response as people taking the actual medication, without the side effects, which she argues deserves far more clinical attention than it gets.
- The nocebo effect shows how a grim diagnosis can become self fulfilling. When a doctor tells a patient they have months to live, that belief itself can trigger the physiological decline that makes it true. Words from a doctor carry measurable biological weight.
- Get the diagnosis, but don't accept the prognosis as fixed. Kelly and Adam are clear the film isn't anti-medicine. They encourage people to get an expert diagnosis, then treat the statistical prognosis as one possibility rather than a sentence, since no patient is actually “average.”
- Meditation shuts off the stress response and turns on healing chemistry. The film cites stress as the reason behind roughly 95 percent of doctor visits. Meditation has been linked to telomere lengthening and higher immunoglobulin A levels, part of the body's frontline immune defense.
- Gratitude and positive emotion trigger physical healing responses. Kelly describes a heart brain coherence effect where feelings like gratitude, compassion, and love release healing chemistry, while fear and anger trigger the opposite, stress producing chemistry.
- Suppressed emotion doesn't just disappear, it can show up in the body. The film's experts describe unprocessed emotion as energy that, left unaddressed, can become physical blockage over time.
- Visualizing a healed outcome while feeling genuine gratitude reinforces new neural pathways. Kelly connects this practice, drawn from work by Dr. Joe Dispenza and Gregg Braden, to signaling the brain and nervous system as if the desired healing has already happened.
“But don't believe the prognosis.”
Kelly Noonan
