Seth contrasts witch doctors and Western doctors

"If the cultural concepts include voodoo or witchcraft, then the therapeutic situation will be seen in that context, and a curse uncovered; which, using the power point of the present, the doctor will then reverse.

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(Pause.) A modern Western physician — granted, with the greatest discomfiture — will inform his patient that he is about to die, impressing upon him that his situation is hopeless, and yet will react with scorn and loathing when he reads that a voodoo practitioner has put a curse upon some innocent victim.

[... 2 paragraphs ...]

You are told what to look for; you are as cursed — far more — as any native in a tiny village, only you lose breasts, appendixes, and other portions of your anatomy. The doctors follow their own ideas, of course, and in that system they see themselves as completely justified — as humane."

—NoPR Chapter 16: Session 659, April 25, 1973

"Even in primitive societies, witch doctors and other natural therapists have understood that the point of power is in the present, and they have utilized natural hypnosis as a method of helping other individuals to concentrate their own energy. All of the gestures, dances, and other procedures are shock treatments, startling the subject out of habitual reactions so that he or she is forced to focus upon the present moment. The resulting disorientation simply shakes current beliefs and dislodges set frameworks. The hypnotist, or witch doctor, or therapist, then immediately inserts the beliefs he thinks the subject needs.

[... 1 paragraph ...]

If the cultural concepts include voodoo or witchcraft, then the therapeutic situation will be seen in that context, and a curse uncovered; which, using the power point of the present, the doctor will then reverse.

Quite without the context of formal hypnosis, however, the same issues apply. With the greatest understanding and compassion, let me mention that Western medicine is in its way one of the most uncivilized hypnotic devices. The most educated Western doctors will look with utter dismay and horror at the thought of a chicken being sacrificed in a primitive witch doctor’s hut, and yet will consider it quite scientific and inevitable that a woman sacrifice two breasts to cancer. The doctors will simply see no other way out, and unfortunately neither will the patient.

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In your time, medical men, again with great superiority, look at primitive cultures and harshly judge the villagers they think are held in the sway of witch doctors or voodooism; and yet through advertisement and organization, your doctors impress upon each individual in your culture that you must have a physical examination every six months or you will get cancer; that you must have medical insurance because you will become ill.

In many instances, therefore, modern physicians are inadequate witch doctors who have forgotten their craft — hypnotists who no longer believe in the power of healing, and whose suggestions bring about other diseases which are diagnosed in advance.

You are told what to look for; you are as cursed — far more — as any native in a tiny village, only you lose breasts, appendixes, and other portions of your anatomy. The doctors follow their own ideas, of course, and in that system they see themselves as completely justified — as humane.

In the medical field, as in no other, you are faced directly with the full impact of your beliefs, for doctors are not the healthiest, but the least healthy. They fall prey to the beliefs to which they so heartily subscribe. Their concentration is upon disease, not health.

[... 6 paragraphs ...]

Now: Your doctors are also the victims of their own belief system, in other words.

They constantly surround themselves with negative suggestions. When disease is seen as an invader, forced upon the integrity of the self for no reason, then the individual seems powerless and the conscious mind an adjunct. The patient is sometimes compelled to sacrifice one organ after another to his beliefs, and to the doctor’s.

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Chiropractors, again, are hypnotists. Unfortunately they are trying to gain respectability in medical terms, and are therefore emphasizing the “scientific” aspects of their work, and playing down the intuitive elements and natural healing. The “quacks” end up with those who are hopeless, who realize the ineffectiveness of other belief systems, find them wanting, and have no place to go. Some of the “quacks” may be unscrupulous and dishonest, yet many of them possess an intuitive understanding, and can work “cures” through the instant alteration of belief. The medical profession is fond of saying that such individuals prevent patients from seeking proper treatment. The fact is that such patients no longer believe in the doctors’ system of belief, and so could not be helped by them.

[... 10 paragraphs ...]

(Pause.) The initiative must be yours. You will never know unless you try the exercise. Now if you are in poor health, and have a physician, you had better continue going to him, because you still rely on that system of belief — but use these exercises as supplements to build up your own sense of inner health, and to protect you against any negative suggestions given by your doctor. Utilize the belief in physicians since you have it.

—NoPR Chapter 16: Session 659, April 25, 1973

"Unknowingly, the sick often give up their power to act in a healthy manner to the physicians. The doctors accept this mandate since they share the same framework of belief, so the medical profession obviously needs patients as badly as the ill need the hospitals. Society as you know it, not understanding the nature of normal aggression, considers it violent. The prisons and law enforcement agencies need criminals in the same way that criminals need them, for they operate within the same system of belief. Each accepts violence as a method of behavior and survival. (Pause.) If you do not understand that you create your own reality, then you may assign all good results to a personified god, and need the existence of a devil to explain the undesirable reality. So churches as they now exist in Western society need a devil as well as a god.

[... 9 paragraphs ...]

The voodoo and the healer, the witch doctor and the priest, are all held in honor, yet are also looked upon with a certain terror because of the power and knowledge involved. The man who heals or the man who curses both imply a power of knowledge to many individuals. To those who are caught up with fundamental ideas in pious terms, religious power is a frightening thing. Normal aggression, seen as evil, is therefore segregated within the self — and also seen everywhere outside. Period.

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The use of your private energy brings you into intimate relationship with your own source of power. Healing involves great natural aggressive thrusts of energy, growth, and the focus of vitality. The more powerless you feel, the less able you are to utilize your own healing abilities. You are then forced to project these outward upon a physician, a healer, or any outside agency. If your own belief in the physician “works” and you are cured of symptoms, you are physically relieved, and yet your own belief in yourself may be further infringed upon. If you are making no effective efforts to handle your own problems, then the symptoms will simply reappear in a new fashion, and the same process will be reinitiated. You may lose faith in your doctor while still retaining confidence in doctors as a whole, and run from one to another.

[... 3 paragraphs ...]

(10:59.) I am dealing here mainly with Western culture. In some other civilizations, and particularly in the past as you think of it, witch doctors operated within a context of nature accepted by all. The witch doctor, while initiating natural forces on behalf of his patient, who seemed momentarily unable to do so, was then returning the patient to the source of himself and reviving his own buried sense of power. That is the source of physical life, the sense of power and action. When a man or a woman feels powerless, as you think of it, he or she will die."

—NoPR Chapter 17: Session 663, May 14, 1973

"As I have said before, your thoughts are reality. They directly affect your body. It seems that you are highly civilized people because you put your ill into hospitals where they can be cared for. What you do, of course, is to isolate a group of people who are filled with negative beliefs about illness. The contagion of beliefs spreads. Patients are obviously in hospitals because they are ill. The sick and their doctors both work on that principle.

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The individual is made to feel powerless, at the mercy of doctors or nurses who often do not have the time or energy to be personable, or to explain his [or her] condition in terms that he can understand. The patient is therefore forced to transfer his own sense of power to others, which further deepens his misery; this in turn reinforces the sense of powerlessness that initiated his condition.

Furthermore, the natural elements of sun, air, and earth are refused him. The stability of familiarity is withdrawn. Now with your set of beliefs you are indeed more or less obligated to go to hospitals in severe conditions. I am not saying here that many doctors and nurses do not try their best to promote healing, and certainly healings occur — but they do so despite the system and not because of it. In many cases the belief of a doctor in a person who is ill revives him and rearouses his own belief in himself. The patient’s confidence in the doctor will then reinforce the entire medical procedure, and he may then be filled with faith in his recovery. But as there are natural healing processes within animals, so there are in your race.

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The old witch doctors operated within the surroundings of nature, utilizing its great healing ability, directing its practical and symbolic qualities in a creative fashion."

—NoPR Chapter 17: Session 661, May 7, 1973