Chapter 1 starts by introducing Sam Londe, a shoe salesman who, in the early 1970s, was diagnosed with esophageal cancer. Despite surgeries, the cancer spread to his liver, and doctors told him he had only months left to live. After he died, the autopsy revealed that the scans performed had yielded a false positive, indicating a much more serious kind of cancer than he actually had. Dispenza argues that since Londe and both of his doctors expected him to die, he died “from thought alone” (5).

Next, Chapter 1 covers the case of a graduate student who joined a medical trial for a new type of antidepressant. This was a randomized trial in which some participants were unknowingly assigned to a control group and given a placebo while other participants received the real medication. The student ended up taking all the pills in a suicide attempt but immediately changed his mind and called for help. His blood pressure fell dangerously low while his pulse rocketed up, and ER doctors reached out to the trial administrators so they could treat the overdose. However, it turned out that the student had been taking the placebo, and the pills he had overdosed on were harmless.