One of his cases, a woman with terminal breast cancer, her weight down to 90 pounds and near-comatose, had been moved to a hospice because her husband did not feel capable of caring for her in her final agonies. But realizing she had been relocated to a place to die, the woman suddenly became pugnaciously assertive. "From a neat and well-educated woman," says Schilder, "she changed into a woman who was cursing, singing dirty songs. She carried on like this for three weeks—although she still waited until people left the room to do it!" An internist was shocked to observe that her tumor was starting to regress. Ten years later, she remained in a good state of health—"still very tidy," says Schilder, "but now very earthy as well."
Japanese researcher Yujiro Ikemi, one of the pioneers in the study of spontaneous remission, also observed an increase in emotional expressivity and autonomous behavior. He describes the case of a 58-year-old farmer's wife who, after years of knuckling under to a harpy of a mother-in-law and a "bossy and self-centered husband," abruptly rebelled upon being diagnosed with terminal stomach cancer. As one token of her new assertiveness, Ikemi notes, she insisted on joining a group that specialized in "the loud recitation of Chinese poems."
Although only one of Schilder's cases had a formal religious experience during their healings, Ikemi noted a particular quality of faith—the farmer's wife along with all four other cases in his initial study had, as he puts it, "completely committed themselves to the fate or the will of God."
But how integral is spiritual experience to the seeming occurrence of miracles? In his independent study of the reported healings at the shrine of Lourdes, psychologist Donald West observed that many cases were diseases known to normally undergo remission—tuberculosis, for example. Researcher Alexis Carrell concluded that most of the Lourdes cures that have been officially certified as miracles (a total of 65 out of 6,000 claimants and tens of millions of supplicants since 1884) seemed to occur through an enormous acceleration of the body's natural healing processes.
The Lourdes Medical Commission, however, insists that it bars cases of spontaneous remission when it deems these could have resulted from biological mechanisms that would require no spiritual intervention to explain them.
Until very recently, there seems to have been an odd collusion between conventional medicine and religion to make God a kind of catch basin of anomaly. "I can't explain why you got well;" the doctor says to the patient who defies his prognosis. "The only word I can think of is 'miracle.'" James Gordon, M.D., a professor at Georgetown Medical School and director of the Center for Mind-Body Studies, notes that "science often ignores these cases because it is busy looking for statistical averages. This is not good science, just convenient science. Even if they hardly ever happen, these 'miracles' are the kinds of exceptions to the ruling paradigm that inevitably create new areas of study."
As Dr. Rosenberg wrote about the mystifying Mr. DeAngelo, "The single most important element of good science is to ask an important question." The Institute of Noetic Sciences' Caryle Hirshberg, Ph.D., a former Stanford biochemist, has become one of the leading inquirers into the subject of spontaneous remission. For the last eight years, beginning with a data base search on a donated computer and time spent "poring over big, dusty old volumes of the British Medical Journal," Hirshberg eventually gathered hundreds of cases into a massive book, Spontaneous Remissions: An Annotated Bibliography.
Simply Remission
Her undertaking cannot help but spawn a few revolutionary questions. What percentage of medical cures, for example, may be instances of spontaneous healing mistakenly attributed to treatment? As Hirshberg writes, "Since remission happens with unknown frequency, it can convincingly be argued that some of both conventional and unconventional therapies' 'successes' are simply cases of remission and have nothing to do with the [therapies'] efficacy."
Could remissions be a more common phenomenon than we suspect? Says Patricia Norris of the Menninger Clinic, who's best known for her work with a nine-year-old boy who healed of a terminal brain tumor, after all treatment had failed, using only biofeedback and mental imagery, "It's completely natural to heal. Spontaneous remission is too mystical-sounding; it's like the medieval term "spontaneous generation," when they didn't have enough science to see germs. Doctors think mind-body factors are a very minor part of curing cancer. But patients who heal say it's major. If our culture supported it, I think more people could get over cancer by bolstering their own immune systems."
In this, she edges further out on a theoretical limb than Hirshberg, who stressed at a recent conference, "We can't withhold treatment if statistics—at least, the ones available to us—tell us spontaneous remission is still only one chance in eighty thousand." She proposes "offering conscientious hope. We should ethically be able to say, 'Here are the survival statistics on your disease, here is the mortality rate, and five out of every three hundred or whatever have a spontaneous regression. You're just presenting the information."
But what is the information? Discussing the story of Dr. Rosenberg's Mr. DeAngelo, an alcoholic who polished off four quarts of bourbon a week, a doctor interrupted: "Did the guy quit drinking after they told him he had cancer?" Told no, he asked amid swelling laughter, "Well, what kind of whiskey did he drink?"
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