The lighthearted exchange belies its cut-to-the-chase significance. The mechanisms of spontaneous remission remain obscure. Mitchell May's orthopedist avers, "I have a lot of respect for the body's ability to heal itself—I literally take people half apart and put them back together again, and the human body comes through time after time." But in the case of his most famous patient, he says without hesitation, "We tried the ordinary and the extraordinary as far as medicine goes, from mind-altering medication right up to hypnosis and acupuncture. Nothing worked. Whatever turned the switch and made him heal, it did it much more rapidly than conventional explanations allow."
Perhaps, suggests Dr. Gordon of the Center for Mind-Body Studies, explanation isn't the only agenda. "Trying to systematize these phenomena may be the wrong way to go. Maybe for now we should concentrate more on how to create the conditions to help mobilize the amazing plasticity of the mind-body."
It is a strategy well known to shamans, whose elaborate, emotionally charged ritual ceremonies seem to create optimal conditions to arouse the inner capacity for healing. journalist Rob Schultheiss, writing about his survival of a devastating climbing accident, suggested that "perhaps the powerful hidden self only appeared when the normal limited self was shocked or scarified or otherwise blown out of the way for an instant, clearing the boards." Perhaps it is the same hidden self the late Norman Cousins referred to when he surmised the existence of "a healing system... a grand orchestration of all the body's systems in enabling human beings to meet a serious challenge."
But can the orchestra be conducted at will? Mitchell May, who eventually became an apprentice to healer Jack Gray, suggests that "dissecting a person's experience might not enable you to recreate it. It's like lightning." He pauses for a minute, looking for a better analogy. "Or like an amazingly delicious pot of soup, where there are all these ingredients plus something else, some art, that makes it taste so good."
Dr. Schilder, who believes it possible to create a psychology of healing, nonetheless reports the case of a woman who, returning to a stressful family situation, had a recurrence of a tumor after a year of apparent remission. "She tried to repeat a profound spiritual change that had occurred on a trip into the mountains, which she felt had started her spectacular recovery. But she found that she couldn't force that change to happen again."
"If you took these cases as literal instructions, you would have to somehow create a dramatic replay of a pivotal event—or an entire set of circumstances in the person's life. It would certainly be a different sort of therapy than we're used to." In the meanwhile, it may be as one patient who had experienced a remission enigmatically put it: "You can't prescribe it, it can't be taught, and you can learn it."
What then can we draw from the archives of the miraculous? I find inspiration in the frequent evidence that, as the Arabic physician Ali Pul once wrote, "The medicine of the soul is the medicine of the body:" that what we do to live more wholeheartedly has innate healing power.
The Psychological Pivot
Dr. Schilder notes that spontaneous remitters "often gain access to something that is essential to them. Often the psychological pivot associated with healing is seemingly very small: For a patient who has been a strict, loyal housewife for 30 years, just taking a few minutes to sit in chair, stretch your legs, and let the kids run around and the hell with housekeeping can be a hell of a transformation." Schilder's story reminded me of the story of the Zen master who, asked if his practice of self-insight had enabled him to work miracles, replied, "My miracle is, I eat when I'm hungry, I sleep when I'm tired." Or of Rosa Parks, whose small act of authenticity on an Alabama bus mobilized the healing resources of the social body to defeat a seemingly invincible pathology.
"Spontaneous remitters," another physician told me, "almost invariably say they weren't shooting so much for a cure, but rather to live congruently at long last with their inner values." Rosa Parks just didn't feel like giving up her seat. Perhaps the most spectacular miracles begin with a single instance of self-listening, a few small acts of affirmation—with the tiniest mustard seed of faith in the deeper self. For some of those who walked the path of healing, disease seemed to have forced a moment that arrives for most of us all too infrequently, when life itself depended on becoming authoritatively, powerfully, even crazily, the person they were meant to be.
What most of the patients I interviewed wound up doing was the opposite of what sick people are usually expected to do: Rather than simply trying to "get back to normal," many had embarked, at the most harrowing of times, on a voyage of self-discovery. They had clung instinctively to the circumnavigator's faith that the only way home was forward, into the round, unknown world of the self. People who have been through illness's dark passage can occasionally give us a glimpse not only of what it is like to become whole, but what it is to be fully human.
Type M: Do You Have A Miracle Personality?
At present, there is no way of knowing to what extent psychosocial factors play a key role in spontaneous remission. Any number of unique factors might prove crucial—genetic inheritance, nutrition "alternative" medicines with immune-enhancing properties, perhaps some still-undetectable quirk in a person's neuroimmunological "wiring."
Inner Change
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