A paradigm is an umbrella of metaphysical premises and additional underlying assumptions and logical systems implicit or explicit in the day-to-day exploration of a group of scientists in a given field of human endeavor. Accordingly, conventional medicine has a working paradigm, with materialist metaphysics, classical physics, biochemistry, and molecular biology plus neo-Darwinism as its base.
Why do we need a paradigm shift in medicine? As noted by the philosopher Thomas Kuhn, who formulated the idea of paradigms and paradigm shifts, a paradigm is useful to its practitioners only until it begins to exhibit paradoxes that it cannot resolve and anomalous data that it cannot explain. Why is a paradigm shift in medicine needed? Because clinical trials are demonstrating the validity of alternative medicine practices, which constitute paradoxes for conventional medicine (see chapter 1). In addition, there are now definitive data for spontaneous healing, prayer healing at a distance, even placebo healing, which constitute anomalous data for the mainstream paradigm. Clearly a shift is called for to an integrative paradigm that can act as an umbrella for conventional and alternative medicine practices. I have already outlined this integrative paradigm—Integral Medicine—in the previous two chapters.
In this chapter, I want to delve into a little bit of history both in order to give credit where it belongs and to bring out additional paradoxes and anomalous data that conventional medicine cannot handle, but the new paradigm can (which will be the subject of the next chapter).
The truth is that most practitioners of medicine continue to think strictly according to classical physics even after a hundred years of the advent of the new quantum ideas. Classical physics gives us some invalid prejudices, the most blinding one being that there is an independent separate reality out there, and it is objective, that is, independent of consciousness. In medicine, this prejudice forces practitioners to ignore the causal role of the healer's and the patient's consciousness in healing, much evidence and even common sense notwithstanding.
Mary Baker Eddy (1906), who founded Christian Science, suffered from chronic illness for most of her life. In 1866, she suffered from an accidental injury that took her almost to death. Somehow she came out of this injury not only healed but with the insight that became the basis of Christian Science: Disease is unreal, a consciousness-created illusion, she said. And consciousness can cure it by de-structuring and restructuring its belief system.
Another prejudice that doesn't help is strict materialism, the idea that everything is made of matter and its correlates, energy and force fields. In this view, mind and consciousness are epiphenomena of matter. Elementary particles make conglomerates called atoms, atoms make molecules, molecules make the cells that make up the body including the brain, and the brain makes consciousness and the mind. If you take this view—the doctrine of upward causation, so named because all cause proceeds upwards from the lowest level of the elementary particles—then you must relegate consciousness to only an ornamental existence with no causal efficacy. Once again, this leaves no room for self-healing. You must also look at the mind as synonymous with the brain, leaving no room for meaning.
Yet many medical practitioners would at least privately admit that there is a role for meaning in healing, in what meaning the patient sees in the disease (Dossey 1989). But where does meaning come from? The brain looked upon as a classical computer cannot process meaning (see chapter 3). No, what processes meaning is the mind.
If matter is the only basis for things, there is also no room for such extraphysical objects as chi or prana, is there? Under the influence of material realism even practitioners of Eastern medicine have fallen prey to this materialistic emphasis and become defensive. For quite a while they have been looking for material explanations of their concepts, although the trend is now reversing.
With classical thinking, you either think of consciousness, mind, and the vital body as epiphenomena or you think of them as separate world entities, as dual, and then dualism—how can separate dual objects interact?—haunts you (Stapp 1995). So classical thinkers in medicine are forced to ignore well-substantiated data of mind-body healing and the well-appreciated success of traditional Chinese and Indian medicine and homeopathy, because the alternative is a philosophical blunder of attributing to the brain and the physical body the causal efficacy of consciousness working in conjunction with vital energy, and the mind.
There are data that squarely contradict other classical prejudices of medical practitioners. One such prejudice is continuity. Conventional medicine practitioners believe that the healing process is cause-driven and that these causes act in a continuous fashion. In this way the healing generated by these causes must also be continuous, gradual. Thus the prejudice of continuity translates as gradualism for the remission of disease. But there are now many well-publicized cases of spontaneous remission, including severe cases of cancer (Chopra 1989; Weil 1995; Schlitz and Lewis 1997), which are not gradual but sudden!
Another prejudice is the belief in locality—that all causes and effects must be local and must propagate via signals through space, taking a finite time. This one falls flat against the now famous documentation that prayer, even at a distance, even without a physical signal traveling to the patient, has the power to heal (Byrd 1988; see also Dossey 1989).
In 1982, the physician Larry Dossey wrote a book entitled Space, Time, and Medicine. I remember looking at the book; how could I miss it, being an avid reader of New Age books at the time? This was a time when even the now-famous Aspect's experiment definitively demonstrating quantum nonlocality, signal-less communication between correlated quantum objects, was not published yet. But Dossey was already talking about nonlocality in healing; he was urging medicine practitioners to give up the classical way of looking at space and time, with locality, and heed the message of quantum nonlocality, or action at a distance.
Six years later, the physician Randolph C. Byrd (1988) did his double-blind experiment on distant prayer healing. In this experiment, carried out at a San Francisco hospital, a group of patients were studied as to their healing rate, but only an arbitrarily chosen fraction of them were prayed for at a distance by a prayer group, without the knowledge of either the doctor or the patient. The result of the experiment is history: Those prayed for received the benefit of an enhanced healing rate! Prayer works for healing even at a distance. Nonlocality is important in healing! Can quantum physics be indeed important for medicine? Is the nonlocality exhibited in distant prayer healing an example of quantum nonlocality? (See chapter 6 for the answer.)
Then in 1989 came another seminal book on the possible application of quantum physics in healing. The book was called Quantum Healing, and its author is the now famous Deepak Chopra, ex-endocrinologist, now Ayurvedic practitioner. Chopra was making the case for quantum thinking as the explanation of some cases of mind-body healing that seem like self-healing, patients healing themselves.
Conventional physicians are puzzled not only by self-healing, but also by mind-body healing in general because in their classical thinking either self and mind are brain, or they are dual entities, so it is dualism to entertain them as valid entities. Chopra suggested that perhaps the mind interacts with the body through a quantum mechanical body, and perhaps it is consciousness that helps mediate the interaction. Chopra was suggesting no less than downward causation by consciousness, quantum style. He was inspired to do this upon seeing discontinuous “quantum leaps” in self-healing.
The truth is that quite a few physicians seem to have overcome classical prejudices decades ago. I will mention one other—Andrew Weil. Even before Chopra, in 1983, Weil was already inviting his physician colleagues to look at quantum physics for guidance as to how to introduce consciousness back into the science of healing (Weil 1983). Not only that, Weil suggested that cases of spontaneous healing may very well be the result of a “flash of insight.”
Weil cited the case of the patient designated as S. R., who was diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease (a cancer of the lymphatic system). Hodgkin's disease is known to progress in four stages; S. R. was already in stage 3. She was pregnant at the time and did not want to lose her baby, so she refused conventional treatment with radiation or chemotherapy and found a new doctor. Under his supervision, she had surgery, even radiation treatment, but the situation continued to worsen.
It just so happened that her physician was researching the application of LSD therapy for cancer patients. Under his guidance, she took a guided LSD trip during which the doctor encouraged her to go deep inside herself and communicate with the life in her womb. S. R. was able to do that when her physician asked her if she had the right to cut off the new life. It was then that S. R. had the sudden flash of insight that she had the choice to live or die. It took a while after this illumination, a lot of lifestyle changes to be sure, but she was cured. Incidentally, she also gave birth to a healthy child.
This is a clear incident demonstrating that we do have the capacity to choose our own reality, but to do so we need to be in a non-ordinary “illumined” state of consciousness.
Quantum collapse of the waves of possibility is fundamentally discontinuous. Although conditioning obscures this discontinuity or freedom of choice (Mitchell and Goswami 1992) in our normal functioning, it is available and its efficacy shows up in what we call the creative event—the flash of insight that Weil referred to in the case of S. R. So in the quantum view, spontaneous (and therefore discontinuous) events of healing can be seen as examples of creativity in healing.
Quantum collapse is also fundamentally nonlocal. Thus non-locality of healing, as in prayer healing, finds straightforward explanation in quantum thinking.
In the next chapter, we delve even deeper into quantum physics than we have so far to understand the gifts of quantum physics to the science of life, health, healing, and death—the usual concerns of medicine.