SINCE WRITING Love, Medicine and Miracles, I’ve received an outpouring of letters and calls from people thanking me for helping them find the path to healing. I hope what I’ve learned in the intervening years will help you, too, to find that path. My emphasis in this new book and in Love, Medicine and Miracles is on self-healing, that ability given to us by our Creator and too long neglected by medicine. That does not mean that I am advocating turning one’s back on the medical profession—but I also do not believe in relying on it alone. Modern medicine and self-healing need not and should not be mutually exclusive. I advise using all your options, which include your innate ability to heal, as well as what science can offer you. Drawing on my experience and that of the many exceptional people I have encountered, I explore the role of the self-healing system, explain the science behind it, and show why love is physiologic.
Woody Allen tells us that human beings are divided into mind and body: The mind embraces all the nobler aspirations, like poetry and philosophy, but the body has all the fun. I believe, however, that the body and mind are a unit, bound together via nerves and messenger molecules. Love, hope, joy and peace of mind have physiological consequences, just as depression and despair do. That’s what the science of mindbody communication is all about.
Researchers are now studying the relationships among consciousness, psychosocial factors, attitudinal healing, and immune function. Gradually the medical profession, too, is relearning what once it knew so well—that we cannot understand disease unless we understand the person who has the disease. Recently my wife, Bobbie, was reading Kinflicks, a novel by Lisa Alther, in which a retired doctor speaks his mind:
It’s a notion that is out of favor among the medical profession at present. . . . But when you’ve been at it as long as I have, when you’ve treated people under all circumstances, when you’ve treated their parents and their children, you begin to see patterns. Illness doesn’t strike randomly, like a thief in the night. Certain types of people at certain points in their lives will come down with certain kinds of ailments. You can almost predict it after a while. A disease can serve the same function for an alert doctor as a Rorschach inkblot for a psychologist; it’s like a form of existential self-expression for a patient if you like. I know this may sound a little farfetched, my dear, but disease is not arbitrary; and it does not attack. But goodness, you’re not interested in an old man’s pet theories.
When appearing as a medical expert in a court case relating illness and stress, I was asked, “When did this new theory originate?” My response was, “Hundreds of years ago.” Why? Because that was when physicians had little in the way of drug treatments with which to treat their patients—instead they had to know their patients and the circumstances of their lives in order to heal them.
The contribution of life-style and the emotions to the health of the individual was a concept easily accepted centuries ago. Today feelings have to be shown to create chemical alterations in our bodies in order for us to accept them as physiologic. Fortunately, we now have the science to document those changes.
Psychologists have shown that the effects of love on the body can be measured: An unloved infant will have retarded bone growth and may even die; a stroked infant grows faster. The effects of peace of mind are measurable too: People who meditated, as well as those who confided traumatic experiences to diaries rather than repressing them, were shown to have enhanced immune function. Love and peace of mind do protect us. They allow us to overcome the problems that life hands us. They teach us to survive . . . to live now . . . to have the courage to confront each day and utilize our pain and suffering as motivators and redirectors.
As children, however, most of us did not grow up in an environment with sufficient love and hope. It is time to move beyond that legacy of lovelessness, to forgive and be reborn. The energy for this rebirth often comes when we see and accept our own mortality. When we are willing to encounter our shadow and change, we can, as Freud tells us, convert neurotic conflicts into normal problems.
There will always be loss and grief. I know, however, that out of pain new love and true healing can occur. One must learn to use one’s pain for personal transformation, or longevity will be no gift. The path is difficult but it will lead to moments of great beauty.
Peace, Love and Healing is about the very special people who have taken this path and the lessons we can learn from them. The dreams, stories and drawings of exceptional people are shared here to show how emotions can heal lives as well as cure diseases. I talk about people with cancer and AIDS frequently, because they are a large part of my experience. I will also share the stories of people with neurological problems, arthritis, diabetes, collagen diseases and heart disease. The healing mechanisms are the same for all diseases and for all patients as well as their doctors. We must all confront the reality that no one lives forever. Illness and death are not signs of failure; what is a failure is not living. Our goal is learning to live—joyously and lovingly. Disease can often teach us to do that.
When I speak to five hundred people with AIDS about the value of their illness, the gift and challenge it represents, and nobody tries to remove me from the stage, I know how courageous they are and how much they have learned about healing. When I discuss survivors I am interested in how they embrace life, not how they avoid death. Those who have learned to take on the challenge of their illness and share responsibility for their treatment have chosen the path that leads to peace of mind and healing on a spiritual level. This profoundly affects their ability to be cured physically, as the energy formerly involved in conflict is set free, and the body’s immune system receives a dramatic “live” message.
However, those of you who feel guilt because you believe you have caused your own illnesses, or who feel like failures if you cannot cure them, are giving your healing system a destructive message. You must let go of feelings of guilt and failure so that, unencumbered by these negative messages, you can utilize to the fullest your innate healing capacities.
Our Creator has given us five senses to help us survive threats from the external world, and a sixth sense, our healing system, to help us survive internal threats. There is much that we can do, as individuals, to activate or impede this healing system, just as we can choose to confront danger or close our eyes and ears to it.
It took me many years to learn that our ability to mobilize our healing capacity means that survival statistics do not apply to individuals. Individuals who change in response to their illness can exceed expectations or achieve results doctors consider miraculous. When talking to these exceptional patients the words love, faith, living in the moment, forgiveness and hope come up again and again. The inner peace these people have acquired on a psychospiritual level leads to healing and often to cures as well. Self-healers are all the same. The results they achieve are no coincidence. Every doctor can share anecdotes about these people, though few doctors understand what they have witnessed. We must begin to acknowledge that these miraculous healings are scientific and can be taught to others, thereby creating more anecdotes and eventually a scientific understanding of these events.
It is my feeling that no longer should medicine be only a mechanistic specialty that deals with the unexplained by calling it miraculous. Now is the time to reopen our study of the healing process and alter the way medicine approaches it, to turn our attention from disease and death to health and life.
If we do not make this change in the theory and practice of medicine we cannot move forward. Every generation has and always will have its threatening illnesses. If we find a cure for one, another takes its place. If we find a wonder drug for one, we must search for another wonder drug for the next. We need therefore to focus not just on finding new wonder drugs, but on teaching people how to utilize the naturally occurring “wonder drugs” that exist within each of us. I predict that in the next decade, through genetic engineering, these internal wonder drugs will be cloned by scientists and used therapeutically. How much better it would be if we could stop science from being only a mimic and let it teach us to be our own genetic engineers.
That is what I am trying to get people to do in Peace, Love and Healing. I have remained a surgeon for two reasons: One is that most people refuse this challenge and I can still help them, but more importantly I would like to combine my mechanical skills with your healing skills to achieve the greatest potential. If I can make all of this credible, we can accomplish the incredible.
Still, there is no denying that not every physical illness can be cured. We can, however, make use of all illness to help us redirect our lives. I suppose, in the broadest sense, my book shows how illness or suffering can heal not just the individual but society. As the threat of nuclear disaster and famine can lead us to love and healing in our global relationships, so illness can do the same for our personal relationships.
Accepting our mortality as a motivator and not denying it, looking into the shadows of our unconscious, developing self-love and self-esteem—this is what I want to share with you. As a surgeon I know incredible things can happen when energy is freed for healing. We are looking beyond quantity (the province of medicine) to quality of life.
True healers know the value of afflictions and of adversity. They know that within the symbolic experience of disease lies a path to change and self-healing and a healthy bodymind. Let us start on that path. Allow the disease to heal your life. Begin your journey and become your authentic self. Now.