Writing “Miracles!” on Every Prescription Pad
But couldn’t everyone’s life become a work of art? Why should the lamp or the house be an art object, but not your life?
—Michel Foucault
“Irv was just fifty-four years old. He had been a cop, and then had worked as a private investigator for about twenty-five years. He liked to go sailing in Sheepshead Bay, and did woodworking in his garage. When the heart attack hit, it felt like someone had slugged him in the chest with a four-by-four beam. He says he remembers just dropping like a leaf in the wind.
“His wife and son held his hand at the bedside. The Columbia Presbyterian heart surgeon pursed his lips and looked down. ‘He’s been in a coma for five days in spite of everything we’ve done. He’s on the transplant list, but I don’t think he’ll make it long enough for us to find him a new heart.’ They cried and kissed him, and said goodbye.
“It was five months later when Irv walked into my office. He was still a bit shaky, way overweight, and he looked pale. But he sat down, smiled, and said, ‘I shouldn’t be here, Doc.’
“‘How come?’ I asked. He looked down at his hands. ‘Well, because I died five months ago...’
“Or so it seemed to him. A heroic last-option quadruple bypass surgery saved his life—but just barely.
“Irv had pretty bad diabetes for about fifteen years. That set him up for his severe heart attack, and a lot of other problems. It also left him with numb and painfully burning feet and hands. I couldn’t do much about his diabetes; that was a job for another doctor, but as a pain doc I sure could help him with the burning damage to his nerves.
“I adjusted his nerve medications, put him on a couple of new things, a couple of supplements, and then we just sat and talked for about twenty minutes. This was a man who had gone through a huge life crisis, and was actually still in crisis, still very wobbly. His struggle was something palpable in the room, like the shadow of death, still there. He talked about his family, his job, what had been important to him, his past sense of meaning and religious practice, and the future. Then he started to cry.
“We talked for a while, then I looked down at my prescription pad and I began to write. As a Scottish Episcopalian who was not particularly religious, I had never written such a thing before in my career. I handed it to him and he looked down at the script. The prescription read ‘Long conversations with your rabbi, twice a week.’ He left the office with an odd smile on his face.
“Over the subsequent six months, Irv got more involved with his synagogue. He took the opportunity to allow his terrifying brush with death to work a deep magic on his sense of himself and his day-to-day life. He finally found himself much less concerned with the small things. He still had significant symptoms, but the residual burning in his feet and hands did not bother him as much. He spent more time with his son. He complained much less and got out of the house much more.
“He came back to me and told me he had started a program, through his temple, to provide services for older people in the community. His years as a private investigator had given him the ability to find many resources for his clients, and to protect them from fraud. He said that this was what he was meant to do, and that he could not have found it without going through his illness. He allowed the pain and suffering to become his greatest teacher. As he talked to me about his new calling, his face was bright and his hands were steady. The shadow of death was gone from the room.”1
Imagine the healing arts of the future reformulated around the idea of thoughts, driven by the power of feelings, as shapers of our reality. When a cardiac patient visits a doctor, the first prescription the doctor might offer might not be a drug but a precisely formulated sequence of thoughts and feelings designed to affect the genetic predisposition of people at risk for heart disease.
James Dillard, MD, who told his patient Irv’s story in The Heart of Healing, is a specialist in pain medicine, and director of the Pain Medicine Clinic at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City. He wrote a compendious book on the subject that combines alternative and allopathic approaches, called The Chronic Pain Solution,2 and also wrote Alternative Medicine for Dummies.3 He has been featured in Newsweek and People magazines, and has appeared on Oprah, NPR, and the Today Show.
Dillard’s inspired impulse to employ his prescription pad to write down the name, not of a drug, but of a spiritual exercise, may have done far more for Irv than any pharmaceutical. It engaged the customized pharmacopeia of Irv’s own immune system, a resource uniquely targeted to solve Irv’s body’s particular problems. Doctors are realizing that there are miraculous healing effects that occur as a result of changes in consciousness such as belief, intention, spiritual practice, and prayer. The medical profession is taking increasing note of how effective prayer is as a medical intervention; prayer is even becoming pervasive in the medical community.
A large-scale study was performed by the Jewish Theological Seminary in December 2004. It surveyed 1,087 physicians. Among the doctors were practitioners of many faiths: Catholics, Protestants, Jews (broken out into groups of Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, and culturally identified but not religiously observant Jews), Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists.
According to the results of the survey, two-thirds of doctors now believe that prayer is important in medicine. Miracles occur today, according to three-quarters of the group. Among physicians in every religious group in the study, except for less religiously observant Jews, more than 50% of participants believe that miracles occur today. Certain groups of doctors (among them Christians of all denominations and Orthodox Jews) believed to a very high degree (80% or more) that miracles happen today.
Two-thirds said that they encouraged their patients to pray, either because they believed it was psychologically beneficial to the patient or because they believed that God might answer those prayers, or both. Half of them said that they encouraged their patients to have other people pray for them. Half of them said that they prayed for their patients as a whole, and nearly 60% said that they prayed for individual patients. An average of 55% of the physicians reported seeing miraculous recoveries in patients, and a third or more of physicians (of every religious group) said they had seen miraculous recoveries—even when the percentage of doctors in that group who prayed for patients was well below one-third.4 Between 50% and 80% of physicians—even those of weak religious faith—believe that miracles can happen today. There’s good reason for their conviction; a recent meta-analysis of prayer studies found that “prayer offered on behalf of others yields positive results.”5 And to the surprise of researchers who believed that college students become increasingly secularized as they progress through school, a large-scale survey found the opposite. Though church attendance diminished, with college students being less likely to attend church than high school students, their spiritual focus, and concern for the intangible aspects of human existence, increased at the same time.6
Unlike linear medicine, miracles, prayer, and spirituality all embrace the idea of sudden and dramatic improvement in health. Miraculous cures are hard to study, since they cannot be predicted using the methods by which clinical trials are run. In their book Catastrophe Theory, Alexander Woodcock and Monte Davis note, “The mathematics underlying three hundred years of science, though powerful and successful, have encouraged a one-sided view of change. These mathematical principles are ideally suited to analyze—because they were created to analyze—smooth, continuous quantitative change: the smoothly curving paths of planets around the sun, the continuously varying pressure of a gas as it is heated and cooled, the quantitative increase of a hormone level in the bloodstream. But there is another kind of change, too, change that is less suited to mathematical analysis: the abrupt bursting of a bubble, the discontinuous transition from ice at its melting point to water at its freezing point, the qualitative shift in our minds when we ‘get’ a pun or a play on words.”7 Randomized clinical trails cannot study discontinuous and exceptional phenomena like miracles. We have to rely on the accounts of doctors who’ve seen them, and patients who’ve experienced them.
Discontinuity and Transformation
A serious attempt to collect stories of sudden, discontinuous personal change has been made by psychiatry professor William Miller, PhD, at the University of New Mexico, author of some twenty-five books and many articles, and clinical psychologist Janet C’de Baca, PhD. After a newspaper article about their research in rapid personal shifts, they received hundreds of phone calls from people who had undergone rapid personal changes, including miraculous healings. They coined the term “quantum change” to describe this phenomenon, a term which, unlike the word “miracles,” frees this type of experience from identification solely with religious observance (though the majority of quantum changes do indeed occur in the context of religious experiences). They describe many of these cases in their book Quantum Change.8
The authors tell us, “A decade later, we have a reasonably good description of the phenomenon and full confidence that sudden, profound, and enduring positive changes can and do occur in the lives of real people. Lives are transformed utterly and permanently, as utter darkness suddenly gives way to a joyful dawn that had not even been imagined. It happens.” In the book, they also look for the commonalities associated with all such quantum healings. Although they grapple to explain how and why it happens, they eventually offer five different perspectives that may explain why quantum change occurs. But there is no doubt that it occurs; our difficulties in measuring it reflect the limits of our science, not the limits of miraculous healing.
We change constantly, and the principles used in energy medicine can nudge that change in life-affirming directions. In The Private Life of the Brain, Susan Greenfield, PhD, reminds us, “We are not fixed entities. Even within a day, within an hour, we are different. All the time, experiences leave their mark and in turn determine how we interpret new experiences. As the mind evolves, as we understand everything more deeply, we have increasing control over what happens to us: we are self-conscious. But this self-consciousness itself is not fixed. …It will ebb and flow…”9
Certain genetic characteristics, like hair color and height, are fixed; the Biblical Psalmist, three thousand years ago, demanded, “Which of you, by taking thought, can add one cubit to his height?” Other groups of genes are continuously influenced by the environment, such as those responsible for our immune and inflammatory responses. Yet intriguing accounts from psychotherapists indicate that even these fixed genes might be mutable. Lee Pulos, PhD, a professor and psychotherapist in Vancouver, Canada, describes treating a patient with multiple personality disorder, a man who was legally blind. When this man snapped into his alternate personality, however, he had twenty-twenty vision. Pulos also reports a case by Lee BennetBraun, of a Montreal police officer who made an arrest one evening, and wrote in his report that the subject had brown eyes. The officer checked on the man in his cell three hours later, and noted to his astonishment that the man now exhibited blue eyes. The following morning, the officer visited the suspect again, and found his eyes were green.10 Other therapists report clients who are diabetic and require insulin injections in one subpersonality, and are not diabetic in another subpersonality. Yet still more bizarre are accounts of women who have several menstrual periods a month, the number depending on which subpersonalities are dominant at the time.
These cases are so rare that I am aware of no systematic study of them, or even a way to aggregate them in order to derive commonalities (and perhaps therapeutic approaches) from them. But they point to the possibility that even those genetic characteristics that we consider fixed and immutable may be susceptible to miraculous change. The more we investigate it, the less certainty the genome presents. These cases point us to the importance of keeping our minds open to the possibility of miraculous change and miraculous cures.
In a universe where the miraculous is available to us every day, where discontinuous positive change is always an option, and in which science shows that DNA follows consciousness, it is high time that we began making space in our experience for routine miracles. Every day, we can choose to take conscious control of our life script. As we write mental and emotional software that codes for health and vibrance, we have the potential to catalyze miracles in our bodies.