A Physician’s Search for Sacred Healing
NORMAN SHEALY, M.D., PH.D.
I have always known that there is a universal power we generally call “God,” as well as an aspect of us, the soul, that survives physical death.
Although my family was only minimally attached to the concept of going to church, I found the church’s rituals comforting and attended regularly throughout my childhood and early adolescence. I grew up attending a Southern Methodist church that was remarkably liberal for its day. Teenagers were allowed to dance on Sunday evenings in the basement of the church. I was not aware of the teachings of guilt that seem so prevalent in many religions today. In my mid-teens I was on a statewide debating team taking the positive side of the debate, “And God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten son that whosoever should believeth in Him would not perish but have everlasting life.”
At age sixteen I went off to Duke University where I was often inspired by the sermons of Dr. McClellan, a wonderful Presbyterian minister. Then at nineteen, I entered medical school, three years younger than most of my classmates. I had little time for religion or even thoughts of spirituality over the next eleven years as I pursued medical school, internship, and ultimately a neurosurgical residency at Massachusetts General Hospital. Halfway through the neurosurgical residency, I became engaged, and my fiancée and I discussed at length our spiritual beliefs and what church we would attend. We settled on Trinity Episcopal in Boston, primarily because Dr. Theodore Ferris was one of the most charismatic ministers I’ve ever encountered. We attended couples’ discussion groups at his home about once a month, whenever my schedule allowed.
During post-residency I was still busier with neurosurgery and raising a family than I was with spiritual and religious activity. In October 1971, I founded the first comprehensive pain clinic in the United States. I was dealing with people for whom conventional allopathic medicine had failed. Many of them had undergone multiple, unsuccessful operations. In fact, my average patient had gone through five to seven unsuccessful back operations. Many of them were much worse neurologically and experienced more pain than before the first operation.
In 1972 a synchronous series of events took place. The most important, perhaps, was meeting Olga Worrall, whose work will be discussed at some length later in this book. I had been invited to speak at Stanford University to a group of 1,200 physicians on the value of acupuncture; at that conference I met Olga. I also met Dr. Bill McGarey and subsequently was introduced to the teachings of Edgar Cayce.
Olga and I instantly became friends and remained so for the next thirteen years, throughout the remainder of her life. Through Olga, I was introduced to the concept of “sacred healing.” Yes, I was aware that Oral Roberts apparently talked about doing healing on his radio and television programs. My grandmother had been a great fan of his. I was vaguely aware of Katherine Kuhlman and her work in healing. Yet Olga got my attention partly because she had been scientifically studied, and those studies confirmed many unusual abilities and reports of near-miraculous healing.
Knowing how difficult it is to heal many illnesses, especially through neurosurgery, I became fascinated with the idea that miraculous sacred healing could occur. I visited Olga at the Mt. Washington United Methodist Church in Baltimore, where each Thursday morning about three hundred people attended her healing service at the New Life Clinic.
At the end of August 1972,1 visited the Association for Research and Enlightenment (A.R.E.) in Virginia Beach, which houses the Edgar Cayce readings. Edgar Cayce is best known as the “Sleeping Prophet” who did almost 15,000 trance “readings,” about two-thirds of them related to illness and healing. “The Week of Attunement,” as the conference was called, changed my life even further. Twice I had what is often described as a peak experience, a literal awareness of my connectedness with God and the universe.
Those two events, meeting Olga and the Week of Attunement, led me to the principles and experiences of autogenic training and meditation and finally to a quest for the essence of spirituality. I began collecting letters to Olga from people who claimed she had healed them. Through them I attempted to collect medical documentation to prove sacred healing had occurred as described in these letters. Interestingly, even with the patients’ permission, few physicians answered my requests for medical records.
One of my most profound experiences occurred when I was a senior resident of neurosurgery at the Massachusetts General Hospital. One evening, a man brought his comatose sister into the hospital emergency room. An emergency X-ray of the arteries to the brain demonstrated a moderate tumor in the right frontal lobe, and I removed that tumor, which turned out to be a metastatic squamous cell carcinoma. The woman recovered consciousness overnight. The primary cancer was found to be an exquisitely small tumor in the urethra, and it was apparently cured with radiation.
During the days after her recovery, however, she was extremely agitated and weepy, and one day I said, “If you do not improve your attitude, you will never get well.” She replied, “Oh, Dr. Shealy, are you a Christian Scientist, too?” Her agitation had to do with the fact that she had failed to cure herself and had succumbed to medical treatment, including surgery. I explained to her that I considered all aspects of healing, including medical and surgical therapy, to be God-given.
In 1975 I was invited to debate Dr. William Nolen, a surgeon and popular author, on “The Tomorrow Show” with Tom Snyder. Dr. Nolen had written a book titled Healing: ADoctor in Search of a Miracle. Dr. Nolen properly emphasized that healers such as Katherine Kuhlman seemed to feel that many of their cures took place through “the holy spirit.” He asserted that many of the illnesses may have been psychosomatic and the results purely the power of suggestion or “placebo.”
Despite his relatively negative approach toward sacred healing, Dr. Nolen admitted that a significant majority of patients, perhaps as many as 70 percent, were improved by spiritual healers. Yet he concluded his book with “Healers can’t cure organic diseases. Physicians can.” Then he went on to say, “So let us admit that healers do relieve symptoms and may even, as I’ve already mentioned, cure some functional diseases.” He adds, “We may well admit this; it’s a fact—they’re going to achieve an overall cure rate of 70 percent.”1 Dr. Nolen’s greatest conflict with the sacred healing issue apparently arose from within separate parts of himself!
His statement that he had been “unable to find any such miracle worker”2 who could cure an incurable illness set me on a course to prove that miraculous healing truly occurred. Over the ensuing years I have reviewed more than one hundred medical records documenting miraculous cures. One white crow proves that there are white crows; we now have a huge flock of them. Sacred healing is alive and well.
The Next Step: Holistic Healing
In May, 1978, two hundred twelve physicians and medical students met in Denver, Colorado, to found the American Holistic Medical Association (AHMA), and I became its first president. The word “holistic” was first used by South African Prime Minister Jan Smuts in his 1929 volume Holism and Evolution, in which he laid the conceptual framework for holistic medicine. In 1980, Charlotte McGuire founded the American Holistic Nurses Association. Soon thereafter the terms of complementary, integral, quantum, integrative, and alternative medicine became synonyms for holistic concepts of health care and well-being, and greatly extended the allopathic convention that has dominated American medicine for over a century.
In the meantime, the Shealy Institute that I founded in 1971 continued to work with patients with a wide variety of illnesses. A quarter-century after its founding, the American Academy of Pain Management, the largest organization of clinical pain practitioners in the world, reported that the Shealy Institute had the best success rate of any pain clinic they had evaluated—at a cost that was 60 percent lower than the national average. When back pain is due to a ruptured disk, we achieved better and safer results in 85 percent of patients than surgery. We were able to lift 85 percent of people out of depression with two weeks, safely and without drugs. This also is approximately twice as effective as any antidepressant and without any of the serious side effects.
At the Shealy clinic, we worked with over thirty thousand patients, most of whom had failed to respond to everything conventional medicine has to offer. I realized early on that the great problems of humanity are often the result of individual existential crises. Patients, however, most often concentrate on a pain in the back or head, inability to work or walk, or some other external malady. Ask about the underlying emotional factors, and they would complain about someone in their family or work environment. At least 40 percent of Americans are clinically depressed. Another 40 percent are sub-clinically depressed. Seventy percent of individuals are unhappy in their work or career. Ninety-seven percent do not have all four of the essential habits for health:
The failure to choose these commonsense habits results in a pervasive unhappiness which Freud might have described as a death wish. Despite this, 80 percent of Americans say they believe in God, life after death (soul), and the Golden Rule. Yet doctrines such as Original Sin, male dominance in religions East and West, and the displacement of responsibility to factors outside of the self, have contributed to this pervasive unhappiness. I’m gratified to find that 20 percent of individuals escape the effects of malignant societal brainwashing.
Soul medicine is an antidote to both the spiritual and physical aspects of this malaise. Once you heal at the soul level, body and mind are no longer oppressed by inherited social limitations. In this book, we present many summaries of cases of documented miraculous healing. We demonstrate the physiological effects of sacred healing, including changes in electroencephalogram (EEG), changes in the molecular bonding in water, and other effects, even on bacteria and enzymes.
I had long envisioned a graduate program where students would contribute meaningful research to the field of spiritual healing. In 2000 I collaborated with Drs. Ann and Bob Nunley to establish Holos University Graduate Seminary. The seminary offers distance learning graduate, post-graduate, and certificate programs with selected residency requirements. Courses and research explore the emerging integration of historical, theological, and scientific foundations for optimal physical, mental, and spiritual health.
Holos amplifies the research dealing with spiritually-based holistic healing. It emphasizes ecumenical spiritual approaches that fulfill a growing need for the practice of soul medicine in contemporary communities. As a seminary, Holos places special emphasis on the spiritual aspects of its wellness studies and research. As a university, Holos strives to uphold the highest standards of excellence in teaching and scientific research and seeks to serve as a bridge between primarily academic institutions and primarily religious institutions. Holos course work demonstrates an appreciation for the essential teachings of the world’s great religions and a broad ecumenical, interpersonal, and cross-cultural understanding of faith and spirituality. It supports a high degree of professional competency in holistically oriented spiritual counseling approaches, and independent scholarly study and research using rigorous protocols.
Acknowledging that most illnesses appear to have direct correlations with poor self-esteem, anxiety, and depression and, as such, may be rooted in an existential crisis of faith, Holos affirms the highest holistic and ecumenical spiritual principles as the foundation for optimal physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual health. The seminary building in Missouri, completed in 2003, includes a spacious chapel, offices for the administrative staff, and classrooms for residency classes. Holos has already graduated over two hundred students with a doctorate in theology, with a focus on soul medicine. Holos graduates are accomplished spiritual and intuitive counselors.
In addition, Caroline Myss and I established the American Board of Scientific Medical Intuition, which certifies the competency of Medical Intuitives and Counseling Intuitives. As the institutions of soul medicine become formalized and defined over the course of the coming decades, training programs like that of Holos, and certification programs like that of the American Holistic Medical Association and the American Board of Scientific Medical Intuition, will play an increasing role in providing independent standards and public accountability for this emerging set of professions.