Several times in my medical career I have been privileged to witness miraculous cures. The most recent began last year when a 32-year-old Indian woman came to see me in my office outside Boston. She sat quietly facing me in a blue silk sari. To keep her composure, she clasped her hands tightly in her lap. Her name was Chitra, she said, and together with her husband, Raman, she ran a neighborhood import store in New York City.
A few months earlier, Chitra had noticed a small lump in her left breast that was sensitive to the touch. She underwent surgery to remove it, but unfortunately the surgeon found that the lump was malignant. When he explored further, he detected that the cancer had spread to her lungs.
After removing the diseased breast and a large portion of tissue around it, Chitra’s doctor gave her initial doses of radiation and then placed her on intensive chemotherapy. This is standard procedure for treating breast cancer and saves many lives. But the lung cancer was going to be much harder to treat; it was obvious to everyone that Chitra was in a very precarious position.
Examining her, I noticed that she was very anxious. When I tried to reassure her, she surprised me with a touching statement: “I don’t mind for myself if I have to die, but my husband will be so lonely without me. Sometimes I pretend to be asleep and then sit up all night, just thinking about him. I know Raman loves me, but after I’m gone, he will start seeing American girls. I can’t bear to lose him to an American girl.” She stopped and looked at me with suffering in her eyes. “I know I shouldn’t say that, but I think you understand.”
You do not get used to the sorrow that cancer creates, but I felt a deeper sorrow from knowing that time was Chitra’s enemy. For the moment, she still looked healthy. She had even managed to hide her disease from her relatives, dreading having to be watched as she wasted away. We both knew it was going to be very bad for her.
No one can say that he knows a cure for advanced breast cancer. Conventional therapy had provided all that it could for Chitra. Given that her cancer had already spread to another organ, the statistics said that her chance of surviving for five years was less than 10 percent, even with the most intensive routine of chemotherapy that could be safely administered.
I asked her to start a new course of treatments, as prescribed by Ayurveda.
Like me, Chitra had grown up in India, but she had little idea of Ayurveda. Her grandparents’ generation was the last to “believe” in it, I would imagine; today, every progressive Indian living in a big city would prefer Western medicine if he could afford it. To explain to Chitra why I wanted her seemingly to turn her back on progress, I told her that her cancer was not just a physical disease but a holistic one. Her whole body knew she had cancer and was suffering from it; a tissue sample taken from her lungs would show that malignant cells had migrated there, while a sample from her liver would be negative. Yet, her liver had the same blood coursing through it, and therefore it picked up the signals of disease that were coming from the lungs. This in turn affected its own functions.
Similarly, when she felt pain in her chest or had to sit down owing to shortness of breath, signals were racing throughout her body, going to and from her brain. Sensing the pain, her brain had to respond to it. The fatigue she was feeling, along with her depression and anxiety, was a brain response that had physical consequences. So it was wrong to think of her cancer as just an isolated tumor that needed to be destroyed. She had a holistic disease and for that she needed holistic medicine.
The word holistic, which tends to offend orthodox doctors, simply means an approach that includes the mind and body together. I believe Ayurveda does this better than any alternative, although it may not be very apparent on the surface. In fact, many well-publicized mind-body techniques such as hypnosis and biofeedback are far more flashy than Ayurveda. If Chitra had gotten sick at home in Bombay, her grandmother might have fixed her some special meals, brought home medicinal herbs in a brown paper sack from the Ayurvedic pharmacy, and insisted that she stay in bed. Various purgatives and oil massages might be prescribed to clean the body of toxins generated by the cancer. If there was a spiritual tradition in the family, she would have begun to meditate. In essence, I was going to have her do these same things, with a few additions. There is as yet no scientific reason why any of this should work, except that it does. Ayurveda has hit on something deep in nature. Its knowledge is rooted not in technology but in wisdom, which I would define as a reliable understanding of the human organism gathered over many centuries.
“I want you to go to a special clinic outside Boston for a week or two,” I told Chitra. “Some things that will happen to you there will seem highly unusual. You are used to the idea of a hospital as a place with respirators, IV tubes, transfusions, and chemotherapy. By that standard, what we will do for you at this clinic will seem like nothing. Basically, I want to get your body into a deep, deep state of rest.”
Chitra was a trusting person; she agreed to go. In part, of course, she had no alternative. Modern medicine had done all it could, using the strategy of physical assault on her cancer. The initial advantage of assaulting a disease is that you hope to wipe it out physically as soon as possible. The tremendous disadvantage is that the whole body is damaged in the assault on one of its parts. In the case of chemotherapy, there is the very real danger that the immune system will become so weakened that the door is opened for other cancers to develop in the future. However, untreated breast cancer is considered deadly, and today’s medicine is good at wiping it out over the short run. In a climate of opinion ruled by fear, people prefer to run the risks of the cure rather than the disease.
I referred Chitra to the clinic where I work, in Lancaster, Massachusetts. She stayed for a week and received treatments; she also learned an outpatient program to use at home that included a change of diet, some Ayurvedic herbs, a specific daily routine including simple yoga exercises, and instruction in meditation. These measures look different on the surface, but underneath they all aimed at bringing her day-to-day existence to a settled, restful state, building a foundation for healing. In Ayurveda, a level of total, deep relaxation is the most important precondition for curing any disorder. The underlying concept is that the body knows how to maintain balance unless thrown off by disease; therefore, if one wants to restore the body’s own healing ability, everything should be done to bring it back into balance. It is a very simple notion that has profound consequences. Chitra was also given two special mental techniques that went directly to the root of her cancer. (I will say more about these later.)
Chitra followed her program faithfully and came back to see me every six weeks. She also continued the course of chemotherapy set up by her doctor at home in New York. When we talked about that I said, “If I could confidently put you on nothing but Ayurveda, I would—the deterioration in your physical state would then be much less. But you came to me a very sick woman, and we know that the chemotherapy works as an outside approach. Let’s combine the outer and the inner and hope that they add up to a real cure.”
For almost a year I followed Chitra’s progress. She always listened with a trusting attitude, yet as she returned for each visit, it was clear that she was not improving. Her lung X rays were still bad, her shortness of breath grew worse, and she began to look weaker and more dejected as the disease advanced. Her voice took on a note of panic. Finally the day came when Chitra did not show up for her appointment. I waited out the week and then called her home.
The news was not good. Chitra’s husband, Raman, told me that she had suddenly developed a high fever and had to be hospitalized over the weekend. For some time her lungs had been seeping fluid into the pleural cavity that surrounds them, and her doctor suspected that an infection had set in. Given her grim prognosis, there was no guarantee that Chitra would ever leave the hospital.
Then a very curious thing happened. After a day or two on antibiotics, Chitra’s fever went from 104 degrees F. back down to normal, which puzzled her attending physician. It is very unusual for a high-grade fever to reverse itself so rapidly if the underlying cause is an infection in a terminally ill patient. Could there be another cause besides infection? He decided to take chest X rays, and the next day Raman called me sounding both exhilarated and confused.
“She doesn’t have cancer anymore!” Raman told me jubilantly over the telephone.
“What do you mean?” I asked, taken aback.
“They can’t find any cancer cells at all—nothing.” He was almost unable to contain himself. “Chitra’s oncologist at first was sure that they had X-rayed the wrong patient and wanted to take some more pictures, but now he’s convinced.”
Overjoyed, relieved, and unable to explain this sudden stroke of salvation, Raman regarded his wife’s recovery as a miracle. When I called Chitra in her hospital room, she kept crying into the phone, “You did it, Deepak,” while I kept insisting, “No, no, Chitra, you did it.” I had never anticipated that such a rapid cure would result from her treatments, either conventional or Ayurvedic. In retrospect, I see that her high fever was a kind of burn-off from the dying cancer, a process known as tumor necrosis. But the exact mechanism involved has no explanation. If there is such a thing as a miraculous cure, this was one, I was certain.
Within a few weeks, however, our mutual jubilation began to change. Chitra’s “miracle” wasn’t holding. It eroded first within herself: instead of being able to trust in her inexplicable recovery, she became conflicted, morbidly afraid that the cancer would return. She called to ask me if she should resume chemotherapy.
“It’s been two months since the cancer disappeared,” I said. “Does your doctor find any new cancer cells?”
“No,” Chitra admitted, “but he thinks that the chemotherapy cured me and that I should continue with it.”
I began to feel frustrated. I knew, as did her attending physician, that the particular chemotherapy Chitra had received was not known to produce sudden, total recoveries of this kind, certainly not in advanced cases where the cancer had begun to spread to other sites in the body. Also, it was becoming obvious that she was being worn down past endurance. The chemotherapy had caused almost constant nausea, and her hair had fallen out in frightening amounts, adding to the shame she felt following her breast surgery. All of this compromised the Ayurvedic treatments we were trying. If even higher doses of chemotherapy were given, she would become more depressed, more prone to infections, and weaker in every way.
Yet, at the same time, I did not have a strong enough reason to tell her not to proceed. What if she suffered a relapse in six months and died?
“Go ahead with your chemotherapy,” I advised, “but stick with our program, too, okay?” She agreed.
For several months more, Chitra remained free of disease, but she also remained disturbed and mystified. It seemed that Chitra’s cancer was easier to defeat than the sinister doubt that was creeping back into her life, defying her to be well.
Chitra’s agonizing dilemma is the real starting point of this book. For her to be well again, she needed an explanation. What had happened to her? Was her cure a miracle, as she thought at first, or only a temporary stay of execution, as she came to dread? By going deeper into the mind-body connection, I believe an answer can be found.
Research on spontaneous cures of cancer, conducted in both the United States and Japan, has shown that just before the cure appears, almost every patient experiences a dramatic shift in awareness. He knows that he will be healed, and he feels that the force responsible is inside himself but not limited to him—it extends beyond his personal boundaries, throughout all of nature. Suddenly he feels, “I am not limited to my body. All that exists around me is part of myself.” At that moment, such patients apparently jump to a new level of consciousness that prohibits the existence of cancer. Then the cancer cells either disappear, literally overnight in some cases, or at the very least stabilize without damaging the body any further.
This leap in consciousness seems to be the key. It does not have to come in a flash, however. Chitra was cultivating it deliberately, through her Ayurvedic techniques. Therefore, her ability to stay at a higher level of awareness was strikingly correlated with her condition. Somehow she could motivate the absence of cancer, but just as easily she could return to it. (I think of this as being like a violin string whose pitch varies as you slide your finger up and down it.) The word that comes to mind when a scientist thinks of such sudden changes is quantum. The word denotes a discrete jump from one level of functioning to a higher level—the quantum leap.
Quantum is also a technical term, once known only to physicists but now growing in popular usage. Formally, a quantum is “the indivisible unit in which waves may be emitted or absorbed,” the definition given by the eminent British physicist Stephen Hawking. In layman’s terms, the quantum is a building block. Light is built up from photons, electricity from the charge of one electron, gravity from the graviton (a hypothetical quantum, not yet found in nature), and so on for all forms of energy—each of them is based on a quantum and cannot be broken down into anything smaller.
Both definitions—the discrete jump to a higher level and the irreducible level of a force—appear to apply to certain cases like Chitra’s. Therefore, I would like to introduce the term quantum healing to describe what happened to her. Although the term is new, the process itself is not. There have always been patients who do not follow the normal course of healing. A tiny minority, for example, do not waste away from cancer; others have tumors that grow much more slowly than what the statistics for their diseases predict. Many cures that share mysterious origins—faith healing, spontaneous remissions, and the effective use of placebos, or “dummy drugs”—also point toward a quantum leap. Why? Because in all of these instances, the faculty of inner awareness seems to have promoted a drastic jump—a quantum leap—in the healing mechanism.
Consciousness is a force that most of us undervalue. Generally we do not focus our inner awareness or use its real power, even in the most difficult moments of crisis. That may account for why “miracle” cures are greeted with a mixture of awe, disbelief, and reverence. Yet, everyone possesses consciousness. Perhaps these miracles are extensions of normal abilities. When your body mends a broken bone, why is that not a miracle? As a healing process, it is certainly complex, far too complex for medicine to duplicate; it involves an incredible number of perfectly synchronized processes, of which medicine knows only the major ones and those imperfectly.
The reason why curing cancer by yourself is a miracle but mending a broken arm is not comes down to the mind-body connection: The broken bone seems to mend itself physically, without the intervention of your mind; yet, a spontaneous cure of cancer—so it is widely believed—depends on a special quality of mind, some deep will to live, a heroically positive outlook, or some other rare capacity. This implies that there are two kinds of healing, one that is normal, the other abnormal, or at least exceptional.
I believe that this distinction is false. The broken arm mends because consciousness makes it mend, and the same holds true for the miraculous cancer cure, the long-term survival of AIDS, the healing by faith, and even the ability to live to a great old age without falling prey to disease. The reason why not everyone manages to take the healing process as far as it can go is that we differ drastically in our ability to mobilize it.
We can see this in the way that different people react to disease. A minute fraction, far less than 1 percent, of all the patients who contract an incurable disease manage to cure themselves. A larger fraction, but still under 5 percent, live much longer than average—this is confirmed in the 2 percent of AIDS patients who have survived longer than eight years, while the vast majority do not survive beyond two. These findings are not restricted to incurable diseases. Studies have generally shown that only 20 percent of patients with serious but treatable disorders recover with excellent results. That leaves nearly 80 percent who either do not recover or only partially recover. Why is unsuccessful healing so far out of proportion? What marks a survivor as opposed to a non-survivor?
Apparently the successful patients have learned to motivate their own healing, and the most successful have gone much further than that. They have found the secret of quantum healing. They are the geniuses of the mind-body connection. Modern medicine cannot even begin to duplicate their cures, because no cure that relies on drugs or surgery is so precisely timed, so beautifully coordinated, so benign and free of side effects, so effortless as theirs. Their ability springs from a level so deep that you cannot go any deeper. If we knew what their brains were doing to motivate their bodies, we would have the basic unit of the healing process in our hands.
As yet, medicine has not taken the quantum leap, and the word quantum has no clinical application. Because quantum physics works with ultra-high-speed accelerators, you may think that quantum healing uses radioisotopes or X rays. But that is the opposite of what it means. Quantum healing moves away from external, high-technology methods toward the deepest core of the mind-body system. This core is where healing begins. To go there and learn to promote the healing response, you must get past all the grosser levels of the body—cells, tissues, organs, and systems—and arrive at the junction point between mind and matter, the point where consciousness actually starts to have an effect.
The quantum itself—what it is, how it behaves—takes up the first half of this book. The second half then blends the quantum into Ayurveda, making a marriage of two cultures while trying to arrive at one answer. The scientific worldview of the West surprisingly supports the vision of the ancient sages of India. This is a journey that breaks down barriers and ignores cultural fences. To me, the whole story has to be found out. Chitra asked me for it, and so I am writing for her and all patients like her. Until they find an answer, their lives still hang in the balance.
EXPANDING THE TOPIC
Much can be said in favor of consciousness affecting the body, to the extent that the gap between “normal” healing and “miraculous” healing has closed even more over the past few decades. The main obstacle, as far as mainstream medicine is concerned, is a fixed belief that the body operates entirely like a physical machine. If that were so, the following experiment would have failed.
The experiment was the brainchild of the pioneering work of Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer, who as far back as 1981 was testing the possibility that aging has a major mental component. (The notion is actually ancient in origin. The medieval Indian philosopher and sage Adi Shankara declared that people grow old and die because they see other people grow old and die.)
In 1981, Langer took eight men in their seventies, all in good health but exhibiting signs of age, and immersed them for five days in an environment that was like time travel going back to 1959, including the music and television of the period, along with the movies and events in the news. The men were told to act as if they were their younger selves, because Langer had already done experiments in which memory loss in the elderly could sometimes be reversed by giving subjects an incentive to remember. In other words, the mind was being motivated to affect the body.
Before entering the time-capsule environment, the men were tested on various markers of aging such as grip strength, dexterity, and how well they could hear and see. At the end of the five days, the group had improved on seven out of eight measures, including better vision, a startling finding. They looked younger as assessed by outside judges. Thirty-three years ago Langer was proceeding more or less intuitively, without the knowledge into gene expression and neuroplasticity that we can turn to today (more on those breakthroughs in later “Expanding the Topic” sections).
In another startling experiment, Langer went into a retirement home and divided her subjects into two groups. Both were given some houseplants for their room. One group was told that they were responsible for keeping the plants alive, and that they could make choices in their own daily schedule. The other group was told that the staff would tend the plants, and in addition they were given no choice in their fixed daily schedule. At the end of eighteen months, twice as many subjects in the first group were still alive compared with the second group. (The same rationale lies behind the accepted practice of giving the elderly a pet to take care of. At the very least it improves their mood and quality of life. It may prolong their lives as well.)
Aging and healing have in common that they have long been viewed as fixed processes based on strict physical limitations. An invisible factor like making your own choices about how to spend your day never figured into the calculation. This bias has been shifting for quite a while, but only the beginning signs were evident when Quantum Healing appeared. Today what’s important isn’t the acceptance of consciousness as a factor in healing—that battle has been won, more or less. Instead we need a set of new assumptions about how far consciousness can go to alter healing and aging, not to mention intractable chronic pain, addictions, dependency on prescription drugs, recovery from surgery, and so on.
Here are the basic assumptions I’d suggest:
1. Mind comes before matter.
2. Mental choices originate the messages that change organs, tissues, and cells.
3. The body is fluid and dynamic, not fixed and determined.
4. Genes express whatever a person desires. They operate through switches that the mind can access.
5. The mind-body system is a feedback loop where input and output have many determinants, including lifestyle, environment, behavior, beliefs, and past conditioning.
6. Through self-care, a higher state of wellbeing is attainable. Self-care makes daily use of the mind-body feedback loop.
7. Ultimately, the evolution of future humanity depends on internal balance (homeostasis) that is balanced with the whole ecology of the planet.
There’s much more to say about each of these points, as we’ll discover in coming chapters. But the general conclusion is that “normal” isn’t as far from “miraculous” as both camps, believers and skeptics, used to think. The choices you make today are the key to your wellbeing for life. Every cell in your body is eavesdropping on your thoughts. Consciousness research is constantly gaining new ground, so it’s best to assume that your potential for mind-body mastery is much greater than anyone now supposes.