A MAN WHOSE lungs are filled with cancer is sent home to die, having been told that medicine can do nothing for him. Six months later he reappears in his doctor’s office, tumor free. A young woman—diabetic, a heavy smoker—lies unconscious in a coronary care unit following a bad heart attack. Her doctor anguishes over the fact that her cardiac function is rapidly declining and he is powerless to save her. But the next morning she is awake and talking, clearly on the way to recovery. A neurosurgeon tells grieving parents that their son, who is in a coma following a motorcycle accident and severe head injury, will never regain consciousness. The son is now fine.
Most doctors I know have one or two stories of this sort, stories of spontaneous healing. You will uncover many more of them if you seek them out, yet few medical researchers do. To most doctors, the stories are just stories, not taken seriously, not studied, not looked to as sources of information about the body’s potential to repair itself.
Meanwhile, modern medicine has become so expensive that it is straining the economies of many developed nations and putting itself beyond the reach of much of the world’s population. In many countries politicians argue about how to pay for health care, unaware that a philosophical debate about the very nature of health care has been ongoing throughout history. Doctors believe that health requires outside intervention of one sort or another, while proponents of natural hygiene maintain that health results from living in harmony with natural law. In ancient Greece, doctors worked under the patronage of Asklepios, the god of medicine, but healers served Asklepios’s daughter, the radiant Hygeia, goddess of health. Medical writer and philosopher René Dubos has written:
For the worshippers of Hygeia, health is the natural order of things, a positive attribute to which men are entitled if they govern their lives wisely. According to them, the most important function of medicine is to discover and teach the natural laws which will ensure a man a healthy mind in a healthy body. More skeptical, or wiser in the ways of the world, the followers of Asklepios believe that the chief role of the physician is to treat disease, to restore health by correcting any imperfections caused by accidents of birth or life.
Political debates about how to cover the costs of medical care mostly take place among followers of Asklepios. There has been no argument about the nature of medicine or people’s expectations of it, only about who is going to pay for its services, which have become inordinately expensive because of doctors’ reliance on technology. I am a dedicated follower of Hygeia and want to interject that viewpoint into any discussions of the future of medicine.
Let me give an example of how these different philosophies lead to very different courses of action. In the West, a major focus of scientific medicine has been the identification of external agents of disease and the development of weapons against them. An outstanding success in the middle of this century was the discovery of antibiotics and, with that, great victories against infectious diseases caused by bacteria. This success was a major factor in winning hearts and minds over to the Asklepian side, convincing most people that medical intervention with the products of technology was worth it, no matter the cost. In the East, especially in China, medicine has had a quite different focus. It has explored ways of increasing internal resistance to disease so that, no matter what harmful influences you are exposed to, you can remain healthy—a Hygeian strategy. In their explorations Chinese doctors have discovered many natural substances that have such tonic effects on the body. Although the Western approach has served us well for a number of years, its long-term usefulness may not be nearly so great as the Eastern one.
Weapons are dangerous. They may backfire, causing injury to the user, and they may also stimulate greater aggression on the part of the enemy. In fact, infectious-disease specialists throughout the world are now wringing their hands over the possibility of untreatable plagues of resistant organisms. Just today I received a copy of Clinical Research News for Arizona Physicians, a publication of the university medical center where I teach, that featured an article on “Resistance to Antimicrobial Agents: The New Plague?” It reads in part:
While antimicrobial agents have been considered the “wonder drugs” of the 20th century, clinicians and researchers are now acutely aware that microbial resistance to drugs has become a major clinical problem.… A variety of solutions have been proposed. The pharmaceutical industry is attempting to develop new agents that are less susceptible to current resistance mechanisms. Unfortunately, the organisms appear to rapidly develop new resistance mechanisms.… In the inpatient setting, strict adherence to infection control procedures is essential. Health care workers need to understand that antimicrobial resistance is an accelerating problem in all practice settings that can directly compromise patient outcomes.
The phrase “can directly compromise patient outcomes” is euphemistic. It means patients will die of infections that doctors formerly could treat with antibiotics. In fact, antibiotics are rapidly losing their power, and some infectious-disease specialists are beginning to think about what we will do when we can no longer rely on them. We might have to revert to methods used in hospitals in the 1920s and 1930s before there were antibiotics: strict quarantine and disinfection, surgical drainage, and so forth. What a reversal that will be for technological medicine!
Meanwhile, resistance does not develop to the tonics of Chinese medicine, because they are not acting against germs (and do not therefore influence their evolution) but rather are acting with the body’s defenses. They increase activity and efficiency of cells of the immune system, helping patients resist all kinds of infections, not just those caused by bacteria. Antibiotics are only effective against bacteria; they are of no use in diseases caused by viruses. Western medicine’s powerlessness against viral infections is clearly visible in its ineffectiveness against AIDS. Chinese herbal therapy for people infected with HIV looks much more promising. It is nontoxic, in great contrast to the Western antiviral drugs in current use, and may enable many of those with HIV infection to have relatively long, symptom-free lives, even though the virus remains in their bodies.
The Eastern concept of strengthening internal defenses is Hygeian, because it assumes that the body has a natural ability to resist and deal with agents of disease. If that assumption were more prominent in Western medicine, we would not now have an economic crisis in health care, because methods that take advantage of the body’s natural healing abilities are far cheaper than the intensive interventions of technological medicine, as well as safer and more effective over time.
Asklepians are most interested in treatment, while Hygeians are interested in healing. Treatment originates outside; healing comes from within. The word “healing” means “making whole”—that is, restoring integrity and balance. I have long been interested in stories about healing, and I assume you are too. Perhaps you know someone who experienced a spontaneous remission of cancer, in which widespread malignant disease disappeared, to the amazement of doctors in charge of the case. Maybe the disappearance was temporary or maybe it was permanent. What happened? Or perhaps you know someone who was healed by prayer or by religious fervor.
I have titled this book Spontaneous Healing because I want to call attention to the innate, intrinsic nature of the healing process. Even when treatments are applied with successful outcomes, those outcomes represent activation of intrinsic healing mechanisms, which, under other circumstances, might operate without any outside stimulus. The main theme of this book is very simple: The body can heal itself. It can do so because it has a healing system. If you are in good health, you will want to know about this system, because it is what keeps you in good health and because you can enhance that condition. If you or people you love are sick, you will want to know about this system, because it is the best hope for recovery.
Part One builds a case for the existence of a healing system and presents evidence for its operation, including its interactions with the mind. At every level of biological organization, from DNA up, mechanisms of self-diagnosis, self-repair, and regeneration exist in us, always ready to become active when the need arises. Medicine that takes advantage of these innate mechanisms of healing is more effective than medicine that simply suppresses symptoms. This section includes stories of people I have known who have recovered from illness, often in spite of the predictions of doctors who saw no possibility of recovery or insisted that improvement could occur only with a great deal of Asklepian effort. As I have made it known that I am interested in cases of this sort, I have found more and more of them, and I believe that anyone who looks will find others. Spontaneous healing is a common occurrence, not a rare event. We may marvel at stories of spontaneous remissions of cancer but pay little attention to more commonplace activities of the healing system, such as the repair of wounds. In fact, it is the ordinary, day-to-day workings of the healing system that are most extraordinary.
Part Two of the book tells you how to optimize your healing system. You will find here specific information on modifying lifestyle to increase your healing potentials, including facts about food, environmental toxins, exercise, stress reduction, vitamins, supplements, and tonic herbs that can help you maintain your well-being. I will also suggest an eight-week program for gradually changing lifestyle in a manner that will enhance your natural healing power.
Part Three gives advice on managing illness. It analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of conventional and alternative treatments and identifies a number of strategies used by successful patients. I give suggestions here for using natural methods to ameliorate common kinds of illnesses and also include a chapter on “Cancer as a Special Case,” because that disease poses a unique challenge to the healing system, and the selection of treatments for it requires careful analysis of each individual’s condition. An afterword, “Prescriptions for Society,” considers how existing medical institutions would have to change to accommodate Hygeian philosophy.
Until now few doctors and scientists have looked for examples of healing; therefore, it is not surprising that the phenomenon of spontaneous healing seems obscure and the concept of an internal healing system odd. I contend that the more we embrace that concept, the more we will experience healing in our lives, and the less reason we will have to use medical interventions that are unnecessary, sometimes damaging, and consume so much money. Healing-oriented medicine would serve us much better than the present system, since it would be safer and surer as well as cheaper. I have written this book in an effort to help bring it into existence.