CURED: The Life Changing Science of Spontaneous Healing
by Dr Jeffrey Rediger (2020, Flatiron Books), selections and edits by Dr Ed Bauman
There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what is not true.
The other is to refuse to believe what is true.
—Søren Kierkegaard
Spontaneous means without cause, but the truth is that we mostly have not looked for the cause. In the history of medicine, we have almost never used the tools of a rigorous science to investigate recoveries from incurable illnesses. Common sense would suggest that these are cases we would most want to study, that these people have stumbled upon profound pathways to healing that we would want to understand. And yet the study of spontaneous remission (SR) is a largely unexplored terrain.
An investigation spontaneous natural healing lays the foundation of a new model of health-medicine, one based around “the four pillars” of health: (1) healing the immune system, (2) healing nutrition, (3) healing the stress response, and (4) healing one’s identity. Traditional cultures have known what creates a healthy, vital, even miraculous life, but it is not a part of our modern mainstream narrative.
We classify those who recover using non-medical, traditional holistic practices as “flukes” and “outliers” and simply remarkable recoveries from incurable illnesses. Serena Williams and Michael Jordan are outliers, sure, but they are also luminous examples of human capacities, and by studying their techniques and their methods, we can understand how to improve our own.
Spontaneous remissions give us enormous insight into how we can bolster our immune systems to prevent these diseases from taking hold or roll back their damage if they already have. With cases of spontaneous remission, something shifts that allows the immune system to do its job once again. A combination of factors—diet changes, lifestyle changes, and deep emotional and spiritual changes— altered the terrain of a sick body like nutrient-rich compost added to thin, barren dirt.
“If I could live my life over again,” wrote Rudolf Virchow in 1896, who is now known as the Father of Pathology, “I would devote it to proving that germs seek their natural habitat—diseased tissue—rather than being the cause of the diseased tissue, e.g., mosquitoes seek the stagnant water, but do not cause the pool to become stagnant.”
What we want is an immune system with well-nourished cells that are fast, smart, accurate, and ready to fight for us. We want our immune systems to be fully staffed, not depleted and sluggish, sending out sloppy troops that hit the wrong targets or are ineffective. We want our immune systems to have twenty-twenty vision, able to see viruses as they enter our bodies and rogue cells that threaten to mutate into cancer.
The unfortunate truth is that a lot of us are walking around with immune systems that are chronically worn down. They are sluggish, exhausted, impeded by our poorly managed relationship with stress and nutrition. We are missing key positions in our army of fighter cells, leaving it sparse and thinned out. This leaves us more vulnerable not only to routine colds and flus but, as we will continue to see, to cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and a wide range of serious autoimmune disorders.
As novel studies into the immune system emerge, I continue to notice how the kinds of things that stimulate natural killer cell activity line up with the kinds of changes that survivors of incurable diseases make before they experience their spontaneous healings.
Certain diet changes, such as increasing one’s nutritional level, turn out to support natural killer cell activity, as does reducing (or more effectively managing) stress. Studies even show forgiveness to be linked to a spike in natural killer cells.
When I first interviewed Claire about the mysterious disappearance of her metastatic pancreatic cancer, the old feud over the importance of “the soil” came flooding back. Claire did not know to what she should attribute her remarkable remission; she just knew that at some point between walking out of her surgeon’s office and returning to the hospital years later for an unrelated issue, it had vanished.
The profound changes that Claire made in her life were not made with the intent to cure herself; she fully expected pancreatic cancer to take her life. The changes she made were about living fully and more authentically with the time she had left. They were about confronting fears and other obstacles that had held her back from doing the things she really wanted to do.
In several healing centers in Brazil, I had witnessed a higher-than-usual rate of spontaneous remission. There was something about these healing centers that was allowing these deep, fundamental shifts to occur in the immune system so that healing could be unlocked. They represented a cluster of cases for a phenomenon that is happening everywhere, invisibly, swallowed up by statistics and averages. I
In a spiritual center in Abadiânia, Brazil, people ate nutrient-dense foods. They exercised and meditated. They left behind the stresses of their everyday lives. They turned inward and faced themselves: their fears, their forgotten dreams, their beliefs about themselves and the world they had never questioned. They reinvented themselves, often completely rearranging the bedrock of their lives. They believed that healing was possible.
Somewhere in these physical, mental, and spiritual transformations that so many visitors experienced—and which were also described by other survivors who emailed me from around the country with their startling stories of recovery—there may lie the code to spontaneous healing: the precise combination of numbers that must be punched in together to unlock the door to healing.
I suspected that it could not all be boiled down to one single trigger but instead was a serendipitous combination of all the right factors that lined up to create a rare and “miraculous” phenomenon—like an eclipse.
Everything we put into our bodies affects our terrain. The foods we eat, the toxins that filter in, the medicines we take, the types of bacteria that colonize our bodies. Even thoughts, feelings, and beliefs about ourselves and the world affect the “soil” that are our immune systems.
The strength of your team of natural killer cells and other disease-fighting cells within your immune system are linked not only to what you eat, how you exercise, and other lifestyle choices but also to how you manage stress, relationships, old traumas, what you believe, and how you see and understand yourself.
Spontaneous remissions currently happen when nobody is looking—often, not even the patient. They occur when a patient has been treated to the end of the doctor’s capacity to help and is then sent home on
palliative care. They happen when people have resigned themselves to living with a disease with as much quality of life as possible, or even when they make plans to die. They happen when someone decides to take their health into their own hands and do something, because nothing else seems to have worked and, after all,
“This is my life and no one else’s.” People make pilgrimages to alternative healing centers, where much attention is paid to their spiritual healing, but no physician is present to witness or document the changes in their physiology.
The culture in Brazil was much more accepting of the idea that powers of the mind and heart exist that we do not yet understand. As a product of Western culture, this was a hard concept for me to accept. I visited several healing centers in Brazil in 2004. I arrived quietly and did not call ahead to say I was coming. The first time I had gone down, I had been both the observer and the observed—I had gone with a detective mission, to investigate, to dig through medical records and sit in on surgeries. But I was also being filmed doing these things, performing the role of “doctor.” It was difficult to understand what the experience of visiting these centers was really like when I had cast myself as an outsider, an anthropologist, a Harvard physician. This time, I wanted to be just a person—to experience what it was like to be a part of this community for a brief time.
The sense of community was strong. Many people experienced genuine, deep connections in a few short days that seemed to run deeper and wider than anything they had at home. In the meditation room, there was a current of energy that ran from person to person, so electric that even I, an outsider unpracticed at meditation, could feel it.
We know now that meditation can change the shape of the brain. Sara Lazar and other colleagues at Harvard ran an eight-week mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) program and found that it measurably increased cortical thickness in the hippocampus, the part of the brain in charge of memory, feelings, and regulation of emotions. Not only that, but it also actually shrank the amygdala, the part of the brain that signals the hypothalamus, which then releases hormones associated with the fight-or-flight response. The entire structure of life in the healing centers was anathema to the chronic stress and anxiety that so many visitors lived with in their day-to-day lives.
There is no key to immortality—not even spontaneous healing lasts forever. What the survivors of incurable illness found was a way to move forward that accepted this: that there would be an end, but that in the meantime, they were going to live the best, most authentic and fulfilling lives that they could. They were going to find those big, deep changes that made them feel better and more alive and lean into them as hard as they could. If it meant restructuring their lives, they did it.
If it meant letting go of limiting relationships, they let them go. They looked at themselves in the mirror and asked, What is the story I’ve been telling about myself, and how is it wrong? None of them embarked on this journey halfway or with the idea that they would cheat death; they set forth with the mission to claim the life that was theirs for the time they had. In doing so, they healed. They healed the way they treated their bodies. They healed how they responded to the stresses and challenges of life. They healed their toxic or damaging beliefs about the world and what was possible. And finally, they healed the story of who they are, so they could find the freedom and the capacity to make lifesaving changes. “It was foremost a struggle of the mind and spirit. The body followed.”
Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you cannot see from the center.
Big, undreamed-of things—the people on the edge see them first.
—Kurt Vonnegut
