Why Do Some People Get Cured From "Incurable" Illnesses & Others Don't?
The mysterious phenomena the medical community calls “spontaneous remission” has long puzzled scientists and doctors because of the very inexplicable nature of how patients with “incurable” diseases wind up cured. A similarly bewildering phenomena, the placebo effect, continues to elicit curiosity, but with few satisfying explanations. Most doctors don’t question these mysteries too much, writing them off as outlying data points better left comfortably on the fringes, where they’re unlikely to dismantle the status quo of modern medicine too much.
But as a physician, I’ve been studying such phenomena since 2009. I’m not the only one.
As a Harvard physician, Princeton seminary graduate, and author of CURED, Jeffrey Rediger, MD, MDiv is uniquely positioned to explore the edge of science and spirituality. He shares something in common with me- the unwillingness to not just look the other way in the face of stories of seemingly miraculous health outcomes in patients. Like me, he wants to know why and how people who have remarkable health outcomes recover.
Is it the result of clearing limiting beliefs and imprinting new ones? Is it the side effect of rigorously healing one’s childhood trauma? Is it the result of going on a pilgrimage to a sacred site reputed to cause healing or visiting a healer who channels some kind of spiritual energy? Is it the result of exceptional nutrition? Does it require hard core personal growth or spiritual practices?
And why does one person get the cure and the other, who takes the exact same proactive actions, stays sick or dies? Is it an act of Divine intervention reserved for the pious? Does it have something to do with karma?
In my research for my book Sacred Medicine, I asked questions like this to healers, doctors, and therapists all over the world, and I was never satisfied with the answers I heard. Those who attempted to answer me seemed so full of certainty about something that felt ultimately ephemeral and wildly mysterious to me. But I also didn't want to just give up.
I was dogged in my quest to figure out if there' anything I’ve learned or Jeff has learned that can help sick and suffering patients be proactive about achieving one of these rare, seemingly miraculous remissions?
In 2019, when I learned that Jeff had been studying the phenomena of spontaneous remission rigorously since 2003, we spent several hours on a Native American reservation in Arizona doing the mind meld-brain dump about what we had learned. Jeff expressed frustration alongside his passion. Why do we study outliers in every other field, he wondered- the Serena Williams athletes and the Steve Jobs entrepreneurs. But as doctors, we summarily dismiss those who out-achieve their health prognosis? With the mind of an academician and the heart of a theologian, Jeff set out to see if he could solve the mystery by tracking down some of these patients, using the most rigorous of standards and following them out for 17 years, to answer a few general questions:
While the internet is full of patients self-reporting their seemingly impressive self-healing stories, proving that these stories are indeed accurate from the perspective of science has been challenging for both Jeff and me. Collecting inspiring stories is easy, but proving that these people were properly diagnosed with verifiably objective criteria to have truly incurable or terminal illnesses, and then proving that they were permanently cured- or at least cured until they died of some other cause- is a notable feat.
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Not satisfied with unverifiable stories of radical remission, Jeff had strict criteria for the people he studied. He doggedly screened out anyone who didn’t have before-and-after medical records to verify their stories, along with people who had the kinds of diagnoses that naturally remit and relapse. Focusing on the kinds of cases doctors consider truly incurable- diseases like Patricia Kaine’s deadly idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, Matt Ireland’s and Pablo Kelly’s lethal glioblastoma multiforme brain cancer, Jerry White’s renal cell carcinoma, Claire Haser’s pancreatic adenocarcinoma, Juniper Stein’s progressive ankylosing spondylitis, Stephen Dunphe’s multiple myeloma, and Jan Rose’s end stage lupus- he sought to understand what really happened.
What did these people do? Was there something proactive about their approach to their diagnosis that other patients with similarly grim prognoses could learn from and apply? Could conventional doctors learn from these patients and help others like them? And what happened down the road? Were they really cured or did they just have prolonged periods of remission? Jeff and I have both witnessed lots of people who have a seemingly miraculous cure, only to wind up relapsed a year later. Jeff tracked them over long periods of time to find out what really happened over the long term.
Jeff found that these “health outliers” did not just “go gentle into that good night” as the Dylan poem might suggest. As one woman he studied said, she accepted her diagnosis, but not her prognosis. So what did these people with extraordinary outcomes do?
Jeff broke down what he learned into what he called the “four pillars of health." In our upcoming Zoom weekend workshop The Mysteries of Spontaneous Healing, Jeff will be expanding upon the four pillars- and adding new insights he's learned since the pandemic. And I'll be sharing where I am at the cutting edge of my own understanding and research.
We welcome doctors and other health care providers, therapists, health coaches, people struggling with chronic illness, caregivers of people who are suffering, and anyone who is interested in preventive health. Please pass this along to anyone you know who might benefit from this offering to the world.
Warmly,
Lissa and Jeff