What may have been the first rigorous and wide-ranging attempt to determine the frequency of spontaneous cures and ‘miraculous remissions’ appeared in 1993, a study titled “Spontaneous Remission: The Spectrum of Self-Repair,” prepared by two scientific researchers at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, the California science research think tank founded by former Apollo astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell.
With more than 3,500 references from more than 800 medical and science journals in 20 different languages, the compendium constitutes the largest database of medically reported cases of disease remission ever compiled anywhere in the world. About 74 percent of the cases involved cancer, but the study authors emphasized that both cancer and non-cancer remissions, along with miraculous recoveries from injuries, were vastly under-reported in the medical literature because such cases are “often regarded as an artifact created by the misdiagnosis of the patient’s condition.”
Many physicians fear criticism from their peers if they were to report a spontaneous remission case, much less any seemingly miraculous medical phenomena ascribed to faith, or a remedy outside the acceptance of mainstream medicine.
This study contrasted ‘miraculous’ remission with ‘spontaneous’ remission this way--- miraculous cures are defined as “sudden, complete and without medical treatment. These cases appear to involve some of the same pathways as (spontaneous) remission but consideration should be given to the possibility that the altered states of prayer, religious faith, and meditation may allow the process of self-repair greater freedom to operate.”
By contrast, so-called spontaneous remissions usually happen gradually, rather than suddenly, and are defined as “the disappearance, complete or incomplete, of a disease or cancer without medical treatment or treatment that is considered inadequate to produce the resulting disappearance of disease symptoms or tumor.”
When Physicians Confront The Unknown
The study authors discovered that even in conservative medical journal articles, physicians sometimes express their bafflement at miraculous or spontaneous remissions and as a result, they end up proposing explanations that may credit the ‘alternative’ treatments used by the patient. Here is a partial list:
--Under the heading of ‘psycho-spiritual,’ which presumably included prayer and the ‘laying-on-of-hands,’ physicians described remissions for pancreatic cancers, nasopharynx, testis, breast, and bone sarcoma cancers.
--Meditation was identified in medical journals as possibly being responsible for remissions in lung and bronchial cancers, bone sarcomas, breast cancer, and colon cancer.
--Radical changes in diet, usually involving herbs and raw foods, constituted another category of alternative treatments linked to remissions of malignant melanomas, uterus cancer, bone sarcoma, breast and liver cancers.
The database of cases is divided into 19 categories of remission such as neoplasms (abnormal proliferation of cancer cells) of the digestive organs, female breast, nervous system and endocrine glands, and infectious and parasitic diseases, respiratory and circulatory system diseases, and injury related disorders. These cases provide fascinating reading, though the dry clinical descriptions leave how remarkable the recoveries actually are to your imagination.
Under infectious diseases, 12 cases of AIDs are described in which the patients spontaneously reverted from positive to negative blood readings without any trace of the HIV virus remaining. One of the cases involved a two-year-old boy whose HIV infection –inherited from his mother—accompanied by persistent pneumonia, suddenly disappeared for no apparent reason.
Curing The Blind
Perhaps the most extraordinary category was summarized in a 1983 medical journal article documenting 13 cases of spontaneous recovery by people in the U.S. who had been declared legally blind. Their blindness had resulted from a disease called Presumed Ocular Histophplasmosis Syndrome, a usually incurable malady that produces lesions that rob people of their eyesight. By staid medical standards, this article in the International Ophthalmology Clinics journal used awestruck language reporting “the remarkable return of vision” in these patients and the mystery of this “spontaneous recovery phenomenon.”
Many so-called spontaneous remissions are not really spontaneous –except perhaps from the physician’s point of view—because the patients were working hard for the remission to occur using unconventional healing methods like self-administered Reiki, self-hypnosis, or visualizations. There also seem to be certain types of remissions that are purely biological, caused by infections and fevers that provoke the immune system into taking sudden and dramatic action. Some cancers appear to emerge by evading the recognition radar of the immune system until the cancer growth is out of control. A raging fever in the body, either by coincidence, or if intentionally induced, might wake up the immune system and in the process of fighting this fire, the immune system discovers and combats the cancer.
A more limited attempt at measuring the incidence of remission in cancer came in a study published by the American Cancer Society journal, Cancer, which examined cases of non-small cell lung cancer, an incurable malady with an average survival rate after diagnosis of just six months. The researchers found that about one percent of those diagnosed went on to live for five years or more –and some were effectively cured—without any medical treatment other than tiny doses of radiotherapy to relieve symptoms, such as swelling from the tumor. One theory offered is that these surviving patients are “astonishingly sensitive to low doses of radiation,” in the words of Professor Michael MacManus, an Australian radiation oncologist who co-authored the study. “There is evidence that low dose radiation to cells can actually have a greater effect than bigger doses. There’s also evidence that very low doses of radiation can actually improve the survival of a cell.”
How Nothing Can Produce Something
Here we are introduced to what should become a research study --- tiny doses of something (or in the case of the placebo, of ‘nothing’) can set in motion huge biochemical changes in the human body. That is the central idea behind homeopathy-- that greatly diluted portions of a chemical or healing agent can leave a subtle ‘shadow’ in water that provokes a healing response in the body. The placebo effect may even explain how homeopathy works in the sense that a whole lot of nothing can still activate powerful forces in healing.
Science researchers acknowledge that endocrine disrupting synthetic chemicals can have highly toxic effects on the human body, even at extraordinarily low doses in the one-part-per-billion range. So we know that the principle at work can have both positive and negative impacts on human health.
From this principle of ‘less can be more,’ and the finding that low radiation doses can possibly be advantageous, emerges an observation – it may be worth exploring whether reported ‘energy’ healings, the hands-on kind, that produce remissions and radical regenerations are in fact low-level transfers of a subtle form of radiation from healer to patient, a low intensity jolt that triggers the body’s own inner healing powers.
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