This is the rough draft of the introduction to part 2 of a book I am writing. The tentative title for the book is: The Power of the Human Mind
I am publishing part 2 here for anyone who might find it helpful even in its preliminary rough-draft format. After you read this, I would greatly appreciate any comments that you are willing to share with me. I am particularly interested in hearing about anything that needs clarification or improvement. I would also like to hear about ideas that you find particularly interesting, or about which you would like to read more. My preferred way to receive these comments is by email: chuckge@bellsouth.net.
You may also be interested in other articles that present what I am currently working on in my writing of this book, (the rough drafts of parts 1 and 2 or available on my website, the rough drafts of parts 3 and 4 are not yet complete):
Part 1: Better Health with less Medications
Part 2: (This article: A Ray of Hope for the Terminally ill)
Part 3: Coping with the Loss of a Loved One
Part 4: Answers to Life’s Big Questions (To be based on the contents of the first 3 parts)
(Most recent update: 10/13/23. If you are reading a printed version of this article, it can also be found on my website: chuckgebhardtmd.com)
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This article is for people given a diagnosis of an illness that is expected to be terminal and who have been told that there are no medical treatments available that might lead to a cure or long-term remission. It is also for anyone with this kind of dire prognosis for whom all the currently available curative or controlling treatments have failed. If this is what you are facing, you probably were re-assured that you will receive any medications that might be needed to keep you as comfortable as possible, and you may have enrolled in a hospice program to assist you. Perhaps you may have even been advised to “get your affairs in order,” or some similar, very discouraging, advice.
If this applies to you, and you have been left feeling that there is no hope, the people who have given you this impression are wrong. This does not mean that they do not have the best of intentions for you. Nor does it mean that they are not completely following the officially recommended standard of care that almost all of their colleagues would also be following if you were being treated elsewhere. But they are still wrong. They are probably correct if they are saying it is very unlikely that you will not succumb to your illness, yet they are wrong if they imply there is absolutely no chance that you will live well past their expectations.
Until recently, I have agreed with these conclusions and have believed that comfort measures and hospice care, if needed, were the best that I could do for my terminally ill patients who have failed to respond to conventional therapies. But then I came across reports of investigators who had searched for and reviewed medical reports of people with well documented diagnoses of terminal disease who had failed the usual treatments, and yet whose disease process just went away. Even though these cases have been relatively rare, there still have been several thousand reports published in medical journals over the years.
These unexpected outcomes were never mentioned in my medical school training, and, at this point in time, they are still rarely mentioned in the medical literature. But the existence of these reports indicates a very important truth: nobody, not even highly trained medical specialists, has 100 percent knowledge of what anyone’s future will hold. This is why I can emphatically state that if anyone has told you or even implied that they know how long you are going to live, they are wrong! A medical prognosis is a well-informed estimate of probabilities, but that is all it is, it is just an estimate of the likelihood of various outcomes given the specifics of the diagnosis and the treatments being used or considered.
Given the way these unexpected medical outcomes were reported in the past, it is apparent why they have been nearly ignored. When they first started appearing in the medical journals, they were called the “spontaneous remission of incurable disease.” Describing them in this way indicated that they were completely unpredictable events, and since conventional treatments had failed, nothing else could explain how such desirable results were achieved. Since these unexpected outcomes have also been rare, and if it is indeed true that there is nothing that can be done to increase their likelihood, it would be reasonable to avoid discussing them with the patients suffering from the diseases involved to avoid giving them false hope.
However, relatively recently, a few investigators have questioned the conclusion that nothing can be done to increase the likelihood of these highly desirable medical outcomes. These investigators noted that the original “spontaneous remission” articles in the medical journals were very limited in what they reported concerning the people with these deadly illnesses. Those who wrote these reports in the past were careful to provide the details on which the diagnosis was based, the patient’s response to medical treatments, and how long beyond the usual expectations they survived, but they almost never included information about the individual’s life circumstances, nor their thoughts, opinions or beliefs concerning their disease and its treatments.
Probably the best exploration of a much more detailed accounting of the lives of these unusual patients is found in a book entitled Radical Remission by Kelly Turner, PhD. This book, which was based on Dr. Turner’s research dissertation for her PhD, documented her findings from extended interviews with over 100 individuals that survived well beyond anyone’s reasonable expectation. Dr. Turner found 75 different factors that were both repeatedly mentioned by the unexpected survivors and felt by them to be very important to overcoming their disease. She reports that she was surprised that 9 of these factors stood out from the rest and were part of nearly all of the case histories she investigated.
When I read this book, I was surprised also. As a primary care physician for over 30 years, I have cared for hundreds of patients in very similar circumstances to those reported in this book. Like Dr. Turner, I have also had access to the life stories of almost all of them. What I have witnessed in my patients is in stark contrast to Dr. Turner’s findings. The efforts at self-treatment used very frequently by those she interviewed were rarely even considered by my patients. Almost all of my patients passively accepted their dismal diagnosis and passed on as expected within the time from of the medical prognosis they had been given, while almost all the patients she interviewed had taken a very active role in managing their efforts to survive and had outlived their physician’s predictions, often by many years. While my patients rarely, if ever, tried any alternative strategies beyond the conventional treatments the specialists recommended, almost all her case reports included multiple alternative strategies. Some of the unexpected survivors even refused conventional medical treatments altogether.
I found the differences between Dr. Turner’s findings and my experience regarding how active people were in their treatment decisions to be very puzzling. Why did using certain alternative strategies make such a difference to their future health and survival? And why was there no one single herb, drug, diet, or any other alternative strategy reported by all these survivors? Every story was unique in the choice of alternatives selected, and almost all employed several. While the most frequently reported health initiatives she found in her survey have been reliably shown to produce health benefits in many other research reports, the power these research studies demonstrated would not come close to accounting for the unexpected outcomes Dr. Turner documented.
The main commonality in all these stories is that the people involved took total responsibility for the strategies they employed to improve their lives. They had enough faith in the potential of their efforts to make them a part of their lives. What I concluded from all this was that these cases of “spontaneous remission” were not at all spontaneous, and they had much to do with the beliefs and actions of the people who were told they had these dreaded diseases.
Since this conclusion was so much in conflict with what I learned in my training, as well as with what almost all physicians and medical research scientist believe, I needed more confirmation to be completely convinced. Then, as I explored the case reports of unexpected survival further, I came across a case history about a cancer drug, given the name “krebiozen,” that pointed in a promising direction to help me resolve this dilemma.
How “Krebiozen” dramatically improved a case of advanced lymphoma
In 1957, this story about a terminally ill patient (given the pseudonym Mr. Wright) was published in the Journal of Protective Techniques. Mr. Wright was in the last stage of a rapidly progressive lymphoma. He had tumor growths as big as an orange on his neck, in his armpits, and on his groin. He was so weak he was bedridden and gasping for air. All conventional treatments had failed to control the cancer, and his physician, Phillip West MD, had told him he had only a few weeks to live.
Of course, Mr. Wright was desperate, and when he heard of a new treatment his hospital was helping to evaluate through an experimental drug trial, he asked to be enrolled. However, he failed to qualify since he lacked one of the requirements of the study design: he was not expected to live another 3 months. He was so persistent, though, that he was able to convince Dr. West to obtain some of the treatment drug, called Krebiozen (a compound extracted from the blood of horses), to be injected into him even though he had failed to qualify for the research trial.
Three days later, the tumors had shrunk to less than one half their previous size, and he was able to walk around the hospital ward without assistance. He was in such good spirits that he was joking with the hospital staff. Then, two weeks after he was given his first dose of Krebiozen, he was discharged to home as a “miraculous cure.”
The story does not end here, however. Two months after this cure, Mr. Wright read news reports that Krebiozen was found to be a complete failure in the formal experimental trials. He relapsed; the tumors returned. When this happened, Dr. West concluded that his remission had been a placebo response, and since his patient was terminally ill again, there was little to lose if he lied to Mr. Wright about the Krebiozen he had been given. Dr. West told him that he had been mistakenly given a “weak batch” of Krebiozen, and he had obtained a “new, super-refined, double strength version.” But, in fact, he was injected with distilled water instead of krebiozen.
In response to this second treatment, his tumors once again shrank away to nothing, and Mr. Wright was again discharged to home in good health. Several months later, though, more news reports about the Krebiozen trials appeared. It was disclosed that the research trials had been an elaborate hoax and the drug’s manufacturers had been indicted for fraud. After he heard this news, Mr. Wright’s tumors returned, and he died within a week.
In this case report, Krebiozen was a completely inactive compound; it was a fraud. Yet Mr. Wright’s lymphoma dramatically improved while he was taking this inactive substance simply because of the strength of his conviction that it would cure his cancer. It was his belief in the curative power of Krebiozen and his decision to find a way to obtain it that were the keys to its effectiveness. If this story is completely true, it can only be the power of Mr. Wright’s mind that was being demonstrated.
In much the same way that the Radical Remission survivors pursued their beliefs in alternative strategies, Mr. Wright in this case report strongly believed in the potential of Krebiozen to cure his advanced lymphoma. This case history encouraged me to turn my attention to the large body of research reports that have investigated what medical science calls “the placebo effect.” Next, I will briefly summarize what I have found.
The power of the “mere placebo”
It would be hard to imagine a more dramatic case report demonstrating what medical scientists call the placebo effect than this case report about krebiozen. But, despite cases like this that show such potent responses to inactive drugs or treatments, physicians and medical researchers often describe such healing responses as “merely the effect of a placebo.” Labeling them in this fashion implies that improvements due to the placebo effect are somehow less than real.
This attitude is easily understandable. We know that the results of any experimental trial involving human research subjects can be misleading since the subjects almost always want the results to be as the researchers expect, and the investigators themselves wish to show their theories to be correct through the successful outcomes of their experiments. While using placebos to minimize these potential biases is an effective and important way to control for them, using placebos so extensively and almost exclusively for this purpose, tends to distract us from appreciating their most important actions and their tremendous potential. I think it is fair to say that the scientific consensus about the placebo effect is that it is just a nuisance that complicates research designed to develop new and more effective medications. A review of the research on the placebo effect shows how this attitude is mistaken.
Probably the most important things to know about the placebo effect is that it is absolutely real and that the health benefits that result from it are very important. Carefully designed studies have compared the health benefits of providing a completely inactive treatment or substance (called a placebo) to no treatment at all. These research reports not only show these effects to be very reliable and effective, but with appropriate testing, it is also shown that the use of placebos produces definite, measurable changes in the structure and function of the human body.
Since the treatments in these studies are known to be completely inactive, the only difference between the two groups being compared are the thoughts, beliefs and expectations of the research subjects involved. These, of course, are attributes and actions of the human mind, and this is what produces the changes found. Other studies have expanded this understanding by showing that the stronger the beliefs, the more powerful the effect7. Furthermore, studies have also shown that all kinds of conscious input to the awareness of the research subjects (or patients) modify the power of the placebo effect8. This would include medical reports about it, the opinions of others, the reputation of the treating clinicians and even the conditions of the physical facility in which they are provided, to name only some. All these effects are additive to the final result.
Furthermore, the research also shows that what we are calling the placebo effect can be either positive or negative. If you believe a treatment is harmful, being given it can damage your health and your body’s integrity, even when it is otherwise safe and inactive. This also means that when someone warns you about potential side effects that might result from a treatment, the likelihood that these side effects will occur increases. Ironically, warning about side effects tends to produce them.
It is commonly stated or implied that using a placebo is a form of dishonesty and deception. Incredibly, though, research shows that a beneficial placebo effect can still be demonstrated even when the person being treated is completely aware that their treatment is only a placebo6. What I conclude from this is that when there is no deception intended, there is no ethical problem resulting from the use of placebos in day-to-day medical care.
Given the potential power and pervasive action of the placebo effect, it may be tempting to wonder if the successes of all medical care are just manifestations of its action. To doubt the action of physically based treatments, though, would be a huge mistake. In carefully controlled studies where subjects are completely unaware that they are receiving a known physically active treatment, the beneficial effects are still present. While these studies eliminate any possibility that the results found are due to the placebo effect, they are usually less effective than when the human subjects are aware of the treatment and its expected benefit. It is very important to keep in mind that in just about every medical care scenario, both the physical actions of the treatments being employed, and the placebo effect, are always in play and additive to each other. Both the incredible effectiveness of conventional medical treatments and the ever-present power of the placebo effect should always be kept in mind when formulating a treatment plan.
If this information about placebo effects is new to you, it should provide very helpful guidance for more effectively using any healing strategies you may wish to use. It should encourage you to pay very close attention to your feelings about any strategy you may consider employing since your confidence in it is so important to its effectiveness.
An important insight is that our beliefs and expectations about any strategy we may consider are changeable since our beliefs about everything in the world around us are constantly changing in response to new experiences. We can intentionally take charge of this process by focusing on whatever topic interests us and seems important. Reading about potential strategies, talking to others about them, and beginning to try simple-to-use versions of them all can increase our confidence in them and raise our expectations of their value.
Another fundamentally important attribute of the placebo effect is how general its influence is on our health, and how this contrasts with physically based medical treatments. The physically active treatments of conventional medicine are very different in that they are very specifically targeted at a particular malfunction or disruption that is taking place in our body at any given time. Accordingly, their proper use requires a lot of knowledge and experience concerning human anatomy, physiology, and biochemistry to properly select those that will be safe and effective. These physical treatments can sometimes be additive in their benefits, but only if they are very carefully chosen based on extensive medical knowledge. Thus, conventional medical treatments should be directed by highly trained professionals.
Since beneficial placebo effects are very general in the way they act, adding them together will always be even more beneficial. In contrast to conventional medical treatments, their effective use does not require any medical training whatsoever. In a similar manner, the self-healing strategies discussed in this article are also very general in their effects, are additive to each other, and do not require medical expertise to use them well. What matters most is your individual confidence, expectations, and feelings about them as you contemplate your use of them. What this all means is that the more alternative strategies you use that seem promising to you, the more likely you will be successful.
With this brief introduction to the phenomena of the unexpected healing of deadly diseases and the placebo effect behind us, here are some suggestions to help you begin to effectively apply the insights discussed.
Suggestions for a multifaceted, personal plan for self-healing
I cannot, of course, promise that a deadly disease you may be suffering from will be completely resolved by following the suggestions that follow. What Dr. Turner called radical remissions are still very rare. I can, though, confidently promise that a more enlightened use of the placebo effect and the use self-help strategies you feel are promising will provide health benefits and your future well-being. With these considerations in mind, here is a list of steps to consider. The order of their presentation is what seemed most logical to me but should not be taken to imply which is most important.
1. If you have not done so already, obtain and read a copy of Radical Remission. Just reading about the triumphs of others who overcame a nearly hopeless prognosis should be helpful to you, but trying out approaches that worked for them should be even better. As you read this book and the stories it contains, you will see how the people Dr. Turner interviewed were almost all managing their self-treatment by following their own personal beliefs and intuition. Accordingly, you should carefully focus on your own reaction to the strategies reported in this book. The 9 factors reported to be the most frequently used in Dr. Turners extensive survey all have scientific research to support their benefits to those that apply them. These benefits are non-specific and additive, and will add to the power of the placebo effect that these strategies will also carry for you. As your confidence increases in any of the strategies you might consider, so will their effectiveness when you put them into use.
2. Consider obtaining and reading the research reports concerning the placebo effect which can be found at the end of this article. Just reading the abstract (summary) at the beginning of each report should be helpful in increasing your knowledge about this powerful attribute we all possess. If you already have familiarity with reading and interpreting research reports, reading them in their entirety should be even better. The more you know about the placebo effect, and the better you are at consciously using it, the more power it will hold for you.
3. If you haven’t already read it, consider reading my article (found on my website): Better Health with less Medication. It includes more ideas about the use of some of the 9 factors reported by Dr. Turner. It also includes other self-healing strategies that should also be beneficial. These were included in my article because they have health benefits for anyone who uses them, and they should also add to the benefit to be gained by someone suffering from a terminal illness.
4. Consider finding one of the videos on the internet about Anita Moorjani’s dramatic recovery from being comatose in the last stage of a very advanced lymphoma. Just like the report of the unexpected healing of Mr. Wright’s advanced stages of cancer, Anita’s story has also been very well documented. She was in a coma, her body’s organ systems had shut down, and her physicians had informed her family that the end would be within a few hours. Instead of dying, she woke up from her coma and her body began to be rejuvenated. After this incredible recovery, Anita reported a near death experience as the reason she survived and healed her cancer. I take this seriously both because of how well documented it was and the accuracy of the things she reported to her physician and her family that she should not have had any knowledge of while she was in a coma. Anita has also written a book that presents this experience in much more depth entitled: Dying to be me.
While what I have covered in this article so far may seem like a lot for you to do, we have only considered the first few steps toward what you might do to improve your outlook and your future. The deeper you go, the more power and potential you should find. If you have read Radical Remission, you will have noted that many unexpected survivors were led to important changes in their lives along with their use of alternative healing strategies. Some changed their jobs, some formed new and very rewarding relationships with other individuals, and some completely changed the goals they were trying to obtain in their lives. I am now writing a third part to this series tentatively entitled: Coping with the Loss of a Loved One. While it is being written for people who are grieving, the important questions and concerns it addresses should be helpful for anyone, but particularly so for those dealing with a terminal illness.
I do not know when Part 3 will be available, but when the rough draft is complete, I will be placing it on my website where the first 2 parts are located.
References
If you want an in-depth understanding of the potential of the human mind to completely reverse terminal illnesses, you should start with this book:
1. Turner KA, Radical Remission: surviving cancer against all odds. Harper One; 2015
The following articles are by independent investigators who examine the same phenomena researched by Dr. Turner, and who arrive at similar conclusions:
2. Roud PC, Psychosocial variables associated with the exceptional survival of patients with advanced malignant disease. J Nat Med Assoc 1987; 79:97-102Peters R, The connection between spontaneous remission of cancer and mindbody medicine. Cancer Strategies J Summer 2013; 1-8
3. Peters R, The connection between spontaneous remission of cancer and mindbody medicine. Cancer Strategies J Summer 2013; 1-8
This is another professionally written and researched book about extraordinary healings and what they can teach us:
4. Hirschberg C, Barasch MI, Remarkable Recovery. NY,NY: Riverhead Books; 1995
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This is a classic research report that shows that a completely ineffective surgical procedure can successfully control angina in cardiac patients:
5. Dimond EG, Kittle CF, et al. Comparison of internal mammary artery ligation and sham operation for angina pectoris. Am J of Cardiology 1960; 5:483-486
Here are articles that increase our understanding of both the potency and complexity of the placebo effect:
6. Finniss DG, Kaptchuk TJ, et al. Placebo effects: biological, clinical and ethical advances. Lancet 2010; 375:686-695
7. Kam-Hansen S, Jakubowski M, et al. Labelin of medication and placebo alters the outcome of episodic migraine attacks. Sci Transl Med 2014; 6:1-15
8. Jensen KB, Kaputchuk TJ, et al. Nonconscious activation of placebo and nocebo responses. PNAS 2012; 109:15959-15964
Here is a research report showing that administering a physically inactive placebo changes both the structure and function of the brain of subjects who believe it is an active drug:
9. Leuchter AF, Cook IA, et al. Changes in brain function of depressed subjects during treatment with placebo. Am J Psychiatry 2002; 159:122-129
This is a review of 152 research reports that show that the placebo effect is an important part of the treatment effect of active medical treatments:
10. Howick J, Friedemann C, et al. Are Treatments More Effective than Placebos? A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis. PLoS One 2013; 8(5)
Science and Spirit 