Spontaneous Healing

Norman Cousins, the longtime editor of the Saturday Evening Post, was diagnosed in the mid-1960s with ankylosing spondylitis, a degenerative fatal disease that leads to severe breakdown of collagen and eventually death. Given only a few months to live, he left the hospital and moved to a hotel room, where he spent hours every day watching comedies and laughing out loud as much as he could. Instead of getting worse, he began to regain use of his limbs. As his condition improved, he resumed his life as an editor and detailed his disease and complete healing in the bestselling book Anatomy of an Illness.

Since Cousin’s remarkable cure, many similar stories have been told: a cancer patient given months to live is visiting his grandchildren ten years later; a tumor that doesn’t respond to chemotherapy begins to shrink after the patient uses vis-ualization techniques to treat herself. Until recently, physicians and researchers who’d presented cases of unexplained spontaneous healing were ignored or called crackpots because it’s difficult for most scientists to accept what can’t be tested or proven. Doctors, especially, find it hard to believe that patients can actually heal themselves because it makes them feel less significant and less in control.

But all that’s changing. A physician friend of mine once said that eighty-five percent of his patients literally cure themselves. Spontaneous healing occurs because something within us triggers a major response in our immune system, which literally floods our body with increasing white blood cells that attack and destroy whatever it is that’s causing the illness to begin with. We shouldn’t be at all surprised that this happens as often as it does. Without such an immune response, we would all be dying of diseases so quickly they would wipe out the human race. What should surprise us is that we know so little about how to use the mind-body connection to strengthen immunity and to heal ourselves in the process.

From: Stress, Disease & the Mind-Body Connection: Using the Power of the Brain for Health and Self-Healing by Dr. Andrew Goliszek