Issue 11 April 2011 “
Quantum
Probably the most profound story I have is one I wrote about in Coyote Medicine, and it was one that changed my view of myself as a doctor.
make sense in the context of their lives. Not in a linear, explanatory, cause-and-effect way, but in a circular, interconnected, kind of intuitive way that’s usually difficult to articulate. But when we hear the story, the light bulb goes off. We say, ‘Ah ha! That explains it.’
We know that the mind–mental force–changes physical reality. We know that, for example, from Jeffrey Schwartz’s studies, from ULCA, where he took people with obsessive-compulsive disorder and did PET scans and showed how their brains were abnormal, and then through the sheer force of mental will they changed–it’s part of a programme he developed using mindfulness meditation and cognitive therapy. They stopped the obsessive-compulsive behaviour and their brains changed! So we know that mental force changes physical matter…
Q
So much of what you are saying puts the patient at the forefront, not the doctor. I was struck by something you wrote in Coyote Wisdom, and I paraphrase: In conventional medicine, the hero is the doctor and it is his or her magic that makes the patient well. The narrative approach returns the role of hero to the patient, the client–the person who is suffering. Would you explain further?
L M-M: When you think about healing, it’s always a humble journey. It starts from a restricted, narrow, dark, frightening place of sickness. And we have to overcome obstacles, and there may be villains, and we have to take action. We have to travel, to go somewhere . . . to undergo a journey. And emerge triumphant, with the help of our friends and a supportive audience. And that’s what heroes do. So I think that the more people can embrace the heroic role of getting well, the more likely they can get well. And if they don’t, what a great story to go out by. You know, you might as well go out with a bang–go out a hero!
www.quantumhealthmagazine.com Q
Would you leave us with one final story about the heroic in healing. What is one of the most “marvellous” stories from your patients about the
journey from illness to health?
L M-M: Probably the most profound story I have is one I wrote about in Coyote Medicine, and it was one that changed my view of myself as a doctor. I had begun working with people in a format in which they come for typically seven days, and we would work together for four to six hours a day. And a woman came to work with me who had metastatic ovarian cancer. I told her, ‘I have to tell you that everything I know says that this can’t be cured. Everything I’ve ever been taught or learned says that this is lethal. I can’t really do anything in good conscience for that.’ She looked at me, she patted me on the head, and she said, ‘Don’t worry. I have enough faith for the both of us. You just do your thing and I’ll take care of the rest.’ So I just did my thing, which is, you know, getting her story, leading guided imagery, and working with my hands over her body, doing ceremony and ritual, taking her to medicine people, morning yoga, and on and on and on. So we did our thing. And her cancer disappeared. And I’ll never forget that because it wasn’t supposed to happen. And what it showed me, what I thought of is Hamlet, I think it was Horatio who says something like, ‘There are more things in the earth and sky than your philosophy has ever dreamed of.’ Healing is a mysterious thing, and we do it a disservice in medicine when we pretend that we know a lot about it… Who are we [as physicians] to say that someone will live or die? That someone can’t get well?
To contact Dr. Mehl-Madrona, email him at
mehlmadrona@gmail.com; call him at 802-254-0152, ext. 8402; or write him at P.O. Box 578, Brattleboro, VT 05302
HEALTH
Quantum Health 13
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