BERNIE
By Bernie Siegel, MD
Remarkable Recoveries T
he reason that medicine has not ex- plored the issue of self healing is that we either give credit to the treatment or refer to the healings as miracles or sponta- neous remissions. But a lot can be learned about survival behavior by talking to those patients who experienced “miracles”. Psychologist Bruno Klopfer, back in the
1940’s, was given 24 personality profi les of cancer patients and correctly predicted 19 times who would have a fast or slow grow- ing cancer. In one case he couldn’t decide and his predictions were wrong four times. Yet when a patient enters a doctor’s offi ce and is given a diagnosis, he is not given a list of questions to determine his personal- ity profi le or his likelihood of being a long- term survivor.
Doctors are not trained to communi- cate with patients and so our words can kill or cure. Authority fi gures are hypnotic but some doctors can be hypnotic in a negative way, inducing side effects and sometimes an earlier death by referring to statistics and eliminating hope. Statistics do not apply to individuals and there is no false hope. Psychiatrist George Solomon, when working with AIDS patients early in the epi-
demic, came up with eight questions that defi ne an Immune Competent Personality. He said that from the questions one could predict who would be a long term survivor. Psychiatrist Caroline Thomas, at Johns
Hopkins had medical students fi ll out a per- sonality profi le and draw pictures of them- selves. From the profi le and drawings she found a connection with diseases they de- veloped later in life and could predict what disease they were likely to get and the part of the body likely to be involved from their drawings. Even she was surprised to fi nd a correlation with cancer too. Our bodies love us but if we do not
love them in return, they turn on us. There are more suicides and serious illnesses on Mondays than on any other day of the week. That is no coincidence. Our relation- ships play an enormous part in making our lives meaningful and helping us to survive. As W. H. Auden wrote about cancer in the poem, Miss Gee, a doctor says to his wife, “Cancer’s a funny thing. Childless women get it and men when they retire. It’s as if there had to be an outlet for their foiled cre- ative fi re.” Jungian therapists call it growth gone wrong.
Women live longer than men with the same cancers. Married men live longer than single men with the same cancers. Does that make it remarkable? It is obvious from many studies that a
reason for living also relates to the will to live and survival. I hear men say, “I can’t work anymore. What’s the point of living?” while their families are sitting next to them. While women say, “I can’t die till you’re all married and out of the house.” She died of her cancer twenty three years later when her ninth kid left home. She, like the men, needed to live an authentic life and not just a role as the wage earner or mother. Recent studies show how loneliness affects the genes that control immune function and can lead to cancer, infections and autoim- mune diseases. I was involved in several cases of re- markable recoveries. One was a woman who lived in North Carolina and was told by her doctor that going to the hospital for chemotherapy was a waste of time and energy as she was going to die anyway of cancer. Her niece was caring for my father- in-law at the time and without asking me told her aunt, “Doctor Siegel helps people to get well all the time. So, come up here to Connecticut.”
When she arrived and I was called, I
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admitted her to the hospital and found she had leukemia. As a surgeon I had nothing to offer her, so I called an oncologist to see her. He basically said what her doctor had said but started chemotherapy to give her some hope. She responded dramatically and went into complete remission. Her niece later told me she went home and was driving her doctor crazy, and that she knew she would get well when I sat on her bed and hugged her. Jordan Fieldman was a Harvard medi-
cal student who developed visual problems many years ago and was diagnosed with
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