Connectivity and healing: some hypotheses about the phenomenon and how to study it.

Most physicians are willing to admit that extraordinary improvements sometimes occur in patients' conditions, despite expectations to the contrary. Few will refuse to accept the occasional disappearance of tumors, patients who are expected to die imminently yet outlive their physicians, and other medical miracles. The dominant medical paradigm classifies these occurrences as "spontaneous remissions" since our treatments were not expected to be so successful. A non-dominant minority within academic medicine accepts the hypothesis that these events occur through a process that is called "healing" in ordinary language. Surveys of family physicians show that more than half believe faith can cure, and that divine intervention is possible in human disease.' These believers are not common in academic medical centers, where skepticism is the norm. Beyond the usual chaplaincy service, spirituality has largely been banished from "respectable" healthcare. As practicing physicians, we have seen events that could also be called "spontaneous healing."^ We have met cancer patients whose tumors have mysteriously regressed, allowing them to survive against impossible odds. We have encountered patients in the emergency room whom we never expected to survive, only to see them thrive years later. Those of us who have worked on the frontlines of medicine know amazing things happen that lie beyond biomedical explanation. In this essay, I hope to propose some potential explanatory hypotheses for the amazing and the miraculous, and to suggest a method for its study This is especially important because these phenomena do not avail themselves to randomized clinical trials, our usual method of testing treatments. I will suggest that the reason for this is that we are observing systemic transformations—events of self-reorgani zation that occur at far-from-equi librium conditions, outside of the range of the ordinary events that clinical trials are designed to study. The following case will organize our consideration of unchallenged assumptions within modern medicine that hinder our consideration of healing: Bethany was a 36-year old woman who had successfully completed treatment for thyroid cancer 10 years previously, and had been pronounced cured. I met her on referral from her internist for help with stress-related symptoms. Those symptoms sounded suspiciously like seizures. An EEG confirmed this and an MRI showed a temporal lobe tumor. Within one week, she underwent surgery and a glioblastoma multiforme was removed. Most patients with this diagnosis die within 11 months of diagnosis. Bethany is still alive 8 years later. How do we explain this? Bethany underwent the standard chemotherapy and radiation therapy The best estimates at the time were that these treatments would prolong her life by 4%—not a very dramatic increase. Some of her friends suggested she would be better off skipping these difficult therapies. Bethany disagreed, believing that they would have extraordinary benefit for her. To his credit, her neurooncologist never disagreed with her optimism. In addition, she joined our weekly healing circle. We performed some extra visualization and energy healing sessions. Bethany also attended the sweat lodges and healing ceremonies of the local Native American community, along with several others of us. In Bethany's version of her story, she reinvented her hfe as she surrounded herself with people who believed that she would be well. She left a stressful job that she hated; she left a relationship that was going nowhere; she created a new, sustainable life and a reason why she should live. Bethany continues to avoid pessimists. She surrounds herself with loving friends and family, believing that she needs that level of positive culture. How do we explain Bethany's story? How unusual is it? Our "skeptic" friends avoid discussing her case since the pathology reports and laboratory findings cannot be