Resource: Cured, by Dr Jeffrey Rediger
The 1% blog explores themes of hope, wellness and discovery in the context of MND / ALS. This article is for informational purposes only and does not construe medical advice. The author is not a healthcare professional. Please consult a healthcare professional about your own healthcare needs.
Dr Jeffrey Rediger is a physician, psychiatrist, a best-selling author, and is on the faculty of Harvard Medical School. As well as his medical and psychiatric training, he holds a Master of Divinity in theology and philosophy from Princeton Theological Seminary, giving him a worldview that combines the academic rigour of a scientist with an almost pastoral touch, informed by his education and rooted in his own lived experience of challenge, loss, and growth. You can understand why the title of his bestselling book, Cured: The Life-Changing Science of Spontaneous Healing (known in some markets as Cured: The Power of Our Immune System and the Mind-Body Connection), caught my attention.
Dr Rediger spent 17 years researching spontaneous remissions, following up hundreds of leads from around the world of people who were diagnosed with terminal or untreatable illnesses. Normal people who had their normal lives cancelled when a doctor gave them the worst possible news. By carefully excluding cases that could be explained by any other possible means - whether that meant the person could have been misdiagnosed in the first place or that their remission hadn’t been medically verified - the field was narrowed to only the most watertight of cases.
No two stories were the same, but Dr Rediger pulls from all of the remarkable cases he documented to identify what he calls ‘the four pillars of spontaneous remission’: healing nutrition, healing the immune system, healing stress response, and healing the identity.
In the field of medicine, spontaneous remissions challenge established mindsets around health, treatment, and what is deemed possible. Often, these cases are merely shrugged off, remaining in the category of fluke or anecdote. Yet, there are outliers in every field. In sport, for example, we acknowledge that generational athletes. These high achievers are studied by others who strive to emulate or surpass their level of performance. The culture in sport is to aspire, looking upward, to break the barriers of possibility. Healthcare seems to favour placing conservative expectations around prognosis and possibility, never wanting to give the patient so-called ‘false hope’.
Spontaneous remissions might sound like miracles, but the truth is, they aren’t spontaneous at all. It was clear that all of these people were mindfully involved in their own health. When allopathic options ran out - when treatments and medicines were no longer available or effective - they made peace with their situations and sought to live the remainder of their lives on their own terms. Somehow, this created conditions within them that allowed their bodies to heal. Unfortunately, there’s no one way to guarantee a remission from an incurable disease, just like there’s no recipe to create an all-time great athlete, but surely there are enough clues here to warrant further investigation.
I was completely inspired by this work, which served to further reinforce my own belief in what was possible for me and others in my position. It is, without doubt, the most important book I’ve ever read (and re-read and re-read), and I highly recommend it to everyone, especially those facing a chronic or terminal diagnosis. Fair warning: it might give you hope!
I stand with you.