Medical disclaimer – before I get into the stories from this book, Let me make it clear that I am not making any medical recommendations, and that these stories are being shared for entertainment purposes only. Consult with your doctor before trying anything.
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This book starts with the story of Claire, a 63 yo soon-to-be retiree looking forward to moving from Oregon to Hawaii, and retiring with her husband. But she starts to experience concerning symptoms, and finds out that she has one of the deadliest cancers out there – pancreatic. And when she met with the surgeon who was going to cut her 2 cm tumor out, he was very honest and straightforward with her that surgery only came with a 5% chance of curing her. Meanwhile, she was almost guaranteed to writhe in pain and suffer the consequences of the procedure for a long time. So she opted out of really undergoing any treatment for her pancreatic cancer.
The author, Jeffrey Rediger, then sort of fast forwards 5 years. Claire is actually undergoing another type of medical test for some other ailment she had. The test involved a scan which happened to include her pancreas….where no sign of the previous cancer was found. Now, Claire had opted out of all conventional treatments (chemo, radiation, surgery), yet here she was cancer free.
Interestingly, her doctor told her that her experience had no medical value, it was just a fluke. He didn’t ask her what she changed or tried, he just shooed her along.
Here is where Rediger makes sort of the premise of his book, and that is to determine what the people are doing when they are able to cure their ailments. What are their techniques and strategies. And it’s interesting that we do make a point of studying strategies of people like successful athletes or musicians so we can learn from them, but we completely ignore what people who have successfully cured themselves are doing. And that’s basically what he is doing in this book.
The author says that when he was starting his research of spontaneous remission of cancer, he had heard the statistic that 1 in 100 thousand would experience spontaneous remission, but when he looked into the source of this stat, he found that it was basically made up. When he dug into the topic further, it looked like cases of spontaneous remission were actually much higher, and often would spike after big media stories, the release of popular books, or conferences. He said that when he would ask a group of physicians how many of them had observed remissions which had no medical explanation, several hands would always shoot up, but when he would ask them how many of them documented these observations in case studies, all hands went down. So there might be quite a few more spontaneous healings than we know.
Certainly the author, Jeffrey Rediger, was guided by many sources to research the topic of this book. But one of the influences which, at the very least, got him to travel to Brazil to study faith healers there, was a woman in the hospital he worked in, Nikki. Nikki had been diagnosed with terminal cancer, and flew to Brazil for healing. After this, she did experience what would appear to be a miraculous recovery for a while, but ended up ultimately succumbing to her disease. And of course, Rediger thought that it was all a sham. People can undergo all sorts of “recoveries” and simply just be experiencing a placebo effect. For example, some people can think that they have been spontaneously healed…but then you can see the tumors growing on their scans, and their lifespan isn’t increased anymore than if they’d received no treatment. But Nikki was so adamant that Rediger at least check it out, that she even got people from her experience in Brazil to contact him, and tell him their stories.
So finally, he decides to check it out. He starts at the Casa de dom Inacio Loyola in Abadiania, Brazil. – this is the place where the famous healer, John of God, operates. And while he was in Brazil, he certainly came across a fair number of miraculous healings. For example, there was one man, who was in his 80s who’d been diagnosed with glioblastoma decades earlier. When he asked the guy if he made any changes in his life, the man said, nothing really. He kind of was attributing his healing to just coming to the Casa of John of God, and that was it. HIs wife, however, was sitting next to him, and said everything had changed. Before the diagnosis, he was a completely absent husband and father, focusing on his job, or going out drinking. After the diagnosis, his focus shifted to the family, and he just became a much more engaged person.
After hearing many of these stories of healings, Rediger came to the conclusion that something real was happening at the Casa of John of God, but he actually thought it wasn’t anything John of God was doing. Rather, he thought these were people who had made some sort of significant changes in their lives. But what was that?
So, as he sorts through the “what” of these cures, he supports this hypothesis that one of 4 aspects of the patient’s life has gone awry, and needs to be tweaked. These aspects include:
Your immune system, your nutrition, Your stress response, and your identity. In the book, Rediger details nicely a lot of the science that backs up his rationale for each of these different systems possibly contributing to ill health. I just skipped all of that because it bored me, and went straight to the anecdotes.
- Your Immune system:
He cites case studies of patients who were diagnosed with terminal cancers, who then got some sort of infection after a surgery – possibly to remove the tumor, or some of the tumor. And these people are in the hospital a while as their bodies fight this infection which they got as a result of the surgery. Normally, we would say this is a bad thing, but in certain cases, the patients have gone into remission from this incurable disease. The idea is that perhaps their immune system kicked into gear as a result of the infection, and then it went on to do it’s normal job, which is to also get rid of cancer cells.
It’s rare that I learn something from history which truly shocks me, but Rediger reveals in this book that the famous microbiologist, Louis Pasteur, who is the reason for Pasteurization, actually had a really heated debate with another colleague, Antoine Bechamp, over how best to view or approach the topic of these germs which they were only newly discovering at the time. And, if you can imagine at the time, whenever these germs were discovered, they were basically determined to be the culprit behind these terrible diseases, or your favorite cheese going bad too early. So naturally Pasteur and the public supported this scorched earth policy when it came to these microbes – kill them all! And, it’s been years (Pasteurization came out in 1862), but I would say that it’s really only relatively recently that mainstream medicine is starting to recognize that having a healthy balance of microbes might actually be best–well, at least as it pertains to our human biological systems. We now hypothesize that a lot of people who may have received a lot of antibiotic treatments as a kid are more likely to have some sort of chronic condition, and possibly the imbalance of the types of bugs which live in their intestines are the reason why.
But this ISN’t something that we have only now come to understand. Even as early as when Pasteur was touting his “scorched-earth” recommendation for microbes, another, sorry, French biologist, Antoine Bechamp, was adamant that the specific microbe didn’t really matter. What mattered was the environment or terrain within which the microbe was introduced. Moreover, he had a colleague, Claude Bernard, who agreed with him so strongly, that this dude literally drank a glass of dirty water with Cholera…and he was totally fine. Now this guy must have been so confident because Cholera was one bitch of a disease back then. One last note on this story, as Louis Pasteur lay dying on his deathbed, which is where people go to die, he said, “Bernard was right, the pathogen is nothing; the terrain is everything.”
- Healing your Nutrition
Here’s the part where Rediger talks about how diet might impact an incurable disease. He brings up the story of Tom Wood, who had type 2 diabetes. Despite taking an increasing number of medications, his physical condition got worse and worse over time. He had less and less energy, and was experiencing disease of various organs from the high blood sugar. Then, one day, he went on a diet plan which was being advertised with a money back guarantee, and after a month of basically eating vegetarian, possibly vegan, he really had eliminated the need for half of his medications, and he was starting to feel a lot better. Now, he’s lean, no longer diabetic, and is able to walk 3 miles a day – whereas previously he could barely walk 100 feet.
What was interesting to me here was that his doctor had never seen anyone reverse their disease. This is as recent as within the last 6 years.
I have to hand it to Rediger here, because my impression from the book is that his preference is a vegan or vegetarian diet; but that doesn’t stop him from relaying the story of Pablo Kelly, who ended up going on a ketogenic diet when he found out that he had terminal glioblastoma multiforme. He started by fasting, which basically depletes the glucose stores in your body, and then he ate only meat, veggies, butter, and nuts. Basically, this just kept the tumor from growing for about 2 years. Then, a surgeon went in and cut out 90% of the tumor, and over the following months, the tendrils basically went away. That would be funny if it was really just the fast that stopped the cancer, and everything else he did was completely unnecessary.
- Healing your stress response
To illustrate the impact of stress on the body, Rediger brings up the story of Jan. When Rediger met Jan, he had a picture of her sitting in front of him at his desk (he was interviewing various patients who had healed in Brazil). This picture was from before Jan came to the healing center. When she walked in the room, he could not recognize her from her photo. So Jan’s story started in her teen years, when she struggled to keep awake, falling asleep on her homework. When she reached her twenties, she started getting more symptoms, rupturing a disc in her back. Then, she was diagnosed with something called dry nerve root – which sounds very painful. They had to give her surgery for that, but it put her in a wheelchair for 5 years. Meanwhile, she got married, had kids; but she keep having terrible symptoms — damn, lady, I got two functional legs and I can’t get a dude to save my life. Finally, and way too late, she was diagnosed with Lupus. So all of these terrible symptoms were due to the root cause of an autoimmune condition. By this time, she had so much organ damage from years of not having a diagnosis. Meanwhile, her situation at home wasn’t great. None of the details were shared in the book, but basically her husband left her, and her kids didn’t like her much either–talk about adding insult to injury. That would be funny if it was because she had like 10 different affairs – just men all over town that she was wheeling around to.
Her disease continued to worsen. She was on 15 medications, and really expecting to conk out any time. Interestingly, several people suggested that she go to the healing center in Brazil.
So finally, she was like, what do I have to lose. So she went. At the healing center, Rediger talks about the fact that one of the healing modalities offered was meditation – and people would basically meditate for hours. At one point, the meditation instructor walked up to Jan, and said, “They don’t belong to you.” What? “Your children, they don’t belong to you, they belong to God.”
Now the weight of this failed relationship with her kids had been so heavy on her, that when the instructor said this to her, she basically started crying, and just cried for days. Now, whether this was it or not, Jan started getting better. She started taking fewer and fewer medications. She even weaned off one of her meds so quickly that Rediger thought that alone could have killed her, but she was fine. And only a couple years later, she was unrecognizable. Certainly the fact that she’d lost weight contributed, but Rediger said this was not the only factor making her look so different. She said that she’d walk past people she knew, and they wouldn’t even recognize her.
This is a striking transformation for someone who just started to eat healthy and meditate. 15 medications, relationships with her family so bad that they abandoned her, the brink of multi-organ failure. It supports this theory I have that, if you’re still alive, there’s hope for you. If this woman can turn things around, so many others can do the same.
- Healing your Identity
Rediger also writes about Daniel, a 20 something seminary student who was raised in a very strict, conservatively religious household. Daniel felt a lot of guilt and shame about who he was and who he felt that he was supposed to be. He felt like he didn’t deserve to be an ordained pastor. He had a girlfriend, but his relationship was strained with her because of his conflicting feelings around sex and intimacy. At some point, he was diagnosed with testicular cancer; and, at the time, there wasn’t an effective cure for his disease, so it progressed, and he sort of started to prepare for death. Meanwhile, he went to a psychotherapist who did some regressive hypnosis on him. It took him back to when he was a very young boy, and he remembered his great grandmother. He could remember and feel how much unconditional love she showered on him. And, he carried this feeling of unconditional love with him out of the hypnotherapy session. Since he was dying, they asked him for what he wanted, and he said, I want to get ordained, and married. So, he got ordained and married. As he was going through the wedding ceremony, it seemed like he might not even make it through, he was so ghost-like from the advanced cancer. But he was starting to feel pretty good, and after a while, they decided to do scans on him, and low and behold, his tumors seemed to be shrinking–some of them were gone. Pretty soon, he was pronounced cancer free. So was it this new-found unconditional love for himself which somehow taught his body how to rid itself of cancer, or were these two unique events just coincidence.
Ok, I have no idea which of the categories this last story fits into. I would call it spiritual transformation…maybe? Anyway, this story again involves a dude with glioblastoma, his name is Matt Ireland (that’s right, you just heard me say “is” instead of “was,” so there’s a little hint as to how this ends). This guy was living the life – he was in his early twenties, and he was leading ski tours in the winter in Colorado, and mountain biking tours in the summer. Then, he started feeling really depressed, and it was basically out of nowhere because he’d always been so cheery that people would give him flack for that. Then, it started to become clear that something was wrong because he was getting these really bad headaches, pretty much every day, and he was even getting nauseated and dizzy – pretty concerning symptoms. Long story short, he’s got aggressive GBM. He can barely pay for the treatments, and his health is just getting worse and worse. He ends up going home to live with his mom–probably thinking that death is around the corner. But he hadn’t completely given up. He did try changing his diet to increase the nutrient density of his food – I’m not sure what that looked like or if it was similar to the ketogenic diet that Pablo had done; but whatever it was, it really didn’t seem to make a big difference. A friend of his mom’s ended up hearing about him, and she had had her own miracle healing in Brazil, so she suggested he go there; when he said that he couldn’t pay for the ticket, she was like, dude, if money is the only thing keeping you from going, I’ll pay.
So he rented this small room on the outside of town in Brazil, and the first night, he had what he called a dream, but was more like a vision. In fact, nothing about it seemed like a dream, even after he’d woken up – it was so real to him. But in this vision, this woman came out of the bathroom. The light around her, or coming from her was so bright, that he couldn’t see her or make out any detail. And she put her hands on his head. And I’m going to read from the book:
In that moment he felt the most powerful physical sensation that melted from the crown of his head, over his shoulders, and down his body, all the way to his toes. “It was a feeling of pure love, perfection, light, God, whatever you want to call it. It was like when you get the chills only multiplied by 50 thousand.
Cured by Jeffrey Rediger
So, similarly to Daniel in the previous story, Matt carried this feeling around with him while he was in Brazil. Eventually he returned home for a while. He was actually feeling and doing pretty well. He didn’t know how well, since he didn’t want to get an MRI – basically because he just didn’t want to know. But the community at home in Vermont was a little more negative. They would pressure him to get treatments, even though he knew those made little difference. Another friend of his mom’s heard the story and was like, well, it kind of sounds like going to Brazil did the trick – so maybe you should just go back. So he was like, ok. When he made it back to Brazil, he went to an internet cafe, and met this woman, and basically fell in love at first sight. He was with her from that moment on, and they got married and just made a life for themselves in Brazil.
Two years went by, and he’d been avoiding any diagnostic imaging, I kind of don’t blame him. But he finally decided to get another MRI, and, as you might have guessed, there was really nothing there, not even a brain, just kidding. There was really no sign of a tumor, other than something that could have just been residual scar tissue. To top that, he wasn’t supposed to be able to have children due to the treatments he’d undergone, but he now has two kids, and they’re both super fucked up. Just kidding. He now has two healthy kids; and if you ask him what he attributes his health to, “It was love that healed me. To me, that’s what God is, that’s what life is. That’s what getting better is, it’s love.”
This sounds very suspiciously like someone who has had a very powerful psychedelic experience. Was the experience with the woman under the influence of mushrooms? Is the healing center in Brazil also an Ayahuasca retreat? If so, Rediger gave no mention of that. Perhaps he felt like he couldn’t write it in the book? I have no idea.
That’s it for this time. See you next time.