I’ve spent most of my career exploring answers to the question “What really makes people sick and what really cures disease?”
I thought I’d find those answers in medical school, only to discover that what I spent twelve years rigorously studying and eight years practicing only answered part of the question.
I’ve spent the last 17 years studying what they didn’t teach me in medical school, which led me into the field of spontaneous remission research, a vastly untouched field of research that most doctors don’t pay much attention to. Spontaneous remissions are treated by the medical field as strange, unexplainable anomalies, statistical outliers worth reporting in medical journals but not worth studying as a legitimate research field.
But a few of us out there have devoted our lives to trying to understand why some people are cured from “incurable” illnesses, sometimes with no conventional medical treatment at all. Are these remissions really “spontaneous?” Or are these patients doing something the rest of us can learn from? We study high achievers in other fields- the Serena and Venus Williams of the sports world, the Steve Jobs of the corporate world, the Taylors Swifts of the music world, the Einsteins of the Nobel prize-winning world.
We know that these people don’t just achieve to the heights of their accomplishments by slacking off. Their behaviors are different than the average sports enthusiast, entrepreneur, musician, and intellectual. Don’t you suspect that the people who are cured from diseases they were told they would die from behave differently than the average patient? Why don’t we study the high achieving people with better than usual health outcomes with the same rigor and curiosity as we study other outliers?
I hate to say it, but I think “spontaneous remission” is a kind of narcissistic injury for some doctors. We sacrifice so much to become doctors. We devote ourselves so extremely to our callings that it’s almost like we need to believe we- and only we- are the arbiters of life, death, and cure. To accept that sometimes patients are cured from even the most severe diseases without us is almost too distressing to bear.
Maybe that explains why so many of the radical remission survivors I’ve interviewed over the years say they’ve been waiting for a curious doctor like me their whole lives, since their doctors were not only not curious about what they did to get better; they were flat out angry with them for being “noncompliant” and then daring to get cured anyway.
The good news is that there are more and more doctors like me who really are curious about what really makes people sick before old age- and what could help their health span equal their life span. And I’ve been training doctors to learn what I’ve been studying for over a decade now in the Whole Health Medicine Institute. (If you’re a health care provider or therapist and you’re interested in being certified to learn what we teach, we just opened enrollment for the Whole Health Medicine Institute Class of 2025. Learn more and apply here.)
Healthy Behaviors Aren’t Always What We Think
I spent much of my time during medical training and my early medical practice working with underprivileged, high risk populations in public health clinics and in the indigent patient clinics in my university trainings. Many of these patients suffered from medical illnesses assumed to be the result of the common things we think of when we think of why people get sick when they’re young- poverty, lack of access to basic survival needs (clean water, shelter, safety, food), high infant and perinatal mortality, unhealthy diet, substance abuse, domestic violence, poor access to medical care, environmental toxicity, sedentary lifestyle, and genetic predisposition.
But when I moved to posh Marin County, my ideas about what keep people healthy and what make people sick got turned upside down. These privileged people were eating vegan diets, working out with their personal trainers, taking dozens of expensive supplements, getting the best possible medical care at Stanford and UCSF, avoiding processed foods and toxic substances, doing daily yoga- and yet, they were some of the sickest people I’d ever met.
By the time they made it to my integrative medicine clinic, they’d already had the kind of medical care I’d been trained to offer, and I didn’t know what else to offer them. Yet obviously, something was very wrong. These people were relatively young- many in their thirties, forties, and fifties- and yet they had five to ten diagnoses each. Their diagnoses were the kinds of diagnoses many medical doctors roll their eyes at, mostly because we don’t know how to treat these diseases effectively. Chronic fatigue syndrome. Chronic back pain. Chronic pelvic pain. Fibromyalgia. Chronic Lyme. Autoimmune diseases. Neurological syndromes. Dermatologic conditions. Migraines. Multiple food allergies. Chemical sensitivities. The list would go on and on.
In an attempt to get to know my patients better, I expanded my intake form to ten pages. I screened for every possible type of trauma I could think of. I asked about the quality of their relationships, their work satisfaction, whether they had a sense of meaning and purpose in their lives, their spiritual lives, their sex lives, whether they felt they had any control or agency in their lives, and whether they felt like they had a community of people who had their backs when things got rough. I asked if they were lonely, if they felt like their lives were aligned with their authenticity, if they had any regrets about how their lives had turned out.
I also asked probing questions like “What would it take for you to live a life your body would love?” and “What do you need in order to heal?”
We Intuitively Know When We’re Engaging In Unhealthy Behaviors
I was shocked by the clarity with which my patients would answer such questions. They’d say things like:
“I need to leave my marriage.”
“I need to put my abusive mother in a nursing home and quit caregiving a person who treats me like dirt.”
“I need to get away from my entitled, narcissistic boss who thinks he owns me.”
“I need to quit putting everyone else’s needs ahead of my own.”
“I need to quit meditating and start facing all the things that are fucked up about my life.”
“I need to try to repair with my estranged kids.”
“I need to call my college girlfriend and try to make amends for getting her pregnant and not helping her raise the baby.”
“I need to quit blaming everyone else for my life and start getting brave enough to stand up for myself.”
“I need to finally go to therapy to heal my childhood trauma, so I quit choosing to repeat my past in my present life.”
Those who were brave enough to actually take action on what they intuitively knew sometimes had remarkable, unexpected health outcomes that seemed like medical miracles. But these outcomes didn’t seem like flukes to me.
Studying “Health Outliers”
My findings were consistent with the research findings of Harvard psychiatrist, radical remission researcher, and author of CURED Jeffrey Rediger, MD, MDiv, who reported the results of 17 years of rigorous research interviewing people who were cured from “incurable” illnesses. He was careful in his research to only study those with clear before and after medical records, proving an accurate diagnosis, proving a documented cure, and following the patients for many years to make sure they stayed cured or died of natural causes many years later. (Many people claim to have had miraculous cures, but they refuse to actually go to the doctor to prove they really are cured, so his research really helped separate the wheat from the chaff in the field of spontaneous remission research.)
Jeff and I met 5 1/2 years ago, at a trauma healing conference we were both keynoting, before his research results were published in his wonderful book CURED. We’ve been comparing notes ever since…and now we’re co-writing a book together that is due to be turned in to our editor February 2025. The book is about the health risks of over-caregiving, the physical health impact of overfunctioning in narcissistic relationships, and the remarkable health benefits people with devastating illnesses sometimes experience when they start behaving more self-protectively, implementing strong boundaries, working with their “parts” using Internal Family Systems, and pushing back against the abusive relationships in their lives.
Jeff and I share the results of our collective research into radical remission from my book Mind Over Medicine and his book CURED, as well as sharing some preliminary content from our not-yet-published book, in our online Zoom training The Mysteries of Spontaneous Healing. We’ve just released a homestudy version of this course at a discounted rate for anyone who wishes to watch the recordings of a 2 day weekend Zoom training we co-taught. It’s designed to support both health care providers and therapists interested in helping patients achieve better health outcomes, as well as providing education and tools for people with chronic illnesses that have failed to be cured by conventional medicine.
If you’re interested in checking it out, you can learn more and sign up here.
And if you wish to go even deeper, we invite health care providers and therapists to consider applying for the Whole Health Medicine Institute, Class of 2025. Jeff will be one of many guest faculty, teaching about the findings of his research, in addition to the deep Heal the Healer work we do with our students, the business development courses we teach to help support alternative careers, and the core curriculum we teach for those wishing to become certified to facilitate the Six Steps To Healing Yourself, from Mind Over Medicine.
Whether you participate in any of these trainings or not, we hope you’ll broaden your horizons when you think about what constitutes “healthy” behaviors. As I said in my first two TEDx talks, which have been viewed over 5.5 million times, what if a healthy diet, daily exercise, quitting bad habits, and following doctor’s orders are the least important part of your health?”
Not to diminish the value of those behaviors, but just to acknowledge that a healthy lifestyle requires far more than the typical health behaviors they taught me about in medical school. I now think of “nervous system health” as one of the most important aspects of health.
So…I’ll leave you with this question.
“What would it take for you to live a life your nervous system would love?”