cured
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cured
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by dr jeff rediger

Please Note: Each book review is intended to provide an overview of the content and it’s main benefit to the reader. Though I recommend reading a book alongside following The Roadmap, I am in no way connected to the author or publisher or them to me or this website.

key elements

– Spontaneous healing is a real occurrence, even the healing of seemingly terminal diseases.

– Rediger has direct experience of this with his own patients and has spoken to many who have experienced spontaneous healing.

– How you live your life and view your illness affects if you will recover or deteriorate.

– The future of healing is to embrace the effects of the mind on bodily illness.

why this book is worth reading

Rediger is a highly qualified and experienced doctor who, since 2003, has been researching cases of spontaneous healing or spontaneous remission as it is termed by the medical establishment. His journey from skeptic to proactive investigator and finally promoter of the pathways to spontaneous healing has a profound effect on the reader and will make even the most hard-line adherent to the purely body orientated view of healing questions their assumptions.

As Rediger shows, giving yourself the gift of good health can require turning inward to look at your own feelings, thoughts & emotions. In this book he gives concrete examples of how this has worked in practice showing how people have recovered from the brink of death, making this both an instructive and optimistic read.

Miracles

In the first chapter of this book Rediger asks why, when a patient beats all the odds and recovers from a terminal illness, whether cancer, or an immune condition, doctors and the medical profession in general don’t grab onto these cases and drill into them for answers? Why are they written off as “flukes, outliers or miracles?” The entire book is an attempt to put this right and find what traditional approaches to medicine are missing.

Rediger gives numerous examples of such “miracle” recoveries. There is Claire who made a complete recovery, without surgery or chemotherapy, from an incurable form of pancreatic cancer. There is Daniel, given a 1%  chance of surviving a year beyond his diagnosis of testicular cancer who mad a complete and dramatic documented recovery. There is Jan, who also made a full recovery from the brink of death in multiple organ failure due to the autoimmune condition of Lupus. These are just three of many such recoveries.

Though interviews and extensive histories Rediger tries to formulate the reasons for these recoveries and pieces together what he calls the four pillars of health: “healing your immune system, healing your nutrition, healing your stress response, and healing your identity.”  These four pillars come from the commonalities across many of the recovery stories. People changed their lives or their beliefs about illness changed and these changes seemed to make a difference and helped their healing.

For me the the first three pillars of health all rest on the final pillar, healing your identity. If this way of thinking is new to you, learning about how your immune system works and how your stress response in particular affects your body will help illuminate the effects of losing your identity or perhaps not exploring it in the first place.

the immune system

The body’s immune system is explored in this book as where we can look for the concrete way that for example tumors can be melted away in a matter of days. The immune systems has the capacity to do this by attacking cancerous growth as if it were a foreign body. Unfortunately the immune system also has the capacity to wreck havoc on the body just as rapidly and some autoimmune diseases, such as Lupus, can reduce healthy individuals to wrecks within hours.

In chapter two Rediger explores how the immune system is interconnected with the nervous system. “They are not separate systems operating independently in different sectors of the body but overlapping networks that can swap information and “talk” to each other.” This points at the pathway that can take our thoughts and emotions (how we feel) and turn these into healing or destructive messengers to act on any of the cells in our bodies.

Later in the book Rediger further explores the nervous system, particularly the autonomic system, that part of us that controls many of the body’s functions without need for our conscious awareness of this, such as breathing, digestion, and energy. Your autonomic nervous system has two basic modes: sympathetic and parasympathetic. The sympathetic nervous system, or fight or flight, is the gear you shift into when you’re in danger or under stress. The parasympathetic, sometimes called rest and digest, is the gear you’re supposed to downshift back into the rest of the time, when you don’t need to be tensed and alert to deal with a threat or a problem.”

Medicine in general is opening to the possibility that illness and the recovery from illness can be found to stem from too much fight or flight, which releases the stress hormone cortisol and not enough rest and digest which can release oxytocin also called the love hormone as it is associated with feelings of peacefulness. More at question still are the linkages between ourselves and illness in relation to stress or relaxation.

Stress

Stress isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Stress is a key part of our fight and flight response and tells us when something needs to change. Studies have also shown that how we view stress has a powerful effect on how stress actually affects us. This is explored by Rediger with the aim of changing threat stress to challenge stress, essentially seeing the stress in your life as something you can do something about rathern than as a crushing inevitability.

This doesn’t mean all stress can changed into challenge stress. If stress is affecting us in a negative way, when we’re stressed out by a work or personal situation, this kind of stress, if it turns into a chronic, daily thing is dangerous. As Rediger says, “Anxious thoughts and feelings, the constant drip of stress hormones into your bloodstream—these internal inflammation triggers are just as powerful, if not more so, than a food you’re allergic to or a dangerous toxin.” 

This is the kind of stress that most often leads to either an overactive or an ineffective immune system. So how do you stop this kind of stress. As many of the case histories in this book show, by addressing your life situation and the person you are.

For more on stress see the article Mind Body Healing.

Identity Healing

Rediger found in many cases of spontaneous healing, the healing came because people dropped their baggage, stopped trying to carry the heavy load, and decided to live instead. They looked into themselves to find what they really wanted in life. By doing this, they reduced their stress, which relaxed their nervous system which helped regulate their immune systems.

It sounds simple, but just reading one of the case studies in this book will show how hard this can be in practice.

To get better a person may have to let go of the thing that is killing them and this can be a marriage or a career or a wayward son, daughter or even parent. It is not an easy question to even ask if something that pays the bills and provides an identity or someone you love is at odds with who you are as a person or what you feel you are capable of doing. It is even harder to answer this question and harder again to put into practice the changes necessary to heal yourself and your life.

Though not explored by Rediger I believe a key element of identity is the need for a sense of control in our lives. When we feel overwhelmed by a work situation like a project doomed to fail or a personal situation like marriage breakdown or a child who is leading themselves into an abyss we feel this as a loss of control.

How do regain control, or at least the feeling of control? There are several ways and in Cured, some people get this control through dramatic diet changes. Others go through a more radical reappraisal of themselves. They look deep inside and ask what they really want in life. Are they the kind of person who wants status and a high pressure job? Do they want the glory of adoring fans or parents. Or do they have other goals? Do they want to live a life that doesn’t rest on outward adoration and material success.

By answering these questions and gaining a sense of control of your own wants and needs you can move forward from there, eventually finding that ultimately there is no need to control anything.

placebo & Nocebo

What about the cases of spontaneous healing where there doesn’t seem to be any great changes in the person themselves, where they neither take control of their illness through diet or exercise or control of their lives through self-exploration and changes in job or loving connections? What about faith healers such as Dr. Nemeh who Rediger meets and to who thousands of instances of spontaneous healing are attributed.

Okay, spoiler alert, Rediger finds no answer here. Though he explores current research on faith healing and the power of prayer, there is certainly nothing conclusive. One study even suggested having others praying for you could be detrimental, perhaps because you would then feel like your healing was in others hands, out of your own control so to speak.

Where faith healing and other cases of spontaneous healing that seem to have no other influences lead is to the power of belief. This is best known as the placebo effect where if you believe in a drug for example then it is more likely to work. The nocebo effect is the less well known opposite effect of the placebo and applies when we believe we won’t recover. 

There are shocking and dramatic examples of both these effects and both are exemplified in the almost unbelievable case of Mr. Wright which Rediger explores in detail in chapter eight. Mr. Wrights recovered from cancer then relapsed and then died, it seems, purely by the power in his own belief or lack of it in a certain wonder drug that was anything but.

That the placebo (& nocebo) effects are real is undeniable, even within the standard medical model, but what exactly is going on is difficult to tease out so far.  This can’t be just the power of positive thought, a conscious belief that I will get better. Neither can it be, I believe, anything outside of the body, no angels or god essence working through the healer to heal the patient, though this is what Dr.Nemeh believes is happening.

Rediger suggests it may be a kind of as yet not understood quantum effect, a relation between our consciousness and matter at the quantum level causing such unexplained effects. For myself, I think it more likely that something is going on at an unconscious level that is similar to the conscious changes made by others who experience spontaneous healing. This then initiates the same healing forces of the nervous and immune systems to heal the body.

Blame, Fault, Responsibility

Maybe all this talk of the mind body connection, both in this book review and in the previous review has left you feeling a bit battered and bruised. Maybe you think, bluntly, that being sick is your fault. Pretty bad feeling.

Rediger addresses this in chapter twelve. “One of the good things about our current medical model is that you can often just go in, get your illness treated, and not feel judged or pressured. Sometimes, you just want to let your cold be a cold, or your heart disease just be heart disease. Or have your alcohol problem or bipolar disorder be understood simply as a disease.”

Though it is sometimes easier to look outside of ourselves for the reason for our illnesses, there is no need to attach blame to ourselves when we start to see that the sources of some of our illness stem from our own views and thoughts and lifestyles. Though a culture of blame can exist, it can be overcome and most people I believe would rather be well than sick, even if this means looking deeply at themselves and questioning long held views both of their own actions and of those close to them.

What people need is a culture of acceptance and though it may be a long time before this is commonplace, it can start today for any individual as you can give this acceptance directly to yourself. In the most fundamental way you are the only one who can give this acceptance.

where i see this book in the roadmap

This is the second book looking at the mind-body relationship to health and is intended to cement the fact that to keep good health we must all shift our views of ourselves in relation to illness and healing. As with the previous book related to health this means looking inside and learning about yourself, particularly your concerns.

Asking the kinds of questions to promote good health – How do I view illness? How do I view stress? What do I want in life? What do I choose? Who do I want to be with? Why am I doing what I am doing?  – will naturally lead you to a wider view of life. 

Though you don’t have to be sick to ask these questions, it is often when ill health strikes us that we do question our lives and what we are doing. Also, they will help bring you to a greater awareness of your body which is a gateway into living in the present moment which is where peace and freedom can be found in Stage Seven.

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