"Patient, heal thyself"

A personalised prescription for healing

Every now and then I come across a book that makes me go “Aha!” It articulates hunches and gut feelings that I am not quite able to explain in a way that others will understand. Jeff Rediger’s Cured is such a book.

I read it once through back in September, almost at the same time that the process of the Athens flat sale was set in motion. I put it aside for the time, knowing that I would return to it in time, but its main message has percolated and settled over the months. I hope to do justice to it in this post.

A graduate of a Christian seminary and medical school, psychiatrist Dr Jeff Rediger examines numerous cases of spontaneous remissions from serious and chronic conditions, such as malignant melanoma, prostate cancer, pulmonary fibrosis. Cases such as these are dismissed by the medical establishment as ‘flukes’ or ‘miracles’ and conveniently ignored because they cannot be accounted for by medical statistics. Each patient story is examined on its own terms, looking at what each person did to heal.

The Four Pillars of Healing

Rediger focuses on the following four pillars of healing:

• nutrition: eliminate inflammatory foods and increase nutrient-dense ones

• stress response: find ways to deal with stress and quieten the ceaseless chatter of the mind

• immune function: strengthen the body’s immune function

• identity: rewrite the story of who you are

For some patients all four aspects were significant, for others one or two were more important than others; for some it was only one and only. Rediger stresses that the one-size-fits-all medical prescriptions on offer really do not fit everyone, and that ultimately the patient themselves is their own healer. The patient needs to put together their own healing prescription based on what they know about their bodies and themselves.

“Perhaps what we each need to do […] is to make ourselves an N of 1 - to run our own clinical trial where we find the individual changes necessary for us and then lean deeply into those changes.” (Cured, p 285)

Rediger’s analysis indicates that the fourth pillar of healing - identity - seems to hold the most potency. He explains that the Default Mode Network (DMN) in the brain is a black box containing memories and old emotions; traumas and losses; “griefs and grudges we hold on to like a security blanket;” repetitive thought and behaviour patterns that run along well-worn pathways. In other words, the DMN is “the neurobiological basis of the self: it’s who you are.” (italics in the original, p 270). It makes sense therefore that if the blueprint you are conditioned to see as you is based on damaging or limiting ideas, it affects brain chemistry, biological systems and cells.

An Unexpected Gift

In this TedTalk, Rediger shares the observation that for some patients, disease, even a death prognosis, can be a gift and a blessing in disguise.

What hit me the hardest […] was that I was out of time to rewrite things. […] The story of my life. […] The story I was telling myself about who I was. It was all wrong. And I was out of time to fix it.

Mirae, one of Rediger’s patients (Cured, p 259)

Serious illness and the realisation that death is closer than previously thought, often brings about a change in the relationship with the self, others and the world. In this way, there is nothing spontaneous about spontaneous healing: the profound change of perception of oneself and the world, whether it took ten minutes or ten years, seems to open up the possibilities of making other important changes in nutrition, stress management, and love and connection. (Cured, p 257)

Embracing mortality

Running away from death can hurt us more than running towards it

Cured, p 320

Rediger devotes a whole chapter (“Healing Death”) exploring how accepting death can be a crucial step on the path to healing (p 312). He clarifies that facing death does not mean you lie down and die: you can still choose life.

His explorations into acceptance of death strongly reminded me of Stoic contemplations on death as a reminder to live a joyous life in the present. A child on a visit to the fair knows that it will be over by the end of the day, but this awareness makes her want to try every ride and have both candy floss and ice-cream. In the same way, the constant awareness of the transience of life can can bring joy for the life in this moment. In my experience, it works. I took part in a group Joyful Death Meditation with the Stoics back in November 2021, a literally and figuratively dark period of my life. (I wrote about the experience in the newsletter posts around that time.) Those four weeks contemplating mortality made a lot of difference in how I have seen myself and the world ever since.

In Greek and Roman mythology the archetype of the hero (Odysseus, Orpheus, Aeneas) who crosses over to the underworld can be seen as a parable of the healing potential of embracing mortality. The common traits running through these myths are the courage to face the terrifying descent into Hades and the determination to return with the object of the hero’s quest (knowledge, a beloved person, a riddle resolution). Of course the heroes eventually died, but I like to imagine that after their return from the Underworld their lives had a different quality of both groundedness and freedom. Rediger suggests that embracing mortality without fear can have similar effects.

The prescription I put together for myself

I came across the book Cured at a time of gradual but significant shifts in my life.

Six years ago both hips pulled the emergency break. They had been in manageable pain for some time, but they suddenly gave way. I had not had any falls nor taken cortisone; I did not have osteoporosis; my muscles and bones were strong. What happened to my hips was labeled idiopathic, meaning ‘of unknown cause’ - although: idiopathic comes from the Greek words ‘self’ and ‘suffering’. Both hips were replaced in the space of two and a half months; less than two years later I received the gift of a diagnosis of cirrhosis of the liver. That was the spark of change.

This post is almost a month overdue - I simply missed out May, which I have only done once in the three-and-a half-year long life of this newsletter. But micro-shifts have been happening in the eight weeks since the latest post in late April. In isolation they do not seem to amount to much, but cumulatively, they are giving shape to an emerging new picture.

Two completely unrelated house guests (the one a very old acquaintance, the other a relatively new one) spoke about sowing and growing plants. For the first time in my whole life, last Saturday I had the overwhelming urge to clear out the weeds from the back garden. The rose bushes that were overwhelmed, almost suffocated by tall weeds, are now breathing freely. I installed a composter, and will work on the garden and grow herbs over the summer.

In singing practice, I chose to work on Bizet’s Habanera, an aria I have known for decades and sung in bathroom and kitchen in my opera-voice approximation, i.e. pretending to be an opera singer. Now that I am learning the correct voice functions, I need to over-write the decades-old, inefficient ways of singing with new, efficient ones. As I write these lines, I realise that the process of unlearning and re-learning is a practical way of disrupting the DMN: to do things differently from how I’ve done them for most of my life.

There are more items in my personalised prescription, but for now, an aside in Jeff Rediger’s Ted Talk sparked another idea.

If you do something that gets both parents upset, you’re on to something good

Another component of the healing prescription is to tap into the person I had been in my youth: strong, energetic, healthy; courageous to listen to her gut feeling and determined to go her own way despite parental and societal disapproval. She’s still there somewhere: she may point the way to healing.

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Do you have any practical ideas for disrupting your DMN by doing something radically different? Have you tried any? How did it feel?

I’d love to hear about it!

The Way Forward

In his conclusion to the book Cured, Jeff Rediger lays out his vision for a future where AI will have become an invaluable healthcare assistant to physicians and patients alike. It will synthesise thousands of data points of a patient’s biodata and will free up physicians and patients to nurture meaningful human connections and thus promote holistic healing. An important component of this optimistic future is the revolution of stories: the drive to share individual stories of healing in order to create “a window of possibility for others and for the world.”

This is what I am trying to do through this newsletter and other life writing. This story is still unfolding and its ending is unknown, but the scenic route is so, so rewarding.

The heart meets the (left) hand in an embrace of imperfection