6 Key Teachings: CURED, by Jeffrey Rediger, M.D., M.Div

Cured is one of the most important books about healing I've ever read. Dr. Jeffrey Rediger—a professor at Harvard Medical School and the medical director of Adult Psychiatry at McClean Hospital—also has his M.Div from Princeton. He is a fascinating thinker and this book, which is about spontaneous remission, should be on every nightstand. As he explains, there is a stat about spontaneous remission that cites it as incredibly rare, but as it turns out, that stat was made up. And still, it remains a subject that no doctor or researcher wants to touch. As he writes: "At the first talk I gave where I brought up spontaneous remission and what we, as doctors, might learn from it, I asked the audience of physicians how many of them had witnessed a story of recovery that made no sense from a medical perspective. Hands shot up all around the room. When I asked how many people had written those cases up and published their observations, all hands dropped. It wasn’t that spontaneous remission was rare—it was that a culture of fear and judgment was holding us back from seeing the scope of it. How many cases were out there that never made it into the medical literature for fear of professional ridicule?"

In his fascinating book, he explores spontaneous remission from all angles, collating and distilling patient cases to look for patterns. And the most stunning seems to be that those who heal find that a death sentence liberates them to be their highest self. As he writes, "One way to look at it is that there is a kind of figurative “death” of the false self. Many survivors describe it in these terms and in fact tell me repeatedly that their illnesses were their greatest gifts, because they liberated their true selves. By dying, they found life. By facing the worst that could happen and moving through it, they excised the “disease of fear” that binds all of us and then realized that, unexpectedly, they were free to live. Confrontation with death allows us to be the person we each want to be and really are, rather than the person others need us to be. It can be the final thing that pushes us to heal our identities, shifting us into authentic, fulfilling lives, moving us more permanently and fully into the parasympathetic. An understanding of our own mortality—sparked for many by a terminal diagnosis—can be the catalyst that causes a major shift in understanding as to who we are underneath it all. It can be the switch that flips, causing that fundamental figure-ground shift. We can suddenly see ourselves clearly for the first time. Other priorities drop away. We are liberated to our authentic selves."

You can listen to our conversation on Pulling the Thread here.

The Mystery of Spontaneous Healing (Jeffrey Rediger, M.D., M.Div)

6 KEY TEACHINGS:

1. We don’t know how frequent spontaneous remission occurs because they’re often not written up in scientific literature—and definitely not studied.

Per Dr. Rediger: “I’d read in scientific journals that true instances of spontaneous remission are rare, occurring at a rate of about 1 in 100,000 cases. That statistic was repeated over and over in journal articles, always with the patina of absolute truth. So I decided to trace it back, to see where it came from. As it turned out, it had been made up out of the blue and then taken as true, repeated over and over in subsequent articles.”

Later in the book, he writes: “At the first talk I gave where I brought up spontaneous remission and what we, as doctors, might learn from it, I asked the audience of physicians how many of them had witnessed a story of recovery that made no sense from a medical perspective. Hands shot up all around the room. When I asked how many people had written those cases up and published their observations, all hands dropped.

“It wasn’t that spontaneous remission was rare—it was that a culture of fear and judgment was holding us back from seeing the scope of it. How many cases were out there that never made it into the medical literature for fear of professional ridicule?”

2. Our stress response is critical—i.e., do we rise to the occasion or feel overwhelmed? And so is toning the vagus nerve.