Cure: A Journey into the Science of Mind Over Body

by Jo Marchant

  I have to admit I’m skeptical about the existence of auras and healing energy fields. There’s no scientific evidence for them, and in clinical trials reiki is no more effective than fake therapy2 (the same is true for homeopathy),3 so I find it hard to believe that the treatment has any direct physical effects. Yet many people—like Sue—clearly feel that they benefit from reiki and other alternative therapies, spending millions of dollars on them, despite the damning trial results. Something is helping these patients, and I’m curious to know whether that something is the mind. So I’m here to see what reiki can do for me.

  My session doesn’t start too well. Our energy fields radiate beyond our bodies, says McRoberts, and we can see it if we look hard enough. All I see, however, is McRoberts and the wall. She adjusts the blind and I stare until my eyes blur. “It’s hard to tell,” I say hesitantly, not wishing to offend so early on. My therapist is undaunted. Children are better at it, she says with a shrug, and we get to work.

  McRoberts is warm and smiley, with a taut, tanned face and flowing scarves. Today, she informs me, she’ll combine reiki with psychic healing. She calls on her spirit guides and helpers to join us, then calls on mine too. It doesn’t matter if you believe, she says softly. They’re coming anyway. She lays one hand on my tummy and raises the other, her fingers making flicking, darting movements in the air above my body.

  My energy is closed, she says, hard and smooth like the underside of a fiberglass boat. To soften it, she asks me to breathe deeply and relax. Her voice is soothing, I’m snug under the blankets, and somewhere there’s the gentle sound of trickling water. I start to feel numb, limbs tingling, as if I’m floating. Then McRoberts gets a vision of me as a child, “all knees and elbows,” shouting something about not being listened to. She asks if that makes sense, but although I undoubtedly experienced moments of frustration growing up, I was small and tubby as a child, never gangly, and I’m pretty sure I always made myself heard.

  McRoberts asks if anyone close to me has “crossed,” and I say my grandpa. I can guess what will happen and sure enough, she tells me he’s in the room. Did he used to say something about a cork, she asks? “Put a cork in a bottle…No, that’s not quite it.” I wonder if I’m supposed to jump to the obvious phrase, “Put a cork in it,” but I don’t remember my grandpa ever saying this, so I stay quiet.

  What about my father, she asks, and I say no, he’s alive. She says she can see him too, she’s getting a vision of a man’s legs: one crossed over the other, trousers creased, foot tapping. She repeats the image, of someone severe, judgmental and unforgiving. Perhaps this is how she imagines British fathers, but I don’t recognize it—and by now I’m feeling bad about continually disappointing her.

  McRoberts moves up to my head, fingers pressing on my forehead and the base of my skull, massaging behind my ear. I don’t have any serious physical conditions, but McRoberts diagnoses fear. It’s bubbling in your chest, she tells me. You’re afraid that if you let go, everything will fall apart. This makes some sense; as a working mom I feel I have a lot to juggle. I’d call it stress, but McRoberts says it’s fear that stems from not receiving unconditional love as a child.

  She asks if I’m married. No, I say, but I live with my partner. I don’t mention the children because she doesn’t ask, and if McRoberts really can see my aura, it does not appear to reveal to her this crucial part of my identity (she tells me later that she would not expect to see someone’s children “unless that is where the healing needs to occur”). There are serious problems in my relationship too, she warns, and a decision to make. Apparently I’m repeating the mistakes of my past, and deserve to be with someone who loves me no matter what. Rather than a settled mother of two, I wonder if she has me down as waiting in vain for a no-good boyfriend to propose.

  Time for the healing. McRoberts vigorously moves her hands up and down over my body, telling me she’s opening a channel of energy down my spine to release the fear and pain I’ve been storing. Then she warns me to expect “a profound shift in consciousness.” It doesn’t matter if you believe it or not, she says. Your body will do the work.

  —

  I STARTED this book in the park on a summer’s day, considering whether, by harnessing the power of the mind, alternative treatments can offer something that conventional medicine has missed.

  Twelve chapters later, I’ve learned how our brains control many aspects of our physiology, including the tools that the body has available—from hormones and natural painkillers to the weapons of the immune system—to ease symptoms and fight disease. Instead of responding purely to physical circumstances, I’ve seen how the brain uses our perception of our environment, including memories of the past and predictions about the future, to decide how best to allocate its resources. These processes can have an effect within seconds, or they can influence our physiology for years to come.

  We can rarely deploy these tools at will; we can’t simply “wish” ourselves better. But as described in these page246 there are ways in which we can use our conscious minds to influence them, from believing we have taken a pill, or focusing on the present moment, to seeking the support of someone we love.

  At the heart of almost all the pathways I’ve learned about is one guiding principle: if we feel safe, cared for and in control—in a critical moment during injury or disease, or generally throughout our lives—we do better. We feel less pain, less fatigue, less sickness. Our immune system works with us instead of against us. Our bodies ease off on emergency defenses and can focus on repair and growth.

  What does this mean for alternative medicine? My reiki session hasn’t persuaded me of the power of healing energy fields (not to mention friendly ghosts). But after learning about all the different ways in which the mind can affect the body, I can see that even if their treatments don’t work in the way that they claim, therapists like McRoberts may still deliver a powerful blend of the healing elements described in this book.

  As well as providing a caring one-on-one consultation with lashings of placebo effect, for example, McRoberts induced a relaxed state that to me felt very similar to hypnosis, including positive suggestions and dramatic visual imagery. My promised shift in consciousness did not occur, but for someone more hypnotizable or with more faith in her technique, I can believe that her approach might well reduce stress, and ease pain or fatigue more effectively than conventional drugs.

  In trials too, alternative treatments can be very effective despite performing no better than placebo. In 2001, for example, Exeter University’s Edzard Ernst carried out a rigorous trial of faith healing—a technique similar to reiki—for treating chronic pain.4 He compared real therapists with actors (who had no training as healers, and silently counted backwards during the session to avoid inadvertently directing any healing thoughts towards the patient). There was no difference between the real and fake therapy, but patients in both groups improved dramatically, with some, Ernst said afterwards, who “practically abandoned their wheelchairs during the study.”5

  So should we embrace alternative medicine? And should we care how it works, as long as it does?

  One problem, of course, is that patients who adopt alternative medicines do not always have a positive outcome. While researching this book, for example, I met 37-year-old Tunde Balogh. Originally from Hungary, she lives in Ireland with her husband and young son. She’s beautiful, with delicate, expressive features and sleek, brown hair; inside, though, her body is full of pain and riddled with disease. A year earlier, she had been diagnosed with cancer in her right breast. She refused conventional medical treatment. “I was so against doctors, hospitals, nurses,” she told me. “They offered me radiation. They would give me chemo. Or cut off my breasts. I didn’t want to do that.”

  Instead, she tried reiki, then reflexology. “I knew inside—if I caused this I can fix this.” Then she found German New Medicine, which teaches that cancer is caused by emotional conflict; if we resolve the conflict, the cancer will be cure
d. Founder Ryke Hamer claims that women develop breast cancer when they are conflicted regarding their loved ones, or their role as a mother.6 Tunde says this resonated with her, because insecurities about her body had been causing her to distance herself from her husband. “Why did you do that, now you have cancer!” she says. “It took me around six months to forgive myself.”

  But her cancer wasn’t cured. In January 2014, she started suffering from searing joint pains; the disease had spread to her bones. “Cancer in the bones is when you don’t feel valuable,” she says. She stood in front of the bedroom mirror each day, repeating: “I’m valuable. I love myself.”

  By June, Tunde struggled to walk and was in severe pain. She was as convinced as ever that the answer was inside her, though, and still searching for a cure. I met her in Lourdes, where she was on the same pilgrimage as Rose and her disabled children. She had washed her breast in the holy water and visited the grotto in a wheelchair, but had yet to go to the baths. Why come to Lourdes, I asked, if you believe healing is inside? Maybe as a confession, she said, for having caused her own cancer. “Maybe to wash out my sin.”

  It’s important to remember that just because the mind plays a role in health, this does not mean it can cure everything, or that any therapy that might harness the mind is suddenly justified. Breast cancer generally has a good prognosis if treated early, but is not curable once—as in Tunde—it has spread to the bones. When people reject conventional treatments in favor of untested ones, they may die as a result.

  Tunde’s case is extreme, perhaps, but there are plenty of reported cases of people who have died after rejecting conventional treatment in favor of alternative therapy.7 And less dramatic examples can still risk lives. In 2002, British researchers approached 168 homeopaths and found that nearly half of them advised patients against the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine for their children.8 Similarly, a 2006 investigation by the BBC program Newsnight reported that almost all homeopaths they approached advised travelers against conventional drugs to protect against malaria, and recommended ineffective homeopathic remedies instead.9 A homeopath in one high-street pharmacy told Newsnight’s researcher: “They make it so your energy doesn’t have a malaria-shaped hole in it so the malarial mosquitos won’t come along and fill that in.” I find it hard not to feel angry reading such nonsensical—and potentially fatal—advice.

  Physical complications resulting from alternative medicines are rare but do exist. Acupuncture needles have caused nasty infections, for example,10 and unlicensed herbal medications can have serious side effects. Another concern is the psychological harm that therapists might do to vulnerable patients. Tunde’s physical deterioration is heartbreaking enough, but on top of that is the guilt she feels from believing that she caused her own cancer. Poorly trained hypnotherapists can unwittingly plant false memories, for example of abuse. During my reiki session, when McRoberts told me I’m in pain because I’m not getting the love I need, her words did not hit home. But if I were seriously ill and desperate enough for a cure, might her treatment instead have caused me to turn against those close to me, and to blame them for my condition just when I most needed their support?11

  There are increasing efforts to integrate conventional and alternative treatments, ranging from individual GPs like Patricia Saintey—who offers therapies including homeopathy at her private clinic—to big hospitals. The NHS-funded Center for Integrative Care in Glasgow offers holistic interventions such as homeopathy and mistletoe therapy, for example, while at Stanford Center for Integrative Medicine in the U.S., cancer patients can have traditional acupuncture alongside their chemotherapy. This helps to ensure that treatments given are regulated, and that patients also get any conventional care they need.

  When I visited the Stanford Center, therapist Deming Huang explained how his needles “adjust the energy function” of the body, and talked me through the 12 major energy channels—or meridians—that acupuncture targets. Western scientists haven’t been able to find any evidence for these channels,12 and the data regarding the benefits of the therapy are debated. Sham acupuncture—in which the needles don’t penetrate the skin, or are used in the wrong place—generally has very similar effects in trials to the real thing (but both are significantly better than no treatment at all), suggesting that for most complaints, any benefit from acupuncture results from a potent placebo effect. Rigorous analyses suggest that it is slightly better than placebo, however, when used to treat nausea and some types of chronic pain.13

  Huang performs acupuncture on cancer patients to help reduce the side effects of their treatment. “Most of our patients have only mild symptoms,” he says. “They are able to go through the whole treatment more smoothly.” That improves the survival rate, he claims, because more patients are able to finish their full treatment course. And it reduces costs, because when patients suffer side effects they visit him instead of their oncologist. “They can see us four or five times for the cost of one oncologist appointment.”14

  It’s a controversial approach. Steven Salzberg, a computational biologist at the University of Maryland, College Park, and a prominent critic of alternative therapies, has described integrative medicine as “cleverly marketed, dangerous quackery” and argues that treatments such as acupuncture should not be offered in publicly funded medical centers.15 Jeremy Howick, a philosopher of science and epidemiologist at the Center for Evidence-Based Medicine in Oxford, disagrees. He argues that we shouldn’t worry so much about understanding whether alternative therapies work through a physical or a psychological mode of action (or both), and that instead we should focus on how they compare in trials to established treatments. “I think it’s more important to know that something works, than how it works,” he says. “If I had cancer, I wouldn’t care what explanation the therapist gave. I would want him to cure my pain. Wouldn’t you?”16

  I probably would. But I’m still a little uneasy when, in offering alternative treatments, conventional doctors seemingly endorse explanatory frameworks with no scientific basis. It feels to me like an admission of defeat; a confession that these exotic explanations hold some power that science cannot unlock. Is it then surprising if people start to believe in the energy fields and auras that therapists tell them are responsible for the improvements they experience (not to mention healing spirits, German New Medicine, or whatever else comes along), or that they lose confidence in drugs and vaccines that really can save lives?

  —

  AS INDIVIDUALS, rather than putting our faith in mystical rituals and practices, the science described in this book shows that in many situations, we have the capacity to influence our own health by harnessing the power of the (conscious and unconscious) mind. If you feel that alternative remedies work for you, I don’t see any need to abandon them, especially when conventional medicine does not yet provide all of the same elements. But be critical of the advice that you may be offered by alternative therapists. And give your brain and body some credit. It’s not necessarily the potions or needles or hand waving that make you feel better. Consider the possibility that these are just a clever way of pushing your buttons, enabling you to influence your own physiology in a way that eases your symptoms and protects you from disease.

  And when it comes to medicine, rather than importing alternative therapies wholesale, many of the scientists and doctors we’ve heard about are trying a different approach. They want to understand instead the true active ingredients of these treatments (such as empathy, social support, hope) and how to incorporate those into better patient care.

  More basic research is needed; we’re only just starting to understand the complexities of the connections between brain and body. One intriguing area for research, for example, is whether men and women respond differently to stress. Studies so far suggest that men are more sensitive to achievement challenges such as mental arithmetic tasks or public speaking, while women are most vulnerable to interpersonal problems like social rejection.17 “We are very different
animals,” concludes UCSF stress researcher Elissa Epel.18 She’s keen to know if this can help explain why men and women suffer from different patterns of stress-related disease, with men more susceptible to cardiovascular disease and diabetes, and women at higher risk of anxiety disorders and depression.

  And we need more clinical trials to work out what actually helps patients in the real world. Even for one of the best-studied techniques, mindfulness, researchers need to test, for example, whether it works better in some populations than others; how it stacks up against the best available drugs for various conditions; and whether it extends beyond psychological benefits to reduce the biological impact of stress on the body and reduce disease risk long-term.

  Already, though, we’ve seen lots of examples of researchers using some of the principles described in this book to change how patients are cared for, with striking results. They include Vicki Jackson, talking to terminally ill patients about what a good life means to them; Ted Kaptchuk, dispensing honest placebos; Elvira Lang, changing the language radiologists use when they speak to patients; and Hunter Hoffman, designing virtual worlds that melt away pain. All are combining holistic care with a rigorous approach to evidence. All are managing to reduce reliance on drugs and other physical interventions, while improving outcomes for patients.

  There are of course countless other examples I haven’t had space to describe in detail. Jeff Sloan, a health sciences researcher at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, wants to help doctors take account of how patients feel, instead of relying solely on physical tests. That’s tough to do in a rushed appointment. “In modern medicine doctors usually only have one to three minutes of any given clinical visit with a patient that are unaccounted for,” he says. “The rest of the time is tied up with doing the physical, or looking at lab tests and discussing the results.”19