Introduction

Some people with serious, medically incurable illnesses recover unexpectedly. People with cancers, multiple sclerosis, scleroderma, Crohn's Disease, fibromyalgia, and many other diseases have returned to health - with no conventional medical explanation for how they managed to do so.

Modern medicine has occasionally reported the occurrence of these "spontaneous remissions" but has not delved into them to explain how people recover without medical interventions.

This portal of the WHR website focuses on recent, medically documented reports of Remarkable Recoveries.

Please contact us if you have had a remarkable recovery or know personally of someone who has had one.

We are searching in particular for those who have medical examinations and laboratory reports to validate the original conditions and the changes after the remarkable remission.

Your information will be kept in strictest confidence. If the evidence for the remission appears medically convincing, we may discuss with you the possibility of publishing a report that includes your information. if this were to be the case, no information would be shared without your written approval.

We have IRB approval for publication of these reports. For ethical reasons it is best that if you are the therapist, the treatment should have been considered completed before you approach a client for permission to publish the case report. We also welcome clients’ reports to complement therapists’ case studies.

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Exploring Remarkable Recoveries

Wholistic healing addresses body, emotions, mind, relationships (with each other and the environment) and spirit. Each and every one of these levels of our being can contribute to health and illness. Research in wholistic healing confirms that addressing these multiple levels can relieve many illnesses (Healing Research, Volume 2). Remarkable recoveries can add much to our understanding about the relationships of each of these factors to our physical health as well as to every level of our being. (If you click on the round icons at the top of this page, you will find discussions of the relationships between the various levels of our being.)

Many factors have contributed to this over-focus on the physical body. The advances in high-tech diagnostic procedures, and the enormous investments in pharmaceutical and surgical interventions have led to increasingly mechanistic approaches to assessing and treating illnesses. We have been sold on the 'quick fix' that chemical interventions can offer for physical symptoms. Our successes in these areas have led to several generations of distancing ourselves from the other aspects of our being. This is particularly true in the light of increasingly detailed medical focus on various parts of the physical body - to the increasing neglect of the person who inhabits that body. Few doctors have more than a cursory training in psychological issues contributing to health and illness. Many psychiatrists today are trained in programs where psychotherapy is an elective, and many of the trainees see little relevance of this subject to their prescription of psychoactive medications.

Subspecialization is another factor in the distancing of awareness of factors beyond the body that contribute to illnesses. Over several centuries, Western society has assigned care of the body to physicians; of the spirit to clergy; and in the past century, of the emotions, mind, and relationships to various subspecializing therapists in the mental health fields. Each specialty tends to work in varying degrees of isolation from the others. Within this system, careseekers have become used to thinking of physical problems as being only physical in their roots and causes, and present their bodies patient-ly to experts to diagnose and treat.

These splits often can be bridged fairly readily - between body on the one side and emotions, mind, relationships and spirit on the other. My work with people who have physical pains of all sorts has taught me that the average person can reconnect with psychological and spiritual issues contributing to their symptoms. This is true even when the pains have been present for decades and even when the pains have clear physical causes (See Seven Minutes to Natural Pain Release). The IJHC will also be featuring more reports from people who describe their own journeys from little awareness beyond their physical problems to releases of their symptoms through psychological interventions.

People who have remarkable recoveries often credit the spiritual dimensions of their awareness and beingness for providing strength, inspiration and transformative energies. In all my years of searching, I found only one publication that documents the medical evidence for remarkable recoveries through spiritual healing (of Kathryn Kuhlman). This is by a physician, Richard Casdorph, who documented the evidence of amazing physical changes produced by spiritual healing, including in his reports the medical examinations, laboratory tests and x-rays (The Miracles, 1976).

In an article in the January, 2009 issue of IJHC I share an overview on psychological processes that have led us to distance ourselves from awareness of some of the factors and issues beyond the physical body that may contribute to physical illness. In distancing ourselves from those aspects of ourselves that are not physical, we have reached a place where mind, emotions, relationships and spirit are increasingly unfamiliar to many of us - especially as they relate to physical symptoms and illnesses. Anything that is unfamiliar is easy to reject, especially if it were to require us to re-evaluate our basic beliefs about ourselves. For many people it is far easier to distance themselves from that which is unknown, and therefore beyond their understanding, than it is to explore a change of their beliefs and explanations for the world - within and outside themselves. I believe it is this distancing of oneself from the unknown that has led us to reject and ignore the challenges that remarkable recoveries pose to our understanding of mechanisms of health and illness.

Historical notes

Reports on Remarkable Recoveries

References on self-healing