Quantum Healing

Here is an extraordinary new approach to healing by an extraordinary physician-writer-a book filled with the mystery, wonder, and hope of people who have experienced seemingly miraculous recoveries from cancer and other serious illnesses.

Dr. Deepak Chopra, a respected New England endocrinologist, began his search for answers when he saw patients in his own practice who completely recovered after being given only a few months to live. In the mid-1980s he returned to his native India to explore Ayurveda, humanity's most ancient healing tradition. Now he has brought together the current research of Western medicine, neuroscience, and physics with the insights of Ayurvedic theory to show that the human body is controlled by a "network of intelligence" grounded in quantum reality. Not a superficial psychological state, this intelligence lies deep enough to change the basic patterns that design our physiology-with the potential to defeat cancer, heart disease, and even aging itself. In this inspiring and pioneering work, Dr. Chopra offers us both a fascinating intellectual journey and a deeply moving chronicle of hope and healing.

Excerpt:

Page 97

Several years ago, a Boston fireman in his mid-forties came into the emergency room of a suburban hospital one night complaining of sudden, sharp chest pains. The resident on call examined him and could find no evidence of irregularity in his heart function. The patient went away without being reassured, and soon he returned with the same symptoms. He was turned over to me as senior physician, but I could find nothing wrong with his heart, either.

Despite his thorough examination, the fireman began to return to the ER repeatedly, usually late at night. Every time he came in, he told me with great trepidation that he was certain he had a heart condition, but no test, including the most sophisticated echocardiograms and angiograms, detected the slightest defect. Finally, in the face of the man's mounting anxiety, I recommended that he be retired with full disability purely for psychological reasons. The fire department's medical examining board refused, on the grounds that no physical evidence had been offered. Two months later, the man showed up one last time at the emergency room, this time on a stretcher, the victim of a massive heart attack. Within ten minutes of his coronary, which destroyed 90 percent of his heart muscle, he died, but he had enough strength to turn to me and whisper, "Now do you believe I have a heart condition?"

What this case so dramatically attests is that the detour into the ? zone is powerful-it can change any physical reality in the body. I feel I must call what happened here a quantum event, because it did not follow the cause-and-effect rules that have been observed and set down by medicine as the body's normal state of affairs. Many people entertain fears that they might have a heart condition, but they don't die from them; conversely, many heart attacks occur without the slightest forewarning from the mind. Even if we say, in keeping with mind-body medicine, that a thought caused the heart attack, how did this thought find a way to carryout its fatal intention?

If you program the concept of "heart attack" into a computer, you know exactly what you have done. If you want to retrieve it, the circuits can be activated to bring it up to the screen, and once it is there, you can use software to manipulate it. But the thought "heart attack" didn't act like this at all in my patient. He didn't know where the thought came from; once it came, he was powerless to escape it; and far short of staying in one place, the thought invaded his body, with disastrous results.

This is only half of the mystery of a quantum event-the negative half; the journey into the ? zone can have amazingly positive results, too. Another patient of mine, a quiet woman in her fifties, came to me about ten years ago complaining of severe abdominal pains and jaundice. Believing that she was suffering from gallstones, I had her admitted for immediate surgery, but when she was opened up, it was found that she had a large malignant tumor that had spread to her liver, with scattered pockets of cancer throughout her abdominal cavity.

Judging the case inoperable, her surgeons closed the incision without taking further action. Because the woman's daughter pleaded with me not to tell her mother the truth, I informed my patient that the gallstones had been successfully removed. I rationalized that her family would break the news to her in time, and that in all likelihood she had only a few months to live-at least she could spend them with peace of mind.

Eight months later I was astonished to see the same woman back in my office. She had returned for a routine physical exam, which revealed no jaundice, no pain, and no detectable signs of cancer. Only after another year passed did she confess anything unusual to me. She said, "Doctor, I was so sure I had cancer two years ago that when it turned out to be just gallstones, I told myself I would never be sick another day in my life." Her cancer never recurred.

This woman used no technique; she got well, it appears, through her deep-seated resolve and that was good enough. This case, too, I must call a quantum event, because of the fundamental transformation that that went deeper than organs, tissues, cells, or even DNA, directly to the source of the body's existence in time and space. Both of my patients-one with positive thoughts, the other with negative-managed to dip into the ? realm, and from there they dictated their own reality.

As mysterious as these two cases are, are they really examples of quantum events? A physicist could object that we are just making metaphors here, that the hidden world of elementary particles and fundamental forces explored by quantum physics is very different from the mind's hidden world. Yet, one can argue that the inconceivable region from which we fetch the thought of a rose is the same as that from which a photon emerges-or the cosmos. To make this clear, we start with the familiar textbook scheme that arranges the body vertically, as a hierarchy of systems, organs, tissues, and cells:

System
Organ
Tissues
Cell
DNA

End excerpt.