by Dr.Harald Wiesendanger– Klartext
What the mainstream media is hiding
Sometimes, a single word is enough to hit someone with the force of a sledgehammer. This includes the medical assessment that a cure is impossible.
If one day a doctor told me that my illness was “incurable,” How would I deal with that? Am I stuck in shock? Am I falling mentally into the abyss? Am I giving up?
Instead of despairing, I would question his statement. He says He no longer knows any effective treatment, and his resources are not sufficient.
But what about others?
“Unfortunately, I can’t give you any hope,” he probably replies. “The possibilities of medicine have been exhausted in your case.”
What medicine does he mean? The conventional one he acquired during his studies? It knows 30,000 diseases but can only completely treat or at least alleviate a third of them. Despite an ever-increasing technical and financial effort, it reaches its limits – its limits – in a variety of chronic illnesses with which, according to expert estimates, at least twenty million people have to live with in Germany alone.
What is still possible for those affected is demonstrated by amazing treatment successes in the therapy camps of my Ways Out Charity as well as in the practices of therapists who belong to the “Ways Out” network (IVH), be it with multiple sclerosis or advanced cancer, with allergies, with tinnitus, with metabolic disorders, with supposedly “therapy-resistant” epilepsy or fibromyalgia, with rheumatic diseases, with paralysis and other physical disabilities, with serious mental illnesses such as chronic depression, anxiety, autism. And in each of our therapy camps, we could see how beneficial holistic, spiritual, and energetic approaches can be, especially in seemingly “hopeless” cases. We know from experience that there are no incurable diseases – only incurable patients.
But is less than healing never enough? Even with “way out” therapists, very few people who seek help become completely symptom-free. But surprisingly, often, the symptoms subside and improve the mental condition, general well-being, and quality of life; are medications and stressful therapies better tolerated? The ability and willingness to accept one’s own illness grow: as a signal, as a lesson, as a path, as an opportunity.
How humanely does a doctor act when he forces seriously ill people to be “reasonable” in his own sense – and to resign?
A doctor who declares me to be “terminally ill” also usually says: “There is nothing more I can do for you.” But even if his questionable prognosis were correct, in my case, healing or even just an improvement would be once and for all excluded; he is wrong with such a remark. Even for the terminally ill and those doomed to die, a doctor could always do something – with a bit of empathy and the willingness to take the time. It is precisely when the curative potential of all available therapies has been exhausted that some of the most demanding medical tasks begin: caring, conveying meaning, loving care, and sensitive support until the last breath. In this respect, too, many “way out” therapists act in an exemplary manner – they make human medicine more humane.
On the other hand, how humanely does a doctor act when he wants to force seriously ill people to be “sensible” in his own sense? “You have to come to terms with this,” is what those affected then hear. In the event of a life-threatening illness, they will even calculate “how much time you have left” in a statistically accurate and humanly hypocritical manner. Such discouraging statements, especially from doctors, are irresponsible. They depress, rob you of all hope, and destroy quality of life. They often cause worse psychological damage to those affected than their illness could ever achieve. The worst pain, the most terrible disfigurement, and the most severe disability can still be easier to bear than the loss of all confidence that one day there could still be a change for the better. In this way, medical forecasts ultimately become self-fulfilling prophecies, similar to the fortune teller’s vision of an accident or the chart technician’s warning of “resistance” in stock price developments.
“Hope,” the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer once said in an enlightened way, is “the confusion of the desire for an event with its probability,” and he failed to recognize that events become more likely, and hope is directed towards them more persistently. Isn’t lighting a candle better than just noticing how dark it is? Unwavering optimism is a largely underestimated therapeutic factor determining an illness’s course. Anyone who fights for their health can lose, admittedly. But if you don’t fight, you’ve already lost.
The Munich comedian Karl Valentin is credited with the quip: “Predictions are always tricky – especially when they concern the future.” If a doctor gets carried away with predicting that there is no longer a therapeutic way out for me, he fails several times: he discourages. He refuses. And he hides opportunities that he should know about. The phenomenon of “spontaneous remission” suggests that anyone who does not believe in miracles is not a realist.
The statistics of the “miracle.”
Doctors refer to a “spontaneous remission” as a recovery (Latin remittere = to recover) without any recognizable external cause, in particular without any recognized therapy taking place – by itself, so to speak. (The Latin word sponte literally means “of one’s own will” or “from within “.) Although documented by doctors for over a century (1), spontaneous remissions were until recently a taboo subject in medicine: Because prevailing schools of thought could not explain them, they were simply dismissed as a phantom, as the product of dubious sensational reports, and due to misjudgments of the patients or diagnostic errors by the treating physicians.
It wasn’t until 1974 that a change in mood began, with the first scientific conference on spontaneous healing of cancer in Baltimore, USA. Since then, more extensive research projects have addressed the phenomenon. They unanimously concluded that in the vast number of reported spontaneous healings, there is actually a hardcore as to whose authenticity and credibility there is no reasonable doubt.
The American biochemist Caryle Hirshberg from the Institute of Noetic Sciences in California carried out pioneering work: together with her colleague Brendan O’Regan – he died soon afterward of malignant melanoma, malignant skin cancer – she scoured almost the entire medical world literature of the previous 120 years inexplicable healings. She came across around 4,000 cases from 20 countries, 1,051 of which were spontaneous remissions from cancer. (2) (She presented fifty particularly convincing cases in her book “Unexpected Recoveries.”) (3) When the German Cancer Society invited people to a highly acclaimed symposium on “spontaneous remissions in cancer” in Heidelberg in April 1997, Caryle Hirshberg was one of the star guests.
At the same event, a German research group led by Professor Dr. Walter Gallmeier and the senior physician Dr. Herbert Kappauf, who has been researching unexpected healings in cancer patients at the Nuremberg Clinic since 1990, attracted attention. (4) “Our most important concern is to show that these phenomena are real,” explained Kappauf. From his impressive collection of cases, he presented 20 well-documented examples for which conventional medicine offered no plausible explanation.
But hoping for a spontaneous recovery, according to the tenor of the Heidelberg symposium, is pointless for those affected. Such a remission only occurs in one out of 60,000 to 100,000 cancer patients. That would be just 0.001 percent.
Such statistics have a devastating effect on those seeking help: Don’t they mean that out of tens of thousands of people who are seriously ill and have been given up by doctors and have placed their last hope in “alternative” healing methods, only one person is not disappointed in the end? For example, if all 340,000 Germans who develop cancer every year went to a healer, would only three to four of them find effective help? And isn’t it to be feared that the success records of “alternative” therapists for other illnesses will hardly be any better as soon as they are investigated with scientific meticulousness?
One cannot warn patients strongly enough not to take such number games too seriously – and to be discouraged by them. Their database is thin: it only consists of case reports published in the most critical oncology journals, that is, no more than a few dozen yearly. But how many spontaneous healings remain unpublished – for example, because the treating doctor did not document them, because he couldn’t find an editorial team that wanted his report, because he lacked the time to evaluate and publish, or because the patient recovered outside of medical supervision and attention?
Above all, patients should question the standards used: To what extent are they useful as a decision-making aid? According to current medical knowledge, Doctors only recognize a cure as “spontaneous” if it is confirmed by a current diagnosis and occurred within a period of time in which no therapeutic measures were taken that could be effective. Research needs such criteria to isolate “pure” cases – but does the patient need them? They are unrealistically strict in their judgment: for the majority of those who seek help from spiritual healers, their last medical examination was months, if not years, ago. And sensibly, hardly any of them turn down any other therapeutic opportunity while undergoing mental treatment. Previous spontaneous remission research is like a fisherman who hardly catches anything: not because, as he believes, there are too few fish, but because he drags nets with the wrong mesh size through the sea.
Medical research into Lourdes’s “miracle” healings is in a comparable state. Experts estimate that there are 30,000 to 60,000 sick people among the three to four million pilgrims who make the pilgrimage to the famous Marian shrine at the foot of the French Pyrenees every year. In comparison, the number of around 70 “miracle healings” that have so far been officially approved by the Church after an international committee consisting of thirty doctors thoroughly examined them seems to be ridiculously small. To be recognized, a case must meet the strictest requirements that were laid down in a canon in 1734 by Cardinal Lambertini, later Pope Benedict XIV: The healing must be sudden, unforeseeable, complete, and without relapse; the suffering must have been life-threatening and of organic origin; It must be possible to completely rule out that it was not medical treatment that led to success. The cure must “exceed the forces of nature, represent a reversal of the laws of nature, and be scientifically inexplicable.”
Sick pilgrims rightly base their hopes on other numbers and criteria: in the history of Lourdes, over 6,000 healings have been reported to the local Bureau Medical and registered there. The fact that they were ultimately denied recognition does not necessarily speak against their credibility. Because why shouldn’t a “miracle” also take place slowly, only partially, in cases of suffering without a recognizable organic cause and accompanied by relapses? Why should it be inappropriate to speak of a “miracle” even when a life is not acutely threatened? Why, believers wonder, shouldn’t spontaneous remissions be based on understandable biological processes and follow natural laws? Does God’s power only become evident in violations of the world order that he created? Many sick people do not even report a positive change in Lourdes, especially if – and this is the rule – it only becomes apparent a long time after their return, be it due to convenience, the discouraging knowledge of the strict medical examination criteria, or the (possibly erroneous) opinion that previous or accompanying therapy brought about the improvement.
As long as medical research cannot come up with more helpful decision-making aids, patients are better guided by patients: by personal impressions and experiences that those affected themselves collected after they got involved in the “other” medicine. They can be found, for example, among the thousands of people seeking help to whom the Auswege Foundation connected experienced, reputable therapists over the past decade – and among the hundreds who attended its therapy camps. “I don’t know if I’ll get well again,” one camp participant told us as we said goodbye. “But I finally know again that I have a chance.” With the force of the hammer that fell on him with his doctor’s “incurable” prognosis, he tears down the wall of hopelessness.
(Harald Wiesendanger)
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This content comes from Harald Wiesendanger’s book Ways Out – Helping the Sick Differently (2015).
Remarks
1 As early as 1918, Rohdenburg described 185 observed spontaneous remissions (“Fluctuations in the growth energy of tumors in man, with especial reference to spontaneous recession,” Journal of Cancer Research 3/1918, pp. 193-225); Fauvet reported on 202 cases between 1960-1964 (“Spontaneous cancer cures and regressions,” Revue du Practicien 14/1964, pp. 2177-2180); Boyd presented over 98 cases in 1966 (The spontaneous regression of cancer, Springfield Ill. 1966); Cole and Everson report 176 cases in the period 1900-1960 (W.H. Cole: “Spontaneous regression of cancer and the importance of finding its cause,” National Cancer Institute Monographs 44/1976, pp. 5-9; Cole WH, Everson TC: Spontaneous Regression of Cancer, Philadelphia, PA. 1966; “Spontaneous Regression of Cancer: Preliminary Report,” Annals of Surgery 144/1956, pp. 366-380); Challis presented 489 cases from 1900 to 1987 (“The spontaneous regression of cancer. A review of cases from 1900 to 1987”, Acta Oncologica 29/1990, pp. 545-550).
2 Brendan O’Regan/Caryle Hirshberg: Spontaneous Remission – An Annotated Bibliography, Institute of Noetic Sciences, Sausalito 1993; In it, they report on 1385 spontaneous remissions in cancer between 1900 and 1987.
3 Caryle Hirshberg/Marc Ian Barasch: Unexpected recovery – the power to heal comes from within ourselves, Munich 1995.
Walter Gallmeier and Herbert Kappauf published 4 interim results in 1995 in their book After the Diagnosis of Cancer – life is an Alternative, Freiburg 1995; see also Herbert Kappauf: Miracles are Possible – Spontaneous Healing of Cancer. Freiburg 2003; Manfred E. Heim/Reinhold Schwarz (eds.): Spontaneous remissions in oncology. Schattauer, Stuttgart 1998.