Most of us have heard horror stories of mistakes made in a
medical setting; I recall one about a surgeon leaving a pair of scissors in a
patient’s body after sowing her up. But the shocker was reported in the BMJ on
May 3rd:
According to surgeon Dr. Martin Makary, the third leading cause of
death in the U.S. is error committed by medical professionals. 700 lives a day
snuffed out because of a lapse of consciousness is no small thing. Annually, it amounts to 251
thousand souls; 9.5 percent of all deaths in the U.S.
So, after heart disease and cancer, medical error is most
likely to kill you. My own response to this situation: If at all possible, stay away from
medical personnel and institutions. Of course, that would mean taking responsibility for our
health.
Simply by maintaining a healthy diet, exercising, and doing
some mental practice, anybody can improve their health. What’s lacking is the discipline to do it. Unfortunately, most of us lack of what I
call voluntary intelligence (so-called ‘will power’). But that, like our emotional and aesthetic skills, can be
worked on and improved. See, for example, The Act of Will by Roberto Assagioli.
Alternative paths to wellness are available to explore. The goal is to become custodians of our
own bodies, aiming for minimal or zero contact with the medical-industrial
complex.
The latest findings about fatal medical errors suggest the need for a new paradigm that emphasizes the virtues of self-healing. The good news is that there is much evidence for our latent self-healing potentials.
Take the underrated mystery of the placebo effect, the proven
fact that our beliefs can have physical
and emotional healing effects. For
example, the positive virtues of anti-depressants are only slightly more
effective than placebos.
In view of all the placebo evidence, why not train ourselves
to use our health-giving beliefs as an active part of our lifestyle? In place of automatically relying on
conventional medicine, why not learn to cultivate healing beliefs, attitudes and
expectations that promise to enhance our well-being?
A revolutionary book by Dr. Lolette Kuby, Faith and the Placebo Effect (2001),
makes a sustained case for the thesis that all healing is at bottom self-healing. Kuby is a poet and English literature
professor, a Jewish woman who claims to have been healed of cancer as a result
of a vision of Jesus. Her ideas
about God and self-healing are original and inspired by her own unique
experience.
The important fact is that under the scientific heading of
placebo effect, we have masses of evidence suggesting our potential for
self-healing. The books by Larry Dossey, physician and
author of One Mind, are especially
useful in this regard. In light of
the news about the third leading cause of death, all this is important. Could
anything be more nightmarish? The
place you go for healing becomes your charnel-house.
We sometimes hear stories of cancer patients with unexplained
remissions. Dr. Kelly Turner
decided to study and compare such cases.
She wanted to find out what if any were the key variables involved (Radical Remission, 2014). Many physicians apparently avoid talking
about such cases. Turner saw them
as opportunities and sought to identify the factors that might account for the
remissions.
From her research she distilled nine factors that seemed key
to bringing about the remissions. Two were bodily, a radical change of diet and the use of
certain food supplements. The other
seven were mental, involving changes of consciousness.
According to Dr. Turner, the people who beat the odds against
cancer trust their intuitions; try to release emotions they suppressed while
freeing up positive emotions; come out of their shells and accept the support
of others; talk of a new life-enhancing spiritual connection with reality; and,
finally, have and feel deep and attractive reasons for living. All this sounds to me like a plan not
just to remit cancer but to live a healthy life.
I’m throwing out ideas for an escape-plan from the dangers of the medical-industrial complex. It’s
a bizarre fact -- the very place we go to for medical help harbors a high risk
of accidental death.
The conclusion? Take care of yourself as best you can, and try not to play
Russian roulette with the American health-care system.