Creating Miracles
A Practical Guide to Divine Intervention
B Y   C A R O L Y N   G O D S C H I L D   M I L L E R,   P h D

Chapter Six
Miracle Cures

IN DISCUSSING MIRACLES of deliverance from accidents and assaults, we've been confined to purely anecdotal evidence. Occurring suddenly and unpredictably, these incidents don't lend themselves to controlled experiments, replication, or even careful observation by objective third parties. However, the systematic study of divine intervention becomes marginally easier when the danger comes from illness, since many diseases tend to follow a predictable course over a period of months or years.

Investigations into alleged supernatural influences on disability and disease utilize a variety of approaches. There are, for example, retrospective studies of spontaneous remissions, where researchers try to identify the personal characteristics and the attitudinal and lifestyle changes that might have contributed to baffling recoveries. This approach closely resembles the one I've been taking with sudden reversals of fortune in cases of accidents and assaults. If we're on the right track, we'd expect to find evidence that the restoration of inner peace, and the decision to follow inner guidance, play prominent roles in unexpected healings as well.

Another approach to divine intervention in cases of illness involves the study of the effects of prayer. Investigators in this area attempt to learn whether - and under what conditions - the prayers of one person or group facilitate someone's recovery from disease or disability.

A third approach is the one taken by the medical commission studying alleged miracles at Lourdes. These physicians attempt to document spectacular cures attributed to spring water that is believed to have been imbued with healing properties by Mary, the mother of Jesus. The emphasis here is upon identifying cases where healing has been so sudden and complete that it seems that it could not have been caused by any known physical or psychological mechanism, and so it must therefore have been the result of divine intervention.

Those who study spontaneous remissions and their possible relationship to a person's lifestyle, beliefs, or attitudes are not necessarily committed to a belief in miracles, God, or the supernatural. While some believe in these things - holding that such changes reflect the sick person's determination to follow inner guidance, achieve inner peace, or open up to God's grace - others maintain that illnesses cured in this way must have been due to purely psychosomatic causes. In this view, if certain thoughts, attitudes, and behaviors predispose one to disease, changing them ought to reverse the process. Many believe that what appear to be miraculous healings actually represent nothing more than extreme examples of the ordinary - albeit poorly understood - interplay of the mind and body.

Investigators using any of these approaches must take into account certain variables, such as the healed person's faith in God, the healer, and/or the treatment. Many religious people believe that spiritual faith is instrumental in prompting God to act on one's behalf, but some scientists regard faith-based cures as examples of the placebo effect. It is well known that when patients believe they are being healed, they tend to improve regardless of the actual efficacy of the treatment. To determine whether divine intervention or the placebo effect is at work, researchers need to address such questions as: Can a faith healer heal someone who doesn't believe in faith healing? Will prayers benefit those who are unaware of being prayed for?

Spontaneous Remission and Inner Peace
There have always been unexpected healings that physicians acknowledge could not have been caused by medical treatment alone. Historically, these have often been attributed to divine intervention, but modern doctors are more inclined to look to as-yet-unknown physical and psychological influences. In keeping with this approach, they refer to those who experience dramatic spontaneous remissions as "self-healers," implying that the answers will ultimately be found in the choices or actions of the individuals involved.

Cancer surgeon and writer Bernie Siegel facetiously observes that spontaneous remission is the accepted medical term for a miracle.(1) Nevertheless, no one really believes these cures are genuinely "spontaneous" in the sense of having no cause. As parapsychological investigator Stanley Krippner(2) points out, the term simply implies that we do not at present know what their cause might have been.

As we shall see, many physicians have observed that unexpected healings tend to be preceded by dramatic transformations in the individual's mental or spiritual outlook. Like people who experience deliverance from accidents and assaults, terminal patients who recover "spontaneously" appear, upon closer examination, to be actively doing something to produce their good fortune. As one woman who achieved a remission from lymphoma dryly remarked, "It wasn't spontaneous - I worked my ass off for it."(3)

In general, it isn't easy to determine if there is some particular mental state that tends to occur in connection with spontaneous remissions by looking at medical reports, since these usually omit all reference to the patient's state of mind. At most they might include a casual remark, such as this one about a woman considered beyond treatment with metastasized cervical cancer: "And her much hated husband suddenly died, whereupon she completely recovered."(4) A misguided allegiance to naturalism has too often led physicians to completely overlook the possibility that the patient's psychological or spiritual state could be affecting his or her health.

Some inexplicable healings - like that of the woman whose husband died - seem to have occurred because conditions in the sick individual's life became more congenial. A source of conflict was eliminated. Needed physical and emotional support became available. It would appear that these are cases where circumstances surrounding the sick person changed in such a way as to foster inner peace.

One could say the restoration of inner peace occurred by chance in these cases, but many other spontaneous remissions reflect a process of self-initiated change. Patients with terminal diagnoses sometimes set out to heal themselves by altering the beliefs and attitudes that produce negative emotions, such as fear, anger, depression, and guilt. There are even physicians who make the restoration of inner peace an integral part of their treatment.

Dr. Gerald Jampolsky, for example, founded the Center for Attitudinal Healing in Sausalito, California, an organization that provides support to catastrophically ill children and their families.(5) Patients are encouraged to work at recovering emotional equilibrium through loving and forgiving themselves and others. We have already seen that inner peace may be a precondition for miracles in cases of accidents and assaults. Might it also be a key to spontaneous remission?

The Miracle-Prone Personality
Although rigorous scientific research on this issue is lacking, there is some evidence to suggest that terminal patients who succeed in healing themselves do have some unusual characteristics. Indeed, New Age Journal editor Marc Barasch(6) proposed that there might actually be such a thing as a "miracle-prone personality."

First, many self-healers report that they went through some sort of existential shift before things began to improve. Sentenced to death, these individuals seem to search for the meaning of their lives. They take stock of their reasons for living and then reorganize their activities to focus upon what is really important to them.

For some, this inner shift leads to an abdication of onerous responsibilities in favor of a more self-centered approach to life. In the face of impending doom, self-healers seem to give themselves permission to finally do what they want rather than what they are "supposed" to do. This rejection of other people's expectations seems to free the individual to become immersed in activities and projects that are personally meaningful. As a result, they take a renewed interest in life and begin to feel they have something to live for.

Another attribute of people who achieve spontaneous remissions is a comfortable working relationship with reality. While some folks with terminal diagnoses simply deny the problem and go on with business as usual, those who achieve remissions do not kid themselves about the trouble they are in. They accept their diagnoses realistically and make necessary changes in their lifestyles.

And, while self-healers do not give up hope for a cure, being cured is often not their primary objective. They seem to place their main emphasis upon living in a way that is congruent with their inner values for as long as they have left.

From the point of view of our present inquiry into miracles, it is interesting that self-healers also frequently mention slipping into altered states of consciousness. They tend to be intuitive, hypnotizable, fantasy-prone individuals who find meaning in dreams and symbols and feel at home in their imaginations. In chapter 11, when we look more closely at the creative power of the mind, the significance of this will become apparent.

It is also intriguing that long-term survivors of terminal diagnoses tend to be rugged individualists who are both emotionally expressive and self-assertive. They don't necessarily follow medical advice to the letter, and - perhaps as a result - these argumentative, opinionated patients are often perceived rather negatively by their physicians. Medical descriptions of them frequently include terms such as uncooperative, independent, bizarre, rebellious, antiauthoritarian, and nonconformist.

If inner peace and continued hope are essential to accessing miracles, it may be that only highly independent people can maintain the necessary emotional equilibrium when faced with a damning diagnosis. For example, a doctoral student in Idaho who was researching spontaneous remission found that many of her subjects flatly refused to put much stock in the medical experts who had pronounced their death sentences. The researcher asked one woman, "How did you feel when the doctor told you that you had this terminal illness and that you'd be dead in six months?"

"That was his opinion," she replied tartly.

"Would you like to say more about that?" the interviewer prompted.

"Well, you know we're told all these things by all these experts. We live on a farm, and all these federal people come in and they look at the soil and they tell us that nothing will grow and we should put these fertilizers in and we should do all this stuff. We don't do it and hell, things grow there anyway. So why would I listen to an expert?" (7)

Given a choice between believing that she was doomed and believing that her doctor didn't have both oars in the water, this woman opted for the latter possibility. Further, notice the fearless quality of her thinking. This is not someone who is clinging to a physician as to a savior. She is not afraid to go it alone if necessary.

An "irrational" optimism in the face of a "hopeless" situation is yet another characteristic that people who achieve spontaneous remissions appear to share with those who experience miracles of deliverance from accidents and assaults. Sadly, some self-healers find it necessary to insulate themselves against medical skepticism in order to maintain this optimism.

For example, the Idaho researcher above quoted this reaction by a woman who had consented to be interviewed: "You're not a doctor, are you? I don't want to talk to a doctor!" The interviewer said, "No, I'm not. Really. Honest!" Then the woman replied, "Well, I just don't want to be put down and turned away again, like I was so many times. I'm going to keep my state of mind intact, no matter what!"(8)

We can readily understand how exposure to a physician's negative expectations might jeopardize a patient's inner peace, and therefore his or her remission. For example, one researcher was told by many of the long-term survivors he interviewed that their doctors had actually been irritated by their refusal to accept the hopelessness of their situations.(9) Quite a few of these patients said that they had angrily walked out on their medical treatment. Their physicians never even knew that some of these "hopeless" cases recovered fully - much less why they did so.

However, even when patients with remissions do maintain medical contact, their doctors may be reluctant to credit their healings to something as intangible as prayer, a spiritual awakening, or a change of mental focus. In the case of my student Gino, for example, the attending physician did have an opportunity to learn that his patient had made an astonishing recovery, although, even then, he could not accept the idea that it could have resulted from the new thoughts Gino was entertaining.

Gino: Nursing His Liver Cells
At twenty-three, Gino nearly died of a serious illness. His condition was critical, and he had to spend weeks in the hospital and months in a convalescent facility until he stabilized and was able to go home. However, it would be too much to say that he had recovered. His life would never be the same.

It seems that an infection had destroyed most of Gino's liver. His doctor had had the unpleasant task of explaining to him that it would not regenerate itself. Gino's health would always be fragile, and for the rest of his life he would have to be hooked up to a machine that would do for him what his devastated liver could not.

With the disability money he received from the state, Gino was able to rent a tiny apartment. His many friends pitched in to do his shopping and cooking and to run his errands. Bedridden and permanently attached by tubes to a machine that had to be wheeled along with him on trips to the bathroom, this once-athletic young man tried to keep his spirits up despite the knowledge that he was going to spend the rest of his life as an invalid.

Gino had a lot of time on his hands. In an effort to relieve his boredom, one of his friends brought him the book Creative Visualization by Shakti Gawain.(10) In it, Gawain described an ancient spiritual technique for changing reality. She said that you could actually heal yourself by altering the way you pictured things in your mind. Glad to fill his tedious days and sleepless nights with some constructive activity, Gino began to visualize the healing of his liver.

"I used to lie there and work on my liver one cell at a time," Gino told me years later. "It was just too damned depressing to focus on the whole thing at once. My liver appeared in my mind's eye like this big, black blob - all discolored and flabby with just this one little area of healthy pink tissue.

"So I would lie in bed imagining myself with a teensy-weensy little toothbrush, scrubbing the crud off of a single cell, rinsing it carefully, and gently massaging in magical medicines. I don't know that I seriously thought it was going to help, but it was something to do. There's just so much television a person can watch."

As the months wore on, Gino became a little stronger. He could move about the apartment more easily and prepare meals for himself. But he continued to fill his idle hours by mentally tending his liver cells. Sometimes when he was alone, he would even croon to them like a loving father, urging the "little guys" to take heart and heal themselves. And each day the liver in his visualization looked slightly improved. Little by little, there got to be more pink, healthy cells and fewer crud-encrusted, black ones.

One day as he was stepping out of his tiny kitchen, Gino caught his tubing on the edge of the counter. A sudden move on his part, and he felt agonizing pain as the plastic umbilicus was ripped out of his body. His doctor had warned that such an eventuality could be fatal, and Gino lost no time in phoning the paramedics.

Gino's doctor met him in the emergency room, looking grim. "I'll have to operate, but I want to do some tests first so I know where we stand. The nurse is going to take you down for some X-rays and stuff while I get scrubbed."

The tests were quickly completed, and Gino was prepped for surgery. After a short wait, however, the nurse returned and told him that something had gone wrong with his tests. They would have to be repeated.

Gino was put through another battery and was again left to wait. This time it was his doctor who appeared with an apologetic expression. These tests were no good either. How about one more round?

After the third battery was complete, Gino's doctor strode into his room and eyed him with speculation. He waved the sheaf of results in the air and demanded, "Where the hell did you get this liver?"

"What?" Gino replied weakly.

"This isn't your liver! I know your liver, and this isn't it!"

Gino was nonplussed. "What do you mean? What's wrong?" he asked.

"That's just it!" his physician exclaimed. "Nothing is wrong! There isn't a damn thing wrong with this liver. You left here five months ago with almost no liver function, and now you show up with this perfectly good liver. And what I want to know is - how the hell did you do that?"

"You're not going to believe this, Doc," Gino replied, "but it must have been the visualization I've been doing. For hours every day I've been visualizing my liver healing. I guess it did."

Gino was right about one thing. His doctor never did believe that the visualization could have worked such a miracle. Not that he had any other theories to explain how it could have happened!

When I knew Gino twenty years ago, when he was a graduate student in my class, he was a vital, energetic man in his thirties, with an unshakable belief in the power of mind over matter. This was what had led him to study psychology. As a psychotherapist, he hoped to help other people heal themselves by refocusing their thinking.

Research on Miracles at Lourdes
One of the few places where allegations of spontaneously occurring miracle cures have been carefully researched by qualified physicians is at the Shrine of the Virgin at Lourdes, France. That's where a spring is believed to have emerged from the spot on which the Virgin Mary is said to have appeared to a fourteen-year-old girl named Bernadette Soubirous in 1858. Since then, millions of people from around the world have made the pilgrimage to Lourdes hoping for miraculous healing, and large numbers of them assert that they received the help they sought. Records of cures associated with Lourdes have been kept since the first healing was reported while the Marian apparitions were still going on in 1858. However, in 1947 the Catholic Church formally established an international medical team to thoroughly investigate the claims of miraculous healing.

The procedure is as follows:(11) When a pilgrim reports a sudden cure, he or she is interviewed and examined by the physician on duty in the sanctuary. If the case seems to meet the committee's criteria - that it be a final and definite cure of a dire condition, occurring with "supernatural" rapidity - the physician convenes a medical board involving any medical doctors, of whatever religion, who happen to be present in the sanctuary that day and are willing to participate.

If the case is deemed "medically inexplicable" by the medical board, the physician follows the patient's progress for at least three years before deciding whether to submit a report to the International Medical Committee of Lourdes. This committee currently has twenty permanent members - all distinguished physicians - some Catholic, some of other religions, and even a few who are agnostics or atheists. Additionally, the committee consults with some ten thousand adjunct members representing more than seventy nations and a wide variety of beliefs, including agnostics and atheists.

One of the permanent members is assigned the case and charged with investigating it thoroughly, reading all of the current medical literature in that area and consulting with other physicians and scientists as necessary. He or she prepares a report to be discussed at the committee's annual meeting. The full committee then tries to determine whether "the cure of this person constitutes a phenomenon which is contrary to the observations and expectations of medical knowledge, and is inexplicable according to present scientific knowledge."

If a two-thirds majority of the permanent members believes the case to be a candidate for a miracle, the healed individual's local bishop convenes a committee of local physicians who consider the case further, interviewing friends and relatives of the person alleging the miracle and taking into account current developments in the person's condition. In the end, the local bishop is the one who decides whether to declare the cure "miraculous." Of more than six thousand cases where miracles have been alleged, some sixty-five have presently been accepted as actual miracles.

Vittorio Michelli: A Miracle at Lourdes
In 1962, Vittorio Michelli's hip joint was completely destroyed by cancer (specifically, a fusiform-cell carcinoma). The pelvis was disintegrated, and the leg was nearly separated. He was treated in the military hospital at Trente, Italy, where the destructive progress of the disease was charted with radiological evidence.

A year after his initial diagnosis, Michelli went to Lourdes and was bathed in the waters in the plaster cast that was holding his hip together. He reported sudden sensations of heat moving through his body while he was in the water, and when he emerged from the spring, his appetite and energy returned immediately. A month later, his doctors finally consented to remove the cast and take another X-ray. When they did so, they determined that the tumor was regressing.

The tumor soon disappeared completely, at which point the bone began to regrow and eventually completely reconstructed the hip. Michelli was walking two months after his return from Lourdes. Brendan O'Regan of the Institute of Noetic Sciences quotes the committee's report to this effect: "A completely destroyed articulation was completely reconstructed without any surgical intervention. The lower limb which was useless became sound, the prognosis is indisputable, the patient is alive and in a flourishing state of health nine years after his return from Lourdes."(12) The committee's report on Michelli also stated: "A remarkable reconstruction of the iliac bone and cavity has taken place. The X-rays made in l964, l965, l968 and l969 confirm categorically and without doubt that an unforeseen, and even overwhelming bone reconstruction has taken place, of a type unknown in the annals of world medicine."

Dissenting Opinions
While a story like the one above certainly seems authentically miraculous, some cases deemed "medically inexplicable" by the International Medical Committee of Lourdes, and "miraculous" by the Catholic Church, have proven less convincing to independent investigators. British psychologist Donald West, for example, points out that most of these miracle cures involve diseases such as cancer and tuberculosis that are known to be extremely susceptible to psychosomatic influences. He believes that the positive expectations generated in believers by the visit to Lourdes might well have been enough to reverse the courses of these diseases in the absence of any divine intervention.(13)

Other physicians suggest that several cures probably represent cases where multiple sclerosis was misdiagnosed as some other disorder. The sudden disappearance of symptoms is much less amazing if this is so, since it is well known that the course of MS often involves dramatic spontaneous remissions.(14) Then, too, a 1963 miraculous cure of Budd-Chiari Syndrome is called into question by the fact that seven years later the "healed" woman did, in fact, die of that disease.(15)

Research of the kind done at Lourdes inevitably gives rise to conflicting findings and interpretations. Unfortunately, those of us considering the disparate views of experts working from very different assumptions are seldom in a position to independently evaluate their claims. Should we trust the diagnoses agreed upon by the many physicians who actually examined these patients, or the speculations of later, albeit possibly more knowledgeable, doctors who suspect that the attending physicians all got it wrong?

Further, where does psychosomatic influence end and divine intervention, if it exists, begin? Most medical practitioners today would have no trouble accepting the idea that a dramatic change in Michelli's thinking could have cured his cancer. But could it be responsible for regrowing his hip, or must we resort to divine intervention to account for that extraordinary development? Where one expert says one thing and another disagrees, we are left to make our own choice about which one to believe.

I believe the literature on spontaneous remission supports the idea that, like people snatched from death through accidents and assaults, those who are healed of "terminal" conditions change their thinking, follow their inner promptings, and adjust their lifestyles in ways that nurture inner peace. In chapter 8 we'll look more closely at the life-or-death importance of one's state of mind.

Things to Think About

© 2006, Carolyn Miller

(1) Bernie Siegel, Love, Medicine and Miracles: Lessons Learned about Self-Healing from a Surgeon's Experience with Exceptional Patients (New York: Harper & Row, 1986).
(2) Stephen Kierulff and Stanley Krippner, Becoming Psychic: Spiritual Lesssons for Focusing Your Hidden Abilities (Franklin Lakes, NJ: The Career Press, 2004).
(3) Marc Barasch, "A Psychology of the Miraculous," Psychology Today (March/April 1994): 54-80.
(4) O'Regan, Noetic Sciences Collection.
(5) Gerald Jampolsky, Teach Only Love: The Seven Principles of Attitudinal Healing (New York: Bantem, 1983).
(6) Barasch, "A Psychology of the Miraculous."
(7) O'Regan, Noetic Sciences Collection.
(8) O'Regan, Noetic Sciences Collection.
(9) O'Regan, Noetic Sciences Collection.
(10) Shakti Gawain, Creative Visualization (Mill Valley, CA: New World Library, 1978).
(11) For more on the medical commission's procedures, visit their official website at lourdes-france.com.
(12) "Official Report of the Lourdes Medical Commission," in O'Regan, Noetic Sciences Collection.
(13) D. J. West, Eleven Lourdes Miracles (London: Duckworth, 1957).
(14) Barasch, "A Psychology of the Miraculous."
(15) Barasch, "A Psychology of the Miraculous."

Excerpted from Creating Miracles: A Practical Guide to Divine Intervention © 2006, by Carolyn Miller. Reprinted with permission of HK Kramer/New World Library, Novato, CA, USA 94949. 1-800-441-2100, www.newworldlibrary.com.