How Healing Works Read online

  Over the past three decades, the author has seen hundreds of patients. Throughout this book, he has drawn on the stories they have generously shared to illustrate the vast range of treatment experiences. Many of the case histories you will read are composites. When the author has based examples on particular patients, he has changed their names and distinguishing features in order to protect their identity. Any resulting resemblance to persons alive or dead is entirely unintentional and coincidental.

  In addition, the information and advice presented in this book are not meant to substitute for the advice of your family physician or other trained health-care professionals. You are advised to consult with health-care professionals with regard to all matters pertaining to you and your family’s health and well-being.

  As of press time, the URL’s displayed in this book link or refer to existing websites on the internet. Penguin Random House LLC is not responsible for and should not be deemed to endorse or recommend any website other than our own or any content available on the internet (including without limitation, any website, blog post, or information page) that is not created by Penguin Random House LLC.

  Copyright ©2018 by Wayne Jonas, MD

  Published in the United States by Lorena Jones Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  www.tenspeed.com

  Lorena Jones Books and the Lorena Jones Books colophon are trademarks of Penguin Random House, LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Jonas, Wayne B., author.

  Title: How healing works : get well and stay well using your hidden power to

  heal / Wayne Jonas, MD.

  Description: California : Ten Speed Press, [2018] | “Lorena Jones books.” |

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017022019 (print) | LCCN 2017031344 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Healing. | Nature, Healing power of. | Mind and body. |

  BISAC: HEALTH & FITNESS / Healing. | HEALTH & FITNESS / Healthy Living. |

  HEALTH & FITNESS / Health Care Issues.

  Classification: LCC RZ999 (ebook) | LCC RZ999 .J66 2018 (print) | DDC

  615.8/528—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2017022019

  Hardcover ISBN 9780399579240

  Ebook ISBN 9780399579257

  Illustrations by Six Half Dozen Design Studio

  v5.1

  a

  For my family—the first and

  final source of healing

  Contents

  INTRODUCTION

  The Need for a New Understanding of Healing

  Section 1: Rethinking Healing

  CHAPTER 1The Paradox of Healing

  CHAPTER 2How We Heal

  CHAPTER 3How Science Misses Healing

  CHAPTER 4A Science for Healing

  Section 2: The Dimensions of Healing

  CHAPTER 5Coming Home

  CHAPTER 6Acting Right

  CHAPTER 7Loving Deeply

  CHAPTER 8Finding Meaning

  Section 3: Your Healing Journey

  CHAPTER 9Integrative Health

  CHAPTER 10Creating Healing

  Appendices

  The HOPE Consultation

  Constructing Your Healing Journey

  Additional Reading on Integrative Health

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Index

  INTRODUCTION

  THE NEED FOR A NEW UNDERSTANDING OF HEALING

  Most of the treatments we think produce healing do not work when exposed to rigorous scientific scrutiny. Yet people often get better. Why? How?

  This book argues that the vast majority of healing comes from a few basic principles that can be used effectively by any system—ancient or modern, conventional or alternative, proven or unproven—and by both doctors and patients in their daily lives. The secret: to elicit a meaningful response in the person who requires healing.

  My approach is based on almost forty years of seeing patients as a mainstream family doctor, as a trained scientist, and as an explorer of many medical systems. I discovered how healing happens through my work with patients, as director of the Office of Alternative Medicine at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and as a research scientist at the World Health Organization (WHO), Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, and Samueli Institute.

  In this book, I’m going to give you a simple, systematic approach to real healing. Drawing on the most rigorous scientific evidence available as well as wisdom from ancient healing traditions, I will show you that:

  • Only 20% of healing comes from the “treatment agent” that the doctor applies to you—whether that is surgery, drugs, acupuncture needles, herbs and supplements, diet, or anything else external to you.

  • A full 80% of healing comes from constructing a meaningful treatment response, unique to you, which is internal and highly personal, using simple principles and components.

  • You can activate your own inherent healing processes and get your physician and others on board to help accelerate your healing journey, making any approach more effective, safer, and less expensive. And these processes can prevent the majority of chronic diseases in the future.

  I am not arguing, as some others do, that you can simply think yourself into healing. And I am well aware that understanding what stimulates healing or prevents disease will not fix a broken bone, cure cancer, or stop a heart attack. However, the top ten reasons for seeing a doctor, according to a study by the Mayo Clinic, include pain (especially back pain), fatigue, cognitive dysfunction, hypertension, diabetes, obesity, chronic heart or lung problems, or brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, or depression. Almost all of these conditions accelerate and increase as we age, so even if you feel healthy now, chances are if you live long enough, you will get more than one of these conditions, unless you seek out ways to prevent them.

  If you understand how healing really works for the most common chronic conditions, you can take greater control of your own recovery, increase the likelihood that any specific treatment will be effective, prevent many of the diseases of aging, and radically reduce your dependence on the medical industry. How Healing Works provides a way for merging curing and healing—producing true integrative health. Now I invite you to travel with me to see how I discovered this.

  CHAPTER 1

  The Paradox of Healing

  What we think heals often doesn’t, but almost anything can heal.

  Most of what we think produces health actually does not. But there is an inherent healing capacity within us all that, when properly released, can produce remarkable recovery, health, and happiness. The healing process is understood and applied in many wisdom traditions and by wise physicians today, but has been obscured by modern medicine’s obsession with small parts, and the technologies, techniques, and chemicals that manipulate them. While many of these technologies are extremely valuable, this hyperfocus and the economic rewards driving them has largely squeezed out the essence of what medicine is all about—how to guide a person to healing, wholeness, and well-being.

  Let’s take a closer look at how we heal.

  HIEN

  We were miles into the jungle, and my best buddy, Hien, was injured. I was scared. How would we get him out? Although we spoke hardly a word of each other’s language—his, Vietnamese, and mine, English—our communication was clear. How would he get back? Would he die out here? There was a war going on, wasn’t there? Hien’s ankle was markedly swollen. Large amounts of blood collected under the skin. He could barely stand, much less walk on it. Maybe I c
ould run out of the jungle, find my dad, and see if he could call in one of those American military helicopters. I tried to say that to Hien’s father, who was the scout master, but he looked unconcerned. We would camp there that night, he said in Vietnamese, and continue hiking in the morning. Then he turned to me and said in broken English, “Hien be okay, Wen. No worry.” But I didn’t see how he would be okay.

  Hien and I were both nine years old, and I was his only American friend, which was not surprising, given that I was the only nine-year-old American boy in Nha Trang, Vietnam, in early 1964. My father was a chaplain in the military, assigned to serve the spiritual needs of American service men and women in Vietnam. At the time, America was not engaged in active combat, and military advisors could bring families there. My father had asked us to come. So, with four kids, ages two to twelve, in tow, my mother packed us up and we moved to Nha Trang, a lovely coastal village in the center of the country. We lived near the beach, in a four-bedroom French “villa,” on a fenced-off half-acre lot complete with biting red ants, large gecko lizards often found in the house, and pigs running through the yard. The weather was hot. My mother was occupied with volunteer activities and taking care of my two younger siblings; my older brother was off at boarding school. I was largely free to roam the town. “Just be back before dark,” my mom would instruct. Trust and faith seemed to be part of both my parents’ natures. A bicycle allowed me to get around the town at will to explore. My father spent most of the week ministering to soldiers in far-off posts and would return on weekends to execute his church duties, visit people in the hospital, and hold services on the base.

  I met Hien at the Vietnamese school run by French missionaries that we attended every morning. We became friends while playing marbles. He was a great long-range shooter, and I was good close-up, so when we played team marbles on the playground, we were tough to beat. We won a lot of trading cards—the marble game betting currency of the schoolchildren. After Vietnamese school, I rode my bike across town to do Calvert tutoring lessons in order to keep up with American schools back home. One day while en route, I saw Hien going into a building with his great-grandmother. She was clearly ill, being carried in by her family. Curious, I rode my bike around the back and climbed up a short stone wall to see what was inside. It was a Vietnamese hospital, staffed with traditional practitioners and lots of sick patients, many of them lying outside in the yard.

  This traditional Vietnamese hospital was fascinating. It was not at all like the American military hospital a few miles away, with its clean sheets, IVs, and electronic monitors. In the American hospital, nurses and doctors in white uniforms attended to patients, clergy visited on Saturdays, and a few volunteers—like my mother—would open mail and give back massages. Otherwise, the patients were left alone. In the Vietnamese hospital, however, most patients were cared for by their families. Families brought food, cleaned them, and administered herbal medicines, applied hot and cold packs, and gave other types of treatments. There were always people around the patients. The traditional doctors used mostly acupuncture and herbs—and cupping and moxa, a curious treatment in which an herb was burned while resting on an acupuncture point, and then was knocked off before actually burning the patient. The contrast in resources to the American hospital—but more important, to their approaches—was startling. I spent hours looking over the wall, watching people come and go, wondering what medical conditions they had and what the doctors and families were doing.

  One day I saw Hien and his family with his great-grandmother. Like many other patients who were outside because there weren’t enough beds inside the Vietnamese hospital, Hien’s grandmother was lying on a mat on the hard ground—weak, frail, and near death’s door. My friend was dutifully taking care of her, bringing her soup and feeding it to her one spoonful at a time, and cleaning her up when she had accidents. Despite her weakness, she would lift her head periodically and smile, and they would converse in Vietnamese. The doctors would come out, put needles in different parts of her body, do curious twisting motions with her legs and arms, and occasionally place a poultice of herbal concoctions on her abdomen or forehead. The family was constantly there, with Hien’s mother coming for long periods to take care of her. Hien’s great-grandmother seemed quite happy and comfortable. One day I rode my bike down and climbed up to look over the wall, and they were gone. I learned later that she had died peacefully, her family around her.

  Hien and I joined a Boy Scouts troop, and that’s how we ended up together on that backpacking trip when he sprained his ankle. Again, it looked pretty bad to me, very swollen and with blood under the skin just below the leg bone. He couldn’t walk on it, and I figured we would have to carry him out the next day. I had brought along a small first aid kit I’d gotten from the American hospital; the treatments for a sprained ankle consisted of tape, Ace bandages, and some aspirin. But that evening, Hien’s father pulled out a powder of green herbs and mixed it with water into a paste. He applied the paste to Hien’s ankle and put two acupuncture needles in his leg above the sprain. He removed the needles after one hour and left the poultice on overnight. The next day, Hien’s ankle was almost normal again, and we resumed the hike. He seemed to have no pain.

  How had this happened? At age nine, I had not yet thought of becoming a doctor, but I wondered how these two different approaches to healing—the low-tech acupuncture/herbal/family care approach from traditional Vietnamese practices on the one hand, and the high-tech surgery/drugs/professionals approach of the Americans—could both work. I had seen American medicine work, but now I had seen a completely different system bring comfort to a terminally ill great-grandmother as she died, and also rapidly resolve an ankle sprain without aspirin, ice, or an Ace bandage. How could healing be happening with two such completely different approaches? Later in life, I had pretty much forgotten Hien and his great-grandmother. During medical school, I was taught that those acupuncture needles and herbs were ineffective and unscientific. Modern approaches were considered better—more effective, safer, and faster. I learned to rely on “gold standard” science, especially evidence from randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trials. I threw myself fully into modern medicine and science, determined to use the most rigorous evidence to separate what worked from what didn’t.

  Then Norma came along.

  NORMA

  “You are such a sweet boy,” Norma would say at the start of every visit. “You are the best doctor ever.” I blushed. She knew how to handle me. Norma was seventy-nine, with multiple chronic health problems. She loved having a family doctor—a “one-stop shop,” she said—to know her and take care of most of her ills. The one problem that affected her most was her osteoarthritis, the joint disease that now impacts one in every five American adults and more than half of those her age. She didn’t complain about the pain. What bothered her most was her decreasing ability to volunteer at the hospital. This was one of the greatest sources of joy and meaning in her life. I would see her frequently in the hospital halls, pushing around the free-book cart for patients and guests. She got to know the regular visitors who were the most chronically ill and brought them specific books she thought they would like. The arthritis mostly affected her hands and knees, which made it difficult to handle the books and hand them out.

  Norma came to see me often and loved to have me “practice” on her, but all I had to offer her were painkillers and recommendations for heat and stretching. Those didn’t help much, and her disease progressed. Her volunteer visits declined and she became sad. Then I read about something that might help—niacinamide, a form of vitamin B3. I had found an old book about it in my medical school’s discard pile. It was written by a doctor named William Kaufman and published in 1949. Dr. Kaufman had given niacinamide in high doses to thousands of patients with arthritis over long periods of time. What was unusual for a doctor in private practice was that he had carefully measured and documented the pain, strength, and range of motion in every patient who took it
. He reported that the patients’ pain diminished and their strength, range of motion, and moods improved considerably and steadily when taking niacinamide. It seemed perfect for Norma. The one problem was that niacinamide had never been tested scientifically—in a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial. It did not have the kind of evidence I needed to prescribe or recommend it. So I decided to do such a study myself with Norma and arthritis patients like her.

  When I opened enrollment for the study, Norma joined immediately and was an enthusiastic participant. She did all the baseline measurements and agreed to be randomly assigned to get either niacinamide or an identical-looking placebo pill. Neither she nor I would know which one she was getting until after the study was completed. She started her treatment, which involved taking two pills, three times a day. Within a week and then continuing for the three months of the study, she and her arthritis got steadily better in all ways. She began telling everyone that they should sign up for the study; she became my best unofficial recruiter. Soon she stopped using her cane, resumed her daily volunteer book rounds at the hospital, and reported better mood and sleep. Others observed that her normally stiff muscles moved more easily. Her daughter came in at one visit to personally thank me for helping her mother. Norma was smiling more, she said. She was happy. And I was happy. I had found a cure for arthritis! I would be famous! Or so I thought.

  When the study was over, I broke the blinding code to find out what she was taking—niacinamide or the placebo pill. Norma had been taking the placebo pill. I was stunned! I thought something was wrong with the label made by the pharmacologist. I checked and double-checked the shipping labels, randomization codes, and the pharmacist’s process for dispensing the pills. Nothing was wrong. Norma had gotten remarkably better, perhaps 80% overall, as she took a completely inert pill.