The science of healing and the miraculous prescription of faith

A doctor is not simply a practitioner who heals the body. He is as much a healer of the mind of a person who’s tired of an ailment, is tottering on the brink of hopelessness, and has come to him in good faith. A good physician is one who successfully treats a person with his understanding of the science of medicine. A great physician is one who makes the practice of medicine into an art by bringing together his study of the science along with the individual’s own healing capacity and utilises the faith he reposes in him as a catalyst to make the cure complete, and holistic.

Life is both science and art. There is a distinct and detailed methodology which is inbuilt and there is a way in which you live. Brain, which is at the centre of our lives and steers it through the entire course of our existence, is also a science and an art. Similarly, the practice of medicine is both science and an art.

There are three components to healing. One is the medicine, second is the individual’s own healing capacity, and the third, is beyond comprehension, the one we shall be addressing as faith healing. The first one is obvious reference to a formal training in the science of medicine and its application in curing an ailing human body.

It is scientifically substantiated that every individual has about 25-30% capacity to heal as a natural process. We term this as self-healing in the common parlance. As natural and simple as it seems, there’s a science behind how this happens, or how one heals — what changes take place at the level of the chromosome, among other workings that lead to the body attempting to heal itself. For example, if you suffer a cut, nature heals it on its own. The body recovers from a minor fever or temperature by itself.

The third component, and by far the most underrated, is faith healing or the placebo effect that impacts a person’s recovery from an injury or ailment. Placebo, according to Oxford, refers to beneficial effect produced by a placebo drug or treatment, which cannot be attributed to the properties of the placebo itself, and must therefore be due to the patient's belief in that treatment. Many visiting patients often tell us the moment they enter the chamber that they already feel better and believe they have healed. It has happened to most of us. When you leave home, you’re sick and by the time you reach the doctor, you feel you’re fine, even without having taken a single dose of medicine.

It’s the same kind of faith that manifests itself when you are visiting a religious place like the Vaishno Devi shrine, or any temple, or a place of worship. You get this overpowering sense that I will be benefitted. I feel good. That’s your faith expressing itself when it connects with some place or some one, however, intangible it might seem or come across as.

The art is using this science which you are trained in and the kind of faith which you generate, which includes your communication skill, your knowledge base, and your ability to deduce a line of treatment that would start the healing process. The art is to take that 25-30% of the individual’s own healing capacity, and the placebo effect and integrating them with the science of medicine.

I can tell from experience doctors who generate this faith and use it to further their treatment of an ailment pull off the seemingly impossible while being lavished with epithets such as “messenger of god”, “god in human incarnation” and other superhuman references that dwell on the miracle of a healing that was unexpected in the first place.

An example will illustrate what I’m trying to underline here. I received a patient who had come in from outside Rajasthan. She was a middle-aged woman and healthy in her disposition. It was only after she removed her head scarf that her ailment manifested itself in full view. She had only a handful of hair strands left on her scalp. You could have counted them on your fingertips and you wouldn’t have run out of fingers.

She had been plucking off her hair for years now and couldn’t resist the urge to manually pull them off her scalp. She spoke to me about her condition and how she has seen doctors across India but couldn’t end the painful obsession that had resulted in a balding scalp. It took me one sitting with her to briefly understand what was affecting her. She was a clinical case of an Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. I simply chose to trace back the observation to that part of the brain where the anomaly had set in triggering the compulsive response and prescribed her medication which would suppress that neural trigger.

On her next visit, she showed off hair on her scalp. There was 25-30 per cent cover compared to her first visit. She was visibly moved and addressed me as an incarnation of Lord Krishna before leaving for her home. Looking back, her cure was simply a generic suppressant and mostly faith-healing.

Integrating that science and art is ultimately what we are: one of the components in the healing of the human being.