The Variability of Disease

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In this book we would hope to avoid slobbering over the slippers of faith healing and present the subject fairly. This entails telling a few truths about the nature of disease. Anyone who would advocate the use of faith healing or a visit to a shrine should consider the following points carefully.

With every disease that has a fatal outcome, there are some patients who fare better than the average. For example, in one study, 2 per cent of patients with widespread liver metastases from colorectal cancer survived for five years. These survivors could not ascribe their good fortune to effective treatment, for none was available to them. Instead they demonstrate the natural variability of disease.

In many diseases, such as cancer and multiple sclerosis, a patient's progress follows an oscillating route but a route that is generally moving downwards. Many patients will find that their condition suddenly alleviates and plateaus for a time, even although the general trend is downwards.

Many doctors and healing ers in contact with the sufferer will take the credit for this apparent return to health, playing on the ignorance of the sufferer. Yet it is a rudimentary of logic that because C follows B, we cannot therefore say that B caused C. B here, of course, is the visit to the healer or conventional doctor and C the remission of the illness. All that has happened is a plateauing stage in a downward spiral. The later deterioration to a condition worse than before is frequently out of the public eye and conveniently disregarded.

The respected American cancer researcher Emil J Freireich codified this phenomenon into the 'Freireich Experimental Plan', which demonstrated that any treatment administered to an illness could be proved to have been effective. Neurotic patients can often experience rapid fluctuations in the progress of their illness.

Unexpected improvements can and do occur over a given length of time, and it is such an event that problematizes the work of the healer. This phenomenon is usually known as 'spontaneous remission'. Clearly, a cold will eventually go away no matter what you do, even if you do nothing at all.

Most visitors to a faith healer will be at their lowest ebb. For them the only way is up-and although not to deny the therapeutic value of the healer, it is likely that in cases where patients enjoyed a sudden improvement, they were on an upward surge that would have happened anyway.

Faith healers also have the dice loaded in their favour because the majority of people who will come to them for treatment will be fairly well educated when it comes to medicine, at least educated enough to be aware of the possibilities of healing and complementary therapy. What occurs is a form of medicinal natural selection; extremely disturbed patients, such as sexual deviants and alcoholics, will probably be unaware of the potential of complementary therapy or not regard it as a possible line of enquiry.

Another problem is that the healer has a vested interest in declaring his or her treatment a success and may assess events accordingly. The patients of faith healers themselves are scarcely any more objective. The typical account of a healing will run something like this:

I believe with all my heart that on February 19-1 witnessed a healing, a healing that cannot be adequately explained by the normal dictates of medicine. My daughter Sally has been rescued from the jaws of death, and I wish to proclaim God's work through your journal.

My daughter was born with a closed pylorus, the sphincter that connects the stomach with the bowel. Consequently Sally could not retain even a thimbleful of milk or a Farley's rusk, and without such nourishment, the child grew alarmingly weak, and her body grew smaller and smaller until everyone concluded that she was on the verge of death. We first sent for a priest, who bent down and kneeled at the foot of the bed. We earnestly hoped for some upturn, and watched her day and night. Yet it seemed our prayers were not answered and we began to fear the worst.

One evening, during this critical period, a friend of the family happened to mention that she was friendly with a member of the local Christian Science network. Having been ushered into the house in an atmosphere of hope and trepidation, the practitioner confidently went to work. By morning Sally was able to take a full glass of milk and retain it. We thank the Lord for saving our daughter, and we are now firm Christian Scientists.

A passage like this inevitably plays to our emotions, indeed, it is an appeal to our emotionalism. It would be a hard heart indeed that queried the truth of it. There is probably something very deep within human beings that wants to believe in stories like this and that healers can make a difference to the sorry lot of ordinary men and women who are unfortunate enough to be plagued by illness. The truth is that humankind, to all intents and purposes, is powerless against the onslaught of disease. This is a truth that few of us would not find hard to stomach.

Disease is still mysterious to us. One day, a cell becomes cancerous. It begins to eat away at the other cells that surround it, forming a colony. This colony is detected and then destroyed, but colonies of the same cancer begin to appear elsewhere. Still no one can adequately explain why this happens.

Another prime example of the enigma of illness is disseminated sclerosis, a disease in which degeneration occurs in the myelin sheath of the nerve fibres of the brain and spinal cord. The cause of the disease is unknown, and there is no known cure. Death usually results from pneumonia or chronic urinary infection. The tendency to spontaneous improvement is a remarkable feature of the early stages of the disease and can make diagnosis and acceptance of diagnosis and supposed cure problematic for all concerned. The function of the doctor is to administer the palliative use of drugs, the inverse of the homeopathic art of healing.