5 Ways Radical Cure REALLY Happens

LISSA RANKIN, MD
By the time I was 33 years old, I was taking seven prescription medications
for a whole host of chronic health conditions, and my doctors told me I
would be dependent on those medications forever. As a conventional
medical doctor who attended prestigious universities and was raised by a
physician father in a very closed-minded household of rationalist scientists, I
believed what my very smart, competent, caring doctors told me.

Then my life fell apart in 2006 during the “Perfect Storm” that thrust me out
of my medical practice and onto the spiritual path. Before this massive
transformation, (which I describe in detail in my book The Anatomy of a
Calling), I had been quite arrogant and righteous in my certainty that my
expertise as a doctor meant that I knew everything there is to know about
what makes a human body sick, what cures the body, and what lies
suspiciously in the realm of “hocus-pocus” charlatan mumbo jumbo.

I have to laugh now at how little I knew then. After 12 years of medical
education and 10 years of practicing medicine inside the conventional
system, a series of eye-opening epiphanies shattered my very rigid
worldview. As a doctor, I felt like there was something missing in the way I
had been taught to practice, but I was not schooled in mind-body medicine,
psychoneuroimmunology, energy healing, shamanism, or any of the other
new and ancient modalities that patients often seek out but doctors rarely
understand. All I knew was that I had opened a small medical practice to try
to find a way to practice the kind of truly holistic medicine that fulfilled my
spiritual calling as a healer and allowed me to practice with more integrity,
soul satisfaction, and intimacy than when I was expected to see 40 patients a
day.

My patient population in Marin County, California was unusual, especially

compared to the inner city populations I had served in Chicago or the
immigrants who had illegally crossed the border into my San Diego practice.
These privileged people who showed up at my practice were health nuts at
the end of their rope. They had received their medical care at Stanford and
UCSF, receiving the top-notch care Western medicine has to offer. Plus, they
had seen their naturopath, their acupuncturist, and their nutritionist. They ate
their vegan diets, did their green juice cleanses, took dozens of supplements,
received expensive IV therapies, worked out with personal trainers, practiced
yoga, and meditated. So why were they some of the sickest people I’d ever
seen in my life?

I felt helpless with the tools I had been given. What else could I offer these
suffering patients? I didn’t know, but the passionate healer in me was
determined to find out. I set out to make my practice a place where our
secret motto was “We practice love, with a little bit of medicine on the side.”
As hokey as it might sound, my intuitive hit was that love heals, and that

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perhaps, if patients felt safe and nurtured, we might be able to get to the
core of what was making them sick and why nothing was helping them get
better.

With as much genuine care and tenderness as I could pour out from my open
heart, I started asking them penetrating questions like:

• What is your body saying NO to?

• Are getting enough love, touch, and support from your tribe?
• Do you feel like you’re in touch with your most fulfilling life’s purpose?
• Are you prioritizing your deepest passions?
• What would it take to live a life your body would love?

And the mother lode question . . .

• What does your body need in order to heal?

My patients would often cry when I asked these questions. I would hold them
with love and listen to how quickly they would reveal to me what they
sensed was at the root of what might be predisposing them to illness. They
would tell me things like:

• I need to leave my toxic marriage.

• I have to quit my soul-sucking job.
• I’m lonely and wearing masks and haven’t found the tribe where I feel
safe to be myself.
• I need to finally go to art school.
• I need to come out of the closet and admit that I’m gay.
• I need to get my abusive mother out of my house.

Right after they’d say these things, they’d contract and say, “Wait! But I can’t
do that!” And they’d go on to give me a list of their fears—the whole story of
why they couldn’t do what their intuition guided them to do. But some of
them dared to follow through on what they had shared with me. As these
brave souls transformed their lives, I started witnessing patients who were
experiencing “spontaneous remissions” from “incurable” illnesses, right in
front of my surprised and skeptical but awe-struck eyes.

I couldn’t deny what I was witnessing. What was happening? How was it
happening? It wasn’t just that their symptoms were going away. It’s that their
heart failure was reversing itself on echocardiogram, and their tumors were
disappearing on MRI, and their blood tests were normalizing. This wasn’t just
in their heads. The cure was happening in their bodies.

I came to realize how ignorant I was about how radical cure really happens,

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 and I got wildly curious and passionate in my inquiry about how we as health
care providers and patients can optimize the results of any attempt at cure.
This inquiry led me down a rabbit hole that became my book Mind Over
Medicine , this TEDx talk, and this one, and two PBS specials.

I’m still very much a student on this journey of discovery. Since 2 011, I’ve
been researching a book I haven’t published yet—Sacred Medicine —for which
I’ve been studying the spiritual medicines of the world’s wisdom traditions.
This has led me to study with shamans in Peru and Colombia, Balinese
healers, Qigong masters from China, swamis from the Hindu tradition,
Hawaiian kahunas, Christian faith healers, and energy healers from the U.S.
and Europe. The further I go down the rabbit hole, the less I know.

I’m off all seven drugs now after embarking upon a radical Whole Health
healing journey that asked me to examine the areas of my life where my life
was out of alignment with my deepest truth. I had to make some dramatic
life changes, like leaving my job in the hospital where I felt like I was violating
my soul’s integrity, following my dream of becoming a full time writer,
interrupting a lifelong pattern of codependent relationships, dismantling my
“savior complex,” and moving out of the city and into a sanctuary in nature,
where I regularly make offerings of sacred reciprocity to the ocean, lakes,
redwood forests, and mountains.

I feel grateful that my physical and mental health issues caused me to feel
enough pain that I was motivated to do the deep healing work that landed
me smack dab in the center of a life my body loves. In 2 013, I founded the
Whole Health Medicine Institute, where I work with dozens of expert faculty,
training physicians and other health care providers how to facilitate this kind
of Whole Health journey for people whose illnesses have not responded
optimally to what conventional medicine (or functional/integrative medicine)
has to offer.

Here are a few highlights I’ve synthesized from the many healing traditions
I’ve studied since I began this journey of discovery in 2006 about what really
predisposes us to illness, what truly facilitates healing, and what can make
cure possible, even when someone has been labeled “incurable.”

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1. What conventional Western medicine offers is
fundamental, but it may not be enough.

I grew up dogmatically believing everything I was taught in medical school,

while scoffing at everything “woo woo” or unscientific. However, experience
led me to recognize that while Western medicine is a blessing and can
produce miraculous results when it comes to acute trauma care, advanced
organ and joint replacement surgeries, life saving interventions during heart
attacks, strokes, and infectious diseases, and other emergency treatments,
Western medicine tends to produce disappointing results when it comes to
effective treatment of chronic disease and follow up care after acute
emergencies.

Although some diseases and injuries could be permanently cured with the
medical expertise I learned as a doctor, I had to humble myself and let go of
believing that my mastery in conventional medicine was enough to result in
long-term cure for many debilitating health conditions. This willingness to be
curious and open to what else might help patients get the results they desire
fueled my inquiry into what was missing from the allopathic medicine
approach and turned me on to much of what we gloss over in our patients.

As patients and physicians, we must be willing to get curious about whether

we’re missing something when we focus exclusively on a disease-
management system. If we’re willing to be in inquiry about why illness or
injury may have visited a patient, we may open portals of awareness that can
lead to seemingly miraculous outcomes.

2. Unhealed trauma lies at the root of many difficult-to

treat health conditions.

There is a substantial amount of scientific data linking trauma with physical

disease. This is not to suggest “it’s all in your head.” It’s absolutely in your
body! It’s simply that the physiological changes that occur in the body as the
result of unhealed trauma and its associated stress, anxiety, and depression
translates into conditions in the body that make you susceptible to physical
ailments by down-regulating the body’s natural self-healing mechanisms. (If
you like to nerd out on science, the physiological explanation for how trauma
leads to stress responses that predispose you to disease and interfere with
cure is all spelled out in my book Mind Over Medicine.)

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In a landmark 1990 study of 17,421 patients, Kaiser Permanente and the U.S.
Centers for Disease Control (CDC) collaborated on the Adverse Childhood
Experiences (ACE) Study, which has resulted in over 50 peer-reviewed
scientific articles. Patients were interviewed to determine whether they had
experienced any of ten traumatizing events in childhood:

• Physical abuse
• Sexual abuse
• Emotional abuse
• Physical neglect
• Emotional neglect
• Mother treated violently
• Household substance abuse
• Household mental illness
• Parental separation or divorce
• Incarcerated household member

The study revealed that traumatizing childhood events are commonplace.

Two-thirds of individuals reported at least one traumatizing childhood event.
40% of the patients reported two or more traumatizing childhood events,
and 12.5% reported four or more. These results were then correlated with the
physical health of the interviewed patients, and researchers discovered a
dose-response. Traumatizing events in childhood were linked to adult
disease in all categories—cancer, heart disease, chronic pain, autoimmune
diseases, bone fractures, high blood pressure, obesity, diabetes, depression,
smoking, and suicide. The average age of patients in this study was 57 years
old, which means that childhood trauma can have a delayed effect on the
body, making it entirely possible that something that happened 50 years ago
may be predisposing you to illness in the here and now. The more Adverse
Childhood Events (ACE’s) an individual reported, the sicker and more
resistant to treatment they were.

This study didn’t even take into account the more subtle traumas everyone
experiences. Psychologist Dawson Church, PhD defines a traumatizing event
as something that is:

• Perceived as a threat to the person’s physical survival

• Overwhelms their coping capacity, producing a sense of powerlessness
• Produces a feeling of isolation and aloneness
• Violates their expectations

By this definition, all of us have experienced countless traumas over the

course of our lives, and if those traumatic energies are not cleared from the
body and the energy system, they can give rise to disease and interfere with
even the highest quality Western medicine care or functional and integrative

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medicine interventions.

Nobody wants to hear this. We want the magic bullet, something that makes
us feel better without demanding that we dive headlong into the painful
places from the past where our wounds got lodged in our bodies. But as
much as this is not what many people want to hear, research shows that it’s
true.

The good news is that trauma can be cured. Newer advances in psychology,
such as the energy psychology technique Advanced Integrative Therapy
(AIT), as well as advanced trauma healing modalities like Internal Family
Systems (IFS), Somatic Experiencing, and EMDR are showing that treating
the underlying traumas can actually facilitate physical cure, especially when
married with other health interventions. Since many of us bloom in the dark,
we just have to be brave enough to go into these sometimes dark places so
healing can happen and . . . if we’re blessed, cure has the chance to follow
suit.

3. Permanent cure can only happen when stress

responses in the nervous system are replaced with
relaxation responses.

Even if a Western medicine intervention or a diet/exercise/functional/

integrative/naturopathic medicine plan leads to initial results, long term
remission from symptoms and disease requires ongoing support from the
body’s self-repair strategies. The body is naturally equipped to kill cancer
cells, fight infections, repair broken proteins, combat the aging process, and
restore health when things get out of balance. But these self-healing
mechanisms only function when the nervous system is in the homeostatic,
repair-inducing parasympathetic nervous system. Yet we live in a stressed
out culture! If the body is in the “fight or flight” sympathetic state of the
nervous system all the time, the body does not prioritize repair and
restoration because it thinks you’re getting chased by a tiger 24/7!

This means that it’s hard to get and stay healthy if you’re selling your soul for
a paycheck at work, stuck in a toxic relationship where you’re not getting
your emotional needs met, feeling lonely without connection to your Soul
Tribe, ignoring your self care needs, depleting yourself in order to over
function and care give everyone but yourself, and neglecting your passions,
dreams, and pleasure-inducing connections, pursuits, and activities. Every
truly healing (and potentially curing) Prescription might benefit from diet,
exercise, supplements, and appropriate conventional or functional/integrative

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medicine interventions. But true Whole Health will rarely be
restored without addressing healthy relationships, a deep sense of meaning
and fulfillment in your work and life purpose, a healthy nature-based living
environment, a healthy relationship to finances and scarcity, healthy
sexuality, open flow in your creative life, a healthy mind and an open heart
full of nourishing thoughts, beliefs, and feelings.

In the 6 Steps to Healing Yourself that I spell out in Mind Over Medicine , Step
4 helps patients work through the evidence-based wellness model I
developed “The Whole Health Cairn.” This model gives you a visual
framework to examine how healthy and in balance you are in the various
aspects of your life. (If you’re curious about all the scientific data that
proves that every “stone” in the Whole Health Cairn is directly linked to the
health of the body, all the cool geek science is referenced in Mind
Over Medicine.)

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I know it can be overwhelming to think that you need to pay attention to all
of these facets of Whole Health in order to optimally make your body ripe for
miracles. It would be so much easier if a simple pill, supplement, or
acupuncture treatment could fix what ails you. Certainly, drugs and surgeries
are sometimes the miracle treatments the body needs. And preventive
interventions like healthy nutrition, a vibrant exercise program, balancing
supplements, and alternative medicine treatments may help the body heal
itself. But if you really want to be both healed and cured, stepping back and
being in inquiry about the health of all facets of your life can help you
optimize your chance of living a healthy, vital life without disability or chronic
illness until you’re 100!

You can do this . . . Many people have. Radical remission and permanent cure,
while not guaranteed, are absolutely possible. We get emails every day from
people who have experienced such miracles from using the 6 Steps to
Healing Yourself from Mind Over Medicine. You could be the one
experiencing the next miracle . . .

4. You can be cured without being healed, and you can be

healed without being cured.

There's a difference between healing and curing. By definition, to be “cured”

means to be free of disease. To be “healed” literally means “to become whole
—” to repair inner fractures, to heal trauma, to restore emotional harmony,
and to attain inner peace, which can happen even in the presence of disease,
even when someone is dying. While conventional medical treatments may
result in cure, for lasting results, healing must accompany any attempts at
cure. Otherwise, disease is likely to recur, whether as recurrence of the same
disease or as a new health challenge.

Yes, sometimes the body needs emergency repair in order to save a life,
organ, or limb. But if we want both healing and curing, we must consider a
more complete Whole Health approach to medicine that also includes mind,
psyche, soul, spirit, and energy medicine. In a perfect world, disease is both
healed and cured. You alter any biochemical imbalances, treat cancer or
infection, repair any life-threatening organ damage or systemic disruptions,
treat trauma, heal your broken heart, connect with your spirit, shine your
light, heal your childhood wounds, and disease disappears.

But that doesn't always happen so effortlessly. Why doesn’t everyone who
embarks upon a healing journey get to celebrate a miraculous cure? The
honest answer is “I don’t know.” I’m researching a future book
Sacred Medicine because that question led me down a rabbit hole that

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seems to have no end. Perhaps some people’s destiny is to learn to thrive in
the presence of illness, to show others that you can be healed without being
cured. I won’t pretend to know how the mysterious world works, but some
healers I’ve interviewed insist that it’s karma from this life or a past life or
even that we’re paying a generational debt from our ancestors who inflicted
trauma. Perhaps it’s that some sick people are actually getting secondary
gain from staying ill, and even though they say they wish to be cured, some
deeper part wants the disability check or the attention from loved ones or
the excuse not to risk failure by following a dream they might feel pressured
to follow if the illness went away. Perhaps we are more powerful than we
realize, and if we unconsciously wish to stay sick more than we yearn to be
disease-free, we co-create ongoing illness as powerfully as we might be able
to co-create cure. Perhaps bad things simply happen to good people, and it’s
an invitation to thrive anyway.

I don’t know why some people are cured from “incurable” diseases and
others aren’t. I get very triggered when people blame sick people, as if
they’re somehow not doing their inner work deeply enough or the illness is
some kind of marker of spiritual immaturity or they’re just not practicing “the
law of attraction” with enough effort. This righteous, arrogant view that casts
already suffering humans as somehow deficient offers the opposite of what
healing requires—compassion, love, humility, and tenderness as we enter into
a mysterious journey of discovery.

Why do some people get cured and others don’t? I don’t know. But to those
of you who may feel like you’ve tried everything and you’re still suffering, we
carry you in our collective One heart, and we’re sorry you’re hurting. May we
offer you a virtual hug. (((((((((((((((Gorgeous, precious YOU.)))))))))))))))

5. The best doctor lives inside of you.

Inside us all lays an untouchable spark of grace, like a pilot light that may
grow dim but never flickers out. This soulful presence that I like to call your
“Inner Pilot Light” knows exactly what is needed and can make medical
decisions (in addition to other critical life decisions) far better than your
rational mind can. When you make it a practice to tune in and connect with
this Divine spark in you, you have access to a wise ally who can help you
navigate your healing journey, as well as helping you make wise choices as a
healer. Getting in touch with this inner doctor is a journey and requires
practice, but the tools necessary to become intimate with this inner doctor
are within your reach. To learn more about how to connect with your Inner
Pilot Light, sign up for the free Daily Flame love letters from your Inner Pilot
Light.

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When you have access to this inner source of wisdom, decision-making,
spiritual guidance, psychological intervention, and nurturing, compassionate,
unconditionally loving care, you are fully equipped to handle whatever arises
in your physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, or energetic body. Not only is
your Inner Pilot Light your best doctor; it’s also the most efficient,
trustworthy, and cost-effective therapist, mentor, and spiritual guide you’ll
ever find! When this inner connection is re-Sourced, you will feel less
confused about how to proceed in your journey as a patient or a healer. In
dozens of different ways that your Inner Pilot Light communicates, you’ll
simply receive instructions—what treatment to follow, how to align with your
life’s true purpose, which relationships are medicine in your life and which are
poison, tips for easing any financial worries, and how to make yourself a
vessel for Divine Will, serving from your open heart in a world desperately in
need of your love.

To become more intimate with others who are yearning to connect with their
Inner Pilot Lights and be led by this inner wisdom on their physical or
emotional healing journeys, join our Soul Tribe of practice, purpose,
and belonging here.

If you know others who could benefit from this point of view about Whole
Health, please join the love revolutionaries who are committed to healing
health care with me. I’d be so grateful if you’d help me recruit love
revolutionaries, inviting other patients, health care providers, healers, or
educators who share this mission to read what I’ve expressed here and join
this community of wellness warriors who yearn to being the heart and soul
back to medicine.

With deep gratitude and so much love,

Lissa Rankin, MD

Lissa Rankin, MD, New York Times bestselling author of Mind Over Medicine, The
Fear Cure, and The Anatomy of a Calling. She is a physician, speaker, founder of the
Whole Health Medicine Institute, and mystic. Passionate about what makes people
optimally healthy and what predisposes them to illness, she is on a mission to
merge science and spirituality in a way that not only facilitates the health of the
individual, but also uplifts the health of the collective. Bridging between seemingly
disparate worlds, Lissa is a connector, collaborator, curator, and amplifier,
broadcasting not only her unique visionary ideas, but also those of cutting edge
visionaries she discerns and trusts, especially in the field of her latest research into
“Sacred Medicine.” Lissa has starred in two National Public Television specials and
also leads workshops, both online and at retreat centers like Esalen and Kripalu. She
lives in the San Francisco Bay area with her daughter. She blogs at LissaRankin.com
and posts regularly on Facebook.

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