PHENOMENON MIRACLES IN MEDICINE?

WRITER: RICHARD T. BOSSHARDT, M.D., FACS // PHOTO ILLUSTRATOR: ANTHONY CASTO

Ihave been asked on more than one occasion during my career if I believe in medical miracles. To be able to answer this question, it is important to define some terms so we are talking about the same thing. A true “miracle” is not simply an outcome that is against the odds. If this were so, lottery winners could legitimately be called the beneficiaries of miracles. A true miracle is an event that transcends time, space, and the physical world in which we live and violates universally accepted physical laws. It implies the existence of a being or force that is not constrained by the physical boundaries or laws of the natural world. For simplicity, we will call this being or force God.

People can be divided into three camps: those who believe there is no God (atheists), those who believe there is (theists), and those who aren’t sure (agnostics). For the record, I am in the theist camp. Theists and agnostics at least have to allow for the possibility that God might on occasion intervene in human events. Nearly all religious writings are full of such examples, which we call miracles. Raising people from the dead, stopping time, and turning water into wine are all recorded in the Bible. Many of the miracles recorded are medical — the blind seeing, the lame walking, etc.

Medical miracles are when an outcome that would be considered physically, logically, and scientifically impossible does, in fact, occur. A common example of such a miracle is a person who is riddled with cancer and has failed all efforts at treatment “miraculously” finding out the cancer has suddenly vanished, leaving no trace. On the one hand, the outcome is so dramatic and unanticipated that labeling it a miracle is not surprising. On the other hand, there are ways to account for this without invoking a miracle. We know that our immune system is capable of successfully fending off cancer under certain circumstances. It may just be that some factor, or combination of factors, caused a sudden, overwhelming immune response that eliminated the cancer. The human body is amazingly complex, and we may never know all there is to know about how it functions. Then again, who is to say that God couldn’t act in such a manner that the immune system would serve as the agent?

Faith healers regularly fill large auditoriums for healing services and scores of persons claim miraculous healings of various illnesses. Proof of a true healing is problematic. In almost every instance, an alternate explanation can be offered. Skeptics often wonder why so many of the healed illnesses present as non-specific symptoms that are hard to measure, such as pain, weakness, fatigue, dizziness, feeling poorly, etc., and not something more dramatic, such as, say, growing an arm or a leg from an amputation stump. I think most people would consider that as unequivocal proof of a miracle.

Many years ago, William Nolan, M.D., author of the best-seller The Making of a Surgeon, wrote another book, Healing: A Doctor in Search of a Miracle. A Catholic, he chronicled his search for proof of healing miracles. He attended healing services by famous faith healer Katherine Kuhlman in the U.S. and traveled as far as the Philippines to view “psychic” surgery in which “surgeons,” channeling the spirits of dead physicians, reach into the body with their bare hands and pull out “tumors.” Many of these looked, to Dr. Nolan, suspiciously like chicken livers that had been palmed in a sleight-of-hand trick. He concluded that miraculous healing did not occur.

That is a shame because, although I haven’t personally witnessed one, I believe that true “miracles” do occur. I also believe they happen infrequently and are difficult to prove. I just don’t see God as a celestial magician conjuring up fancy tricks to impress mortals. I also believe that “miracles” occur every day in medicine due to the remarkable advances in medical care. D. J. Larrey, M.D., was the head of the medical corps for Napoleon’s army in the late 1700s–early 1800s. He accomplished truly astounding results given that he practiced in an era before there were antibiotics, anesthetics, or even a real understanding of the contribution of germs and viruses to illnesses. I imagine if we could pluck Larrey from his time and show him medicine today, he would declare such things as modern surgery, modern medicines, and any of the diagnostic instruments (MRI machines, CAT scans, etc. ) we take for granted as “miracles.”

If you want to talk miracles, how about the human body itself? Despite our advances in medicine, we still have only a rudimentary understanding of how our bodies function. We really don’t fully understand how our immune system can recognize a virus or bacteria that it encountered perhaps decades ago and respond to it with an overwhelming show of force to keep us healthy. How does our blood clot just when it needs to and not at random other times? What stops the clotting process so we don’t become one big clot every time we are injured? How is light that strikes our retina converted to electrical signals that go to our vision center in the brain to produce an image of a beautiful sunset? The questions we have about how things function in our bodies are endless. What is ironic is the more we learn, the more questions we come up with in a never-ending cycle of complexity.

Finally, there is that intangible but oh-so-real aspect of human life: the will to live. There are countless stories of people who had no right to continue to live but did so through the force of their will and refusal to give up, even when faced with seemingly insurmountable odds against survival. Many times, when we see such situations, the inescapable conclusion is that it was a miracle. You know what? Maybe it was.

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