OceanofPDF .comIn order to ensure the privacy of the patients mentioned in this book, their
names, circumstances, and other identifying details have been changed. Copyright © 1989, 2015 by Deepak Chopra, M.D . All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of R andom House,
a division of P enguin R andom House LLC , New Y ork. BANTAM BOOKS  and the HOUSE  colophon are registered trademarks of
Penguin R andom House LLC . Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Bantam Books, an
imprint of R andom House, a division of P enguin R andom House LLC , in 1989. ISBN 9781101884973
eBook ISBN 9780804179980
randomhousebooks.com
Book design by Jo Anne Metsch, adapted for eBook
Cover design: V ictoria Allen
Cover art: Francisco Javier Gomez Quesada
v4.1_r2
ep
OceanofPDF .comContents
Cover
Title P age
Copyright
Foreword
Introduction
Part I: The Hidden Physiology
Chapter 1: A fter the Miracle
Chapter 2: The Body Has a Mind of Its Own
Chapter 3: The Sculpture or the River? Chapter 4: Messengers from Inner Space
Chapter 5: Ghosts of Memory
Chapter 6: The Quantum Mechanical Human Body
Chapter 7: Nowhere and Everywhere
Chapter 8: Silent W itness
Chapter 9: The Mystery of the Gap
Part II: Body of Bliss
Chapter 10: In the Rishi’s W orld
Chapter 11: Birth of a Disease
Chapter 12: “ What Y ou See, Y ou Become”
Chapter 13: Body of Bliss
Chapter 14: The End of the W ar
Acknowledgments
Reading List
Bibliography
Bestsellers by Deepak ChopraAbout the Author
OceanofPDF .comWhenever the word quantum  comes  up, the word physics
follows automatically . This habit of mind made Quantum
Healing  a novel and provocati ve title in 1989, but its
author , a curious-minded endocrinologist outside  Boston,
was implying a legitimate question. If every atom and
molecule in the universe emerges from the quantum ﬁeld,
doesn’t this mean that our bodies do, too? The answer is
undoubtedly yes. In that case, we possess a quantum
mechanical body. Dr. Deepak Chopra then reasoned that
the mysteries of the human body, particularly the mystery
of healing, are inevitably immersed in the quantum ﬁeld. Very few scientists were thinking that way almost thirty
years ago. Medical schools approached the human body
essentially as a machine subdivided into the working parts
of a machine—organs, tissues, and cells. When the body
broke down through illness, something materia l was at
fault. Bacteria had entered to disrupt the mechanical
operation of an organ, or a worn-out part had failed. An
arthritic joint was consi dered similar to a tire with the
tread wearing thin. Modern scien tiﬁc medicin e goes into sophisticated  detail,
but in essence it embra ces the two basic principles that
bind all the sciences together: materialism and
reductionism. Materialism holds that there must be a
physical explanation for every phenomenon. Reductionismholds that complex problems can be broken down into
smaller component parts, wherein lie all solutions and
answers. Quantum Healing  blew the whistle on both
principles, not because they are inherently wrong, but
because they left out some extremely important things,
especially when it came to the human body . Materialism left out the mind-body connection. Mind isn’t
material. Yet our thoughts cause our bodies to move,
something we take for granted the minute we get out of
bed in the morning but which stands as a great mystery . When you break the body down into organs, tissues, and
cells, you can’t ﬁnd the slightest trace of a thought, and yet
the mind must be related to the body . How? Reductionism left out the holistic nature of the body. Trillions of cells cooperate to sustain one another , acting to
preserve overall balance and health. Up to a quadrillion
neural connections in the brain generate a microscopic
electrical storm, and yet the result is organized thought,
not a jumble of static. As skilled as medical science is at
dissecting body and brain, it has little to say about the
experience of life as a whole, yet that experience impinges
directly on who gets sick and who stays well. Deepak was not the ﬁrst to see these ﬂaws and
omissions, but Quantum Healing  was very bold in becoming
the ﬁrst book to oﬀer a path to new answers. He proposed
that quantum  physics describes an invisible domain from
which mind and body both emerge and unite. Quantum
Healing  struck a nerve by focusing on the most baﬄin g
phenomenon in medicine, spontaneous remission from
cancer . How could the most intractable of diseases, the
object of billion-dollar campaigns to ﬁnd a cure, suddenly
disappear from a patient’s body? Since oncology is a
numbers game, it was easier simply to ignore these
extraordinary cases as anomalies. But if science prides
itself on going wherever  reality leads us, such cases arewell docume nted in medical journals. They force us to
rethink the entire materi alist, reductionist model—Deepak
was willing to go there. Even today, not everyone  is willing. As a neurogeneticist,
I have  been fortunate to study the wondrous interplay of
genes and the brain. All organic processes are coded in our
DNA. Since that includes all brain processes, the mind-
body connection is directly engendered in our genes. The
same is true for healing,  another process that cannot take
place absent genetic activity . However , most geneticists
don’t think in such broad terms; our research studies are
extremely detailed and focused (my specialty is the
neurodegenerative disorder Alzheimer’s disease). The mind
is all too often left out of the equation, and as for quantum,
the word has traditionall y had no bearing on our training,
being the province of physics. Quantum Healing  looked past this long-accepted
compartmentalization, opening up genetics, along with
every other corner of physiology , to quantum thinking. I
didn’t delve into the mind-body connection when I ﬁrst
began my quest to end Alzheimer’s disease, but since it’s a
brain disorder , I discovered common ground with a broad
thinker like Deepak. After getting  excited about how our
interests and passions overlapped, we wrote a book, Super
Brain,  together . The gist of the book, based on solid
neuroscience, is that the brain is plastic, inﬂuenced by
thoughts, feelings, choices, and most important, self-
awareness. We also explored a radical possibility that
Quantum Healing  ﬁrst proposed: What if the mind is
creating the brain at the same time that the brain is
creating the mind? This was a mind-blowin g (or brain-
blowing) idea, because it ﬂew straight past the insistence
that only physical processes matter in the brain
(materialism) and that every answer lies at the level of the
neuron (reductionism).The basic research that was showing how messenger
molecules carry information from the brain to every cell in
the body was new when Quantum Healing  was published. Now our knowledge in this area is extremely sophisticated. The next frontier is the mind-gene connection. Here
Deepak and I have found the most exciting possibilities. We
are actively pursuing the beneﬁcial genetic chan ges that
occur in meditation and other contemplative practices. Long portrayed as spiritual, these are actually mind-body
techniques that speak to every cell and even deeper , to
every gene. The implications are explosive when it comes
to cutting-edge science in preventing or reversin g chronic
disorders, attacking the causes of aging, and ﬁghting
against the subtle imbal ances that lead to inﬂammation,
now the prime suspect in many disorders, including cancer . We are proposing that lifestyle choices, insofar as they
aﬀect a person’s genes, can lead to transformati on at the
level where personal evolution occurs. Genes are not the
ﬁxed, stable, immovable entities I was taught about; they
are ﬂuid and dynamic, and their activities are altered by
every experience, thought, word, and action in a person’s
life. So, why not direct your experience to inﬂuence your
genes in the most positive ways? Ground is being broken in
“self-directed biological transformation” (SDBT), our
phrase for personalized conscious evolution. (And a new
book is emerging from this concept, titled Super Genes,  to
bring SDBT into the practicalities of daily life.) Quantum Healing  didn’t set out to cure cancer or
Alzheimer’s or any other  intractable disease. It set out to
see the human body, and human existence in general,
through wiser eyes. As a scienti st I’m passionate about
genes and the brain; as a person I’m totally fascinated by
the origins of consciousness. Quantum Healing  galvanized
my intuition that these areas do not have to be separated. They belong together naturally , and once we feel securethat self-awareness is integral to the healthy workings of
the body, it will be integral to existence itself . Beyond that,
the possibilities are inﬁnite. —
Rudolph Tanzi, Ph.D ., is director of the Genetics and Aging
Research Unit and vice chair of neuro logy at
Massachusetts General Hospital. He also serves as the
Joseph P. and Rose F. Kennedy Professor of Neurology at
Harvard Medical School. OceanofPDF .comWhen ﬁrst published, Quantum Healing  was a provocative
title based on a controversial idea. The idea was that the
mind inﬂuences the body either to be sick or well. Twenty-
ﬁve years ago the mind-body connection struck most
doctors as weak science,  bad science, or not science at all. Their medica l school training taught them about  systems,
organs, tissu es, and cells—end of story . Somewhere on the
fringes lurked the placebo eﬀect, a suspicious oddity few
doctors paid attention to. Patients got better when given
sugar pills they thoug ht were drugs. Sometimes the
placebo eﬀect was just as eﬀective as the drugs. Why? Hardly anyone cared. Placebos were dismissed as
psychosomatic. In other words, they weren’t “real
medicine.” I vivid ly remember the reaction of hospital
colleagues in Boston when they discovered my newfound
interest in the mind-body connection. With a frown or a
pitying smile they asked, “Do you really believe in such a
thing?” Almost three decades later I can reply , “You don’t?”
Controversial ideas have a way of becoming main stream,
and that’s what happened to the mind-body connection. No
longer does anyone have to defend their belief in
meditation, yoga, stress reduction, anger management, and
a host of positive lifestyl e changes. These measures have
one thing in common: Better messages are being sent fromthe mind to the body. With better messages a higher state
of wellbeing is possible. No one disputes this anymore. The ﬂoodgates have opened, and today Quantum Healing
could be doubled in size by introducing just a fraction of
the new evidence supporting the mind-body connection. Medical school training is still about systems, organs,
tissues, and cells, but that’s no longer the end of the story . A new ﬁeld known as integrative medicine has sprung up
since 1989. It incorporates what used to be called
alternative medicine, along with traditional healing
modalities like Ayurveda, which played a large part in my
own journey , as this book recounts. Yet the mystery of healing is far from solved. I was
baﬄed by Chitra, the ﬁrst patient mentioned in the book,
who somehow recovered from breast cancer without
beneﬁt of conventional treatment (only to die just as
mysteriously). Such cases of spontaneous remission
continue to occur . Just this month I encountered a young
man who had struggled with stomach cancer for six years,
ﬁnally giving up on chemotherapy because  of its
debilitating side eﬀects. His cancer had metastasized throughout his body, to the
bones and liver. Given six months to live, he traveled to
India, where his family originated, and renounced the
hectic life of New York City for the peace and quiet of the
rural countryside. He took up meditation and yoga. He
became a strict vegetarian. He immersed himself in the
most traditional practices of Ayurveda, practices that have
roots going back thousands of years. As of three months
ago his scans show that he is entirely free of cancer . There are thousands of spontaneous remissions of cancer
found in Western medica l journals, and yet it’s fair to say
that they make hardly any diﬀerence in the routine practice
of oncology , not directly at least. Cancer treatment has
advanced over the past quarter century , but the path it hasfollowed—toward genetics, sharply focused drugs, and
more precise statistics—has little to do with the mind-body
connection. Instead, the inﬂuence of spontaneous remissions has
been indirect, by motiva ting research into heali ng itself . Genetics is a crucial key in cancer , and the mind can
inﬂuence genes. Literally thousands of genetic markers are
improved through meditation, for example. Inﬂammation
could be just as crucial in the onset and spread of cancer ,
and inﬂammation is stress related. Stress is a reaction that
begins in the mind, and a person’s mindset can be changed. Lifestyle choices that lead to obesity , lack of sleep, and
distorted biorhythms are being connected to cancer , and
these bad choices can be reversed. *1
In short, there’s nothing about cancer that is separate
from the mind in one way or another . This realization led
the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston to announce
the following in 2008: “Only 5–10% of all cancer cases can
be attributed to genetic defects, whereas the remaining 90–
95% have their roots in the environment and lifestyle.”*2
This represents an enormous shift in attitude. When I was
in medical school, 95 percent of cancers were considered
nonpreventable. If Quantum Healing  is to remain relevan t, a new
controversial idea is needed. What if all healing is
quantum? Then every barrier separating mind and body
would come down. Every cell would be conscious, not just
brain cells. Beyond the boundary of the skin, all of life
would be conscious, arising on a conscious planet in a
conscious universe. To the ﬁve senses, body, planet, and
universe are not one and the same. But at the quantum
level they have a common source. To quote the great
quantum pioneer Erwin Schrödinger , “To divide or multiplyconsciousness is something meaningless….In truth there is
only one mind.”
You and I go through life assuming that we have
individual minds and bodies. When one person burns his
hand on a radiator , he says “Ouch,” not the person standing
next to him. But at the quantum level this changes—you
and I are imbedded in one mind, a cosmic intelligence that
creates, gove rns, and controls reality . Where is this cosmic
intelligence located? Schrödinger comes to our aid again by
dissolving all the everyday barriers that keep us from
seeing our cosmic status. First, the barrier of separate minds: “Consciousness is a
singular that has no plural.” Next, the barrier of past,
present, and future: “Mind is always now. There is really no
before and after for the mind.” Finally , the barrier between
life and death: “Consciousness is pure, eternal and inﬁnite:
it does not arise nor cease to be. It is ever present in
moving and unmoving creatures, in the sky, on the
mountain, in ﬁre and in air .”
This last quote doesn’t come from Schrödinger , however ,
but from one of the most ancient texts in the Indian
spiritual tradition, the Yoga Vasistha . The fact that a sage
living thousands of years ago could take an inner journey
and make discoveries consistent with quantum physics
wasn’t news  when Quantum Healing  came out. But the
world of sages, seers, and saints felt closed oﬀ from
ordinary life back then. All the ensuing research  in mind-
body medicine has helped to build a bridge between two
worlds, and the sage Vasistha, like Buddha, could be our
contemporary . What would it take to turn all healing into quantum
healing? I will addre ss this, the most burning question
facing modern medicine, in the expanded edition you’re
now reading. After each chapter you’ll ﬁnd a section titled
“Expanding the Topic,” which approaches the mystery ofhealing as viewed by cutting-edge medical research and
the world’s wisdom traditions. Beyond the mind-body connection there is a deeper
connection between now and eternity . The human brain
knows only the now. Every electrical impulse or chemical
reaction in your brain occurs right this second. The
feedback between mind and body is being replenished
thousands of times a minute. We can take great hope in this
fact, because it means that the entire universe has
conspired to bring about this very minute. Inﬁnite
creativity , intelligence, and power are supporting us once
we open ourselves up to them. When I wrote this book, I knew it was pointing in the
right direction. If I felt the barbs of skeptics then (and
there were many), I was conﬁdent that conﬁrming studies
were still to come. Now the idea of quantum healing has
had nearly thirty years of supporting research. Let’s hope
this expanded edition prompts open-minded readers to
revisit this concept. Hope is born from impossible ideas. To
the skeptical mind, the most impossible idea is this: We are
children of the universe. Our source is beyond all
boundaries. Seeing ourselves as isolated, limited physical
creatures is merely an assumed identity . I suppose those
are three ideas, but once they are fused into a new
mindset, the era of true healing will have arrived. *1 In 2013 the U .S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that
a third of cancer cases were related to smoking and another third to obesity . *2 The cited lifestyle factors include cigarette smoking, diet (fried foods, red
meat), alcohol, sun exposure, environmental pollutants, infections, stress,
obesity , and physical inactivity . OceanofPDF .comOceanofPDF .comSeveral times in my medic al career I have been privileged
to witness miraculous cures. The most recent began last
year when a 32-year-old Indian woman came to see me in
my oﬀice outside Boston. She sat quietly facing me in a
blue silk sari. To keep her composure, she clasped her
hands tightly in her lap. Her name was Chitra, she said,
and together with her husband, Raman, she ran a
neighborhood import store in New Y ork City . A few months earlier , Chitra had noticed a small lump in
her left breast that was sensitive to the touch. She
underwent surgery to remove it, but unfortunately the
surgeon found that the lump was malignant. When he
explored further, he detected that the cancer had spread to
her lungs. After removing the diseas ed breast and a large portion of
tissue around it, Chitra’s doctor gave her initial  doses of
radiation and then place d her on intensive chemotherapy . This is standard procedure for treating breast cancer and
saves many lives. But the lung cancer was going to bemuch harder to treat; it was obvious to everyone that
Chitra was in a very precarious position. Examining her, I noticed that she was very anxious. When
I tried to reassure her, she surprised me with a touching
statement: “I don’t mind for myself if I have to die, but my
husband will be so lonely without me. Sometimes I pretend
to be asleep and then sit up all night, just thinking about
him. I know  Raman loves me, but after I’m gone, he will
start seeing American girls. I can’t bear to lose him to an
American girl.” She stopped and looked at me with
suﬀering in her eyes. “I know I shouldn’t say that, but I
think you understand.”
You do not get used to the sorrow that cancer creates,
but I felt a deeper sorrow from knowing that time was
Chitra’s enemy . For the moment, she still looked healthy . She had even managed to hide her disease from her
relatives, dreading having to be watched as she wasted
away . We both knew it was going to be very bad for her . No one can say that he knows a cure for advanced breast
cancer . Conventional therapy had provided all that it could
for Chitra. Given that her cancer had already spread to
another organ, the statistics said that her chance of
surviving for ﬁve years was less than 10 percent, even with
the most intensive routine of chemotherapy that could be
safely administered. I asked her to start a new course of treatme nts, as
prescribed by A yurveda. Like me, Chitra had grown up in India, but she had little
idea of Ayurveda. Her grandparents’ generation was the
last to “believe” in it, I would imagine; today , every
progressive Indian living in a big city would prefer  Western
medicine if he could aﬀord it. To explain to Chitra why I
wanted her seemingly to turn her back on progress, I told
her that her cancer was not just a physical disease but a
holistic one. Her whole body knew she had cancer and wassuﬀering from it; a tissue sample taken from her lungs
would show that malignant cells had migrated there, while
a sample from her liver would be negative. Yet, her liver
had the same blood coursing through it, and therefore it
picked up the signals of disease that were coming  from the
lungs. This in turn aﬀected its own functions. Similarly , when she felt pain in her chest or had to sit
down owing to shortness of breath, signals were racing
throughout her body, going to and from her brain. Sensing
the pain, her brain had to respond to it. The fatigue she
was feeling, along with her depression and anxie ty, was a
brain response that had physical consequences. So it was
wrong to think of her cancer as just an isolated tumor that
needed to be destroyed. She had a holistic diseas e and for
that she needed holistic medicine. The word holistic , which tends to oﬀend orthodox
doctors, simply means an approach that includes the mind
and body together . I believe Ayurveda does this better than
any alternative, although it may not be very apparent on
the surface. In fact, many well-publicized mind-body
techniques such as hypnosis and biofeedback are far more
ﬂashy than Ayurveda. If Chitra had gotten sick at home in
Bombay , her grandmother might have ﬁxed her some
special meals, brought home medicinal herbs in a brown
paper sack from the Ayurvedic pharmacy , and insisted that
she stay in bed. Various purgatives and oil massages might
be prescribe d to clean the body of toxins generated by the
cancer . If there was a spiritual tradition in the family , she
would have begun to meditate. In essence, I was going to
have her do these same things, with a few additions. There
is as yet no scientiﬁc reason why any of this should work,
except that it does. Ayurveda has hit on something deep in
nature. Its knowledge is rooted not in technology but in
wisdom, which I would deﬁne as a reliable understanding
of the human organism gathered over many centuries.“I want you to go to a special clinic outside Bosto n for a
week or two,” I told Chitra. “Some things that will happen
to you there will seem highly unusual. You are used to the
idea of a hospital as a place with respirators, IV tubes,
transfusions, and chemotherapy . By that standard, what we
will do for you at this clinic will seem like nothing. Basically , I want to get your body into a deep, deep state of
rest.”
Chitra was a trusting person; she agreed to go. In part, of
course, she had no altern ative. Modern medicine had done
all it could, using the strategy of physical assau lt on her
cancer . The initial advantage of assaulting a disease is that
you hope to wipe it out physically as soon as possible. The
tremendous disadvantag e is that the whole body is
damaged in the assault on one of its parts. In the case of
chemotherapy , there is the very real danger that the
immune system will become so weakened that the door is
opened for other cancers to develop in the future. However ,
untreated breast cancer is considered deadly , and today’s
medicine is good at wiping it out over the short run. In a
climate of opinion ruled by fear, people prefer to run the
risks of the cure rather than the disease. I referred Chitra to the clinic where I work, in Lancaster ,
Massachusetts. She stayed for a week and received
treatments; she also learned an outpatient program to use
at home that included a change of diet, some Ayurvedic
herbs, a speciﬁc daily routine including simple yoga
exercises, and instruction in meditation. These measures
look diﬀeren t on the surface, but underneath they all aimed
at bringing her day-to-day existence to a settled, restful
state, buildin g a foundation for healing. In Ayurveda, a
level of total, deep relaxation is the most important
precondition for curing any disorder . The underlying
concept is that the body  knows how to maintain balance
unless throw n oﬀ by disease; therefore, if one wants torestore the body’s own healing ability , everything should be
done to bring it back into balance. It is a very simple notion
that has profound consequences. Chitra was also given two
special mental techniques that went directly to the root of
her cancer . (I will say more about these later .) —
Chitra followed her program faithfully and came back to
see me every six weeks. She also continued the course of
chemotherapy set up by her doctor at home in New York. When we talked about that I said, “If I could conﬁdently put
you on nothing but Ayurveda, I would—the deterioration in
your physical state would then be much less. But you came
to me a very sick woman, and we know that the
chemotherapy works as an outside approach. Let’s combine
the outer and the inner and hope that they add up to a real
cure.”
For almost a year I followed Chitra’s progress. She
always listen ed with a trusting attitude, yet as she returned
for each visit, it was clear that she was not improving. Her
lung X rays were still bad, her shortness of breath grew
worse, and she began to look weaker and more dejected as
the disease advanced. Her voice took on a note of panic. Finally the day came when Chitra did not show up for her
appointment. I waited out the week and then called her
home. The news was not good. Chitra’s husband, Raman, told
me that she had suddenl y developed a high fever and had
to be hospitalized over the weekend. For some time her
lungs had been seeping ﬂuid into the pleural cavity that
surrounds them, and her doctor suspected that an infection
had set in. Given her grim progno sis, there was no
guarantee that Chitra would ever leave the hospital.Then a very curious thing happened. After a day or two
on antibiotics, Chitra’s fever went from 104 degree s F. back
down to normal, which puzzled her attending physician. It
is very unusual for a high-grade fever to reverse itself so
rapidly if the underlying cause is an infecti on in a
terminally ill patient. Could there be another cause besides
infection? He decided to take chest X rays, and the next
day Raman called me sounding both exhilarated and
confused. “She doesn’t have cancer anymore!” Raman told me
jubilantly over the telephone. “What do you mean?” I asked, taken aback. “They can’t ﬁnd any cancer cells at all—nothing.” He was
almost unab le to contain himself . “Chitra’s oncologist at
ﬁrst was sure that they had X-rayed the wrong patient and
wanted to take some more pictures, but now he’s
convinced.”
Overjoyed, relieved, and unable to explain this sudden
stroke of salvation, Raman regarded his wife’s recovery as
a miracle. When I called Chitra in her hospital room, she
kept crying into the phone, “You did it, Deepak,” while I
kept insisting, “No, no, Chitra, you did it.” I had never
anticipated that such a rapid cure would result from her
treatments, either conventional or Ayurvedic. In retrospect,
I see that her high fever was a kind of burn-oﬀ from the
dying cancer , a process known as tumor necrosis. But the
exact mecha nism involve d has no explanation. If there is
such a thing as a mirac ulous cure, this was one, I was
certain. Within a few weeks, however , our mutual jubilation began
to change. Chitra’s “miracle” wasn’t holding. It eroded ﬁrst
within herse lf: instead of being able to trust in her
inexplicable recovery , she became conﬂicted, morbidly
afraid that the cancer would return. She called to ask me if
she should resume chemotherapy .“It’s been two months since the cancer disappeared,” I
said. “Does your doctor ﬁnd any new cancer cells?”
“No,” Chitra admitted, “but he thinks that the
chemotherapy cured me and that I should continue with it.”
I bega n to feel frustrated. I knew , as did her atten ding
physician, that the particular chemotherapy Chitra had
received was not known to produce sudden, total
recoveries of this kind, certainly not in advanced cases
where the cancer had begun to spread to other sites in the
body. Also, it was becoming obvious that she was being
worn down past endurance. The chemotherapy had caused
almost const ant nausea, and her hair had fallen out in
frightening amounts, adding to the shame she felt following
her breast surgery . All of this compromised the Ayurvedic
treatments we were trying. If even higher doses of
chemotherapy were given, she would become more
depressed, more prone to infections, and weaker in every
way. Yet, at the same time, I did not have a strong enough
reason to tell her not to proceed. What if she suﬀered a
relapse in six months and died? “Go ahead with your chemotherapy ,” I advised, “but stick
with our program, too, okay?” She agreed. For several months more, Chitra remained free of
disease, but she also remained disturbed and mystiﬁed. It
seemed that Chitra’s cancer was easier to defeat than the
sinister doubt that was creeping back into her life, defying
her to be well. Chitra’s agonizing dilemma is the real starting point of
this book. For her to be well again, she needed an
explanation. What had happened to her? Was her cure a
miracle, as she thought at ﬁrst, or only a tempora ry stay of
execution, as she came to dread? By going deeper into the
mind-body connection, I believe an answer can be found.—
Research on spontaneous cures of cancer , cond ucted in
both the United States and Japan, has shown that just
before the cure appears,  almost every patient experiences
a dramatic shift in awar eness. He knows that he will be
healed, and he feels that the force responsible is inside
himself but not limited to him—it extends beyond his
personal boundaries, throughout all of nature. Suddenly he
feels, “I am not limited to my body. All that exists around
me is part of myself .” At that moment, such patients
apparently jump to a new level of consciousness that
prohibits the existence of cancer . Then the cancer cells
either disapp ear, literally  overnight in some cases, or at the
very least stabilize without damaging the body any further . This leap in consciousne ss seems to be the key. It does
not have to come in a ﬂash, however . Chitra was cultivating
it deliberately , through her Ayurvedic techniques. Therefore, her ability to stay at a higher level of awareness
was strikingly correlated with her condition. Somehow she
could motiva te the absence of cancer , but just as easily she
could return to it. (I think of this as being like a violin
string whose  pitch varies as you slide your ﬁnger up and
down it.) The word that comes to mind when a scientist
thinks of such sudden changes is quantum . The word
denotes a discrete jump from one level of functioning to a
higher level—the quantum leap. Quantum is also a technical term, once known only to
physicists but now growing in popular usage. Formally , a
quantum is “the indivisi ble unit in which waves may be
emitted or absorbed,” the deﬁnition given by the eminent
British physicist Stephen Hawking. In laym an’s terms, the
quantum is a building block. Light is built up from photons,
electricity from the charge of one electron, gravity  from the
graviton (a hypothetical quantum, not yet found in nature),and so on for all forms of energy—each of them is based on
a quantum and cannot be broken down into anything
smaller . Both deﬁnitions—the discrete jump to a higher level and
the irreducible level of a force—appear to apply to certain
cases like Chitra’s. Therefore, I would like to introduce the
term quantum healing  to describe what happened to her. Although the term is new, the process itself is not. There
have always been patients who do not follow the normal
course of healing. A tiny minority , for example, do not
waste away from cancer; others have tumors that grow
much more slowly than what the statistics for their
diseases predict. Many cures that share mysterious origins
—faith healing, spontaneous remissions, and the eﬀective
use of placebos, or “dummy drugs”—also point toward a
quantum leap. Why? Because in all of these instances, the
faculty of inner awareness seems to have promoted a
drastic jump—a quantum leap—in the healing mechanism. Consciousness is a force that most of us undervalue. Generally we do not focus our inner awareness or use its
real power , even in the most diﬀicult moments of crisis. That may account for why “miracle” cures are greeted with
a mixture of awe, disbel ief, and reverence. Yet, everyone
possesses consciousness. Perhaps these miracles are
extensions of normal abilities. When your body mends a
broken bone, why is that not a miracle? As a healing
process, it is certainly complex, far too complex for
medicine to duplicate; it involves an incredible number of
perfectly synchronized processes, of which medici ne knows
only the major ones and those imperfectly . The reason why curing cancer by yourself is a miracle but
mending a broken arm is not comes down to the mind-body
connection: The broken bone seems to mend itself
physically , without the intervention of your mind; yet, a
spontaneous cure of cancer—so it is widely believed—depends on a special quality of mind, some deep will to live,
a heroically positive outlook, or some other rare capacity . This implies that there are two kinds of healing, one that is
normal, the other abnormal, or at least exceptional. I belie ve that this distinction is false. The broken arm
mends because consciousness makes it mend, and the same
holds true for the miraculous cancer cure, the long-term
survival of AIDS , the healing by faith, and even the ability
to live to a great old age without falling prey to disease. The reason why not everyone manages to take the healing
process as far as it can go is that we diﬀer drastically in our
ability to mobilize it. We can see this in the way that diﬀerent people react to
disease. A minute fraction, far less than 1 percent, of all the
patients who contract an incurable disease manage to cure
themselves. A larger fraction, but still under 5 percent, live
much longer than average—this is conﬁrmed in the 2
percent of AIDS patients who have survived longer than
eight years, while the vast majority do not survive beyond
two. These ﬁnding s are not restricted to incurable disea ses. Studies have generally shown that only 20 percent of
patients with serious but treatable disorders recover with
excellent results. That leaves nearly 80 percent who either
do not recover or only partially recover . Why is
unsuccessful healing so far out of proportion? What marks
a survivor as opposed to a non-survivor? Apparently the successful patients have learned to
motivate their own healing, and the most successful have
gone much further than that. They have found the secret of
quantum healing. They are the geniuses of the mind-body
connection. Modern medicine cannot even begin to
duplicate their cures, because no cure that relies on drugs
or surgery is so precisely timed, so beautifully coordinated,
so benign and free of side eﬀects, so eﬀortless as theirs. Their ability springs from  a level so deep that you cannotgo any deepe r. If we knew what their brains were doing to
motivate their bodies, we would have the basic unit of the
healing process in our hands. —
As yet, medicine has not taken the quantum leap, and the
word quantum  has no clinical application. Because
quantum physics works with ultra-high-speed accelerators,
you may think that quantum healing uses radioisotopes or
X rays. But that is the opposite of what it means. Quantum
healing moves away from external, high-technology
methods toward the deepest core of the mind-body system. This core is where healing begins. To go there and learn to
promote the healing response, you must get past all the
grosser levels of the body—cells, tissues, organs, and
systems—and arrive at the junction point between mind
and matter , the point where consciousness actually starts
to have an eﬀect. The quantum itself—what it is, how it behaves—takes up
the ﬁrst half of this book. The second half then blends the
quantum into Ayurveda, making a marriage of two cultures
while trying to arrive at one answer . The scientiﬁc
worldview of the West surprisingly supports the vision of
the ancient sages of India. This is a journey that breaks
down barriers and ignores cultural fences. To me, the
whole story has to be found out. Chitra asked  me for it, and
so I am writing for her and all patients like her. Until they
ﬁnd an answer , their lives still hang in the balance. EXPANDING THE TOPIC
Much can be said in favor of consciousness aﬀecting the
body, to the extent that the gap between “normal” healingand “miraculous” healing has closed even more over the
past few decades. The main obstacle, as far as mainstream
medicine is concerned, is a ﬁxed belief that the body
operates entirely like a physical machine. If that were so,
the following experiment would have failed. The experiment was the brainchild of the pioneering
work of Harvard psycholo gist Ellen Langer , who as far back
as 1981 was testing the possibility that aging has a major
mental component. (The notion is actually ancient in origin. The medieva l Indian philosopher and sage Adi Shankara
declared that people grow old and die because they see
other people grow old and die.) In 1981, Langer took eight men in their seventies, all in
good health but exhibiting signs of age, and immersed
them for ﬁve days in an environment that was like time
travel going back to 1959, including the music and
television of the period, along with the movies and events
in the news. The men were told to act as if they were their
younger selves, becau se Langer had alrea dy done
experiments in which memory loss in the elderly could
sometimes be reversed by giving subjects an incentive to
remember . In other words, the mind was being motivated
to aﬀect the body . Before enter ing the time-capsule environment, the men
were tested on various markers of aging such as grip
strength, dexterity , and how well they could hear and see. At the end of the ﬁve days, the group had improved on
seven out of eight measures, including better vision, a
startling ﬁnding. They looked  younger as assessed by
outside judges. Thirty-three years ago Langer was
proceeding more or less intuitively , without the knowledge
into gene expression and neuroplasticity that we can turn
to today (more on those breakthroughs in later “Expanding
the T opic” sections).In another startling experiment, Langer went into a
retirement home and divided her subjects into two groups. Both were given some houseplants for their room. One
group was told that they were responsible for keeping the
plants alive, and that they could make choices in their own
daily schedule. The other group was told that the staﬀ
would tend the plants, and in addition they were given no
choice in their ﬁxed daily  schedule. At the end of eighteen
months, twice as many subjects in the ﬁrst group were still
alive compared with the second group. (The same rationale
lies behind the accepted practice of giving the elderly a pet
to take care of. At the very least it improves their mood and
quality of life. It may prolong their lives as well.) Aging and healing have in common that they have long
been viewed as ﬁxed processes based on strict physical
limitations. An invisible factor like making your own
choices abou t how to spend your day never ﬁgured into the
calculation. This bias has been shifting for quite a while,
but only the beginning signs were evident when Quantum
Healing  appeared. Today what’s important isn’t the
acceptance of conscious ness as a factor in healing—that
battle has been won, more or less. Instead we need a set of
new assumptions about how far consciousness can go to
alter healing and aging, not to mention intractable chronic
pain, addictions, dependency on prescription  drugs,
recovery from surgery , and so on. Here are the basic assumptions I’d suggest:
1.Mind comes before matter . 2.Mental choices originate the messages that change
organs, tissues, and cells. 3.The body is ﬂuid and dynamic, not ﬁxed and
determined.4.Genes express whatever a person desires. They
operate through switches that the mind can access. 5.The mind-body system is a feedback loop where input
and output have many determinants, including
lifestyle, environment, behavior , beliefs, and past
conditioning. 6.Through self -care, a higher state of wellbeing is
attainable. Self-care makes daily use of the mind-body
feedback loop. 7.Ultimately , the evolution of future humanity depends
on internal balance (homeostasis) that is balanced with
the whole ecology of the planet. There’s much more to say about each of these points, as
we’ll discover in coming chapters. But the general
conclusion is that “normal” isn’t as far from “miraculous”
as both camps, believers  and skeptics, used to think. The
choices you make today are the key to your wellbeing for
life. Every cell in your body is eavesdropping on your
thoughts. Consciousness research is constantly gaining
new ground, so it’s best to assume that your potential for
mind-body mastery is much greater than anyone now
supposes. OceanofPDF .comWhen I said that no one can honestly claim to know the
cure for breast cancer , I was telling a half-truth. If a patient
could promote the healing process from within, that would
be the cure for cancer . Healing episodes like Chitra’s come
about when a radical shift takes place inside, removing fear
and doubt at the same time as it removes the disease. Yet,
the exact location of this shift opens up profound mysteries. It deﬁes medical wisdom to answer even the most basic
question: Was the shift in Chitra’s mind, in her body, or
both? To ﬁnd out, Western medicine has recently begun to
move away from drugs and surgery , the mainstay  of every
doctor’s practice, toward  the amorphous, often perplexing
ﬁeld loosely known as “mind-body medicine.” The move
was almost a forced one, because the old reliance on the
physical body alone had begun to crumble. Mind-body medicine makes many doctors extremely
uneasy . They feel it is more a concept than a true ﬁeld. Given a choice between a new idea and a familiar chemical,
a doctor will trust the chemical—penicillin, digitalis,
aspirin, and Valium do not need any new thinking on thepatient’s part (or the doctor’s) to be eﬀective. The problem
comes in when the chemical isn’t eﬀective. Recent surveys
taken in England and America have shown that as many as
80 percent of patients feel that their underlying complaint,
their reason for going to the doctor , was not satisfactorily
resolved when they left his oﬀice. Classic studies going
back to the end of World War II showed that patients left
the Yale Medical School hospital sicker than the day they
arrived. (These are paralleled by similar studies that
showed that patients with psychiatric complaints improved
more while they were on the waiting list to see a
psychiatrist than after they actually saw him—so the
situation isn’t simply one of exchanging a body doctor for a
head doctor .) A miracle cure, then, simply throws into high relief the
need to reexamine some of medicine’s basic concepts. Our
current logic  of healing can be impressive, or at least good
enough, as when we apply penicillin to cure an infection,
but nature’s logic can be awe-inspiring. Many physicians
have stood in wonder witnessing such cures as Chitra’s
without having a clue how to explain them; the standard
term for them is spontaneous remission , a convenie nt tag
that says little more than that the patient recovered by
himself . Spontaneous remissions are quite rare—one study
in 1985 estimated that they occur once in every twenty
thousand diagnosed cancer cases; some specialists believe
they are much rarer (fewer than ten per million), but no
one knows for sure. Recently I spent an evening with a leading oncologist, or
cancer specialist, from the Midwest, a doctor who treats
thousands of patients every year. I asked him if he knew of
any spontaneous remissions. He shrugged and said, “I feel
uncomfortable with that term. I have seen tumors
completely regress. It’s very rare, but it happens.”Did these regressions sometimes happen totally by
themselves? He admitted that they occasionally did. He
thought for a moment and mentioned that certain kinds of
melanoma—an extremely lethal skin cancer that kills very
quickly—are known to disappear by themselves. He
couldn’t explain why this happened. “I don’t stop to think
about these rare incidents,” he said. “Treating cancer is a
matter of statistics—we  go with the numbers. A huge
majority of patients respond to certain lines of treatment,
and there just isn’t time to ﬁnd out about the inﬁnitesimal
minority who recover for some unknown reason. Besides, it
is our experi ence that many of these regressions  are only
temporary .”
Did he think complete regressions were rarer than one in
a million? No, he answered, not that rare. Then, as a scientist, didn’t he want to ﬁnd out the
mechanism that lies behind them, even if the odds are one
in a million, or one in ten million? Again he shrugged. “Of
course there must be a mechanism behind it,” he conceded,
“but my practice is not set up to look into that. Let me give
you an example: eight years ago, a man came to see me
complaining of a painful chest cough. We X-rayed him, and
it turned out that he had a large tumor between his lungs. He was admitted to the hospital, we took a biopsy , and the
pathologist’s report diagnosed the tumor as oat-cell
carcinoma. This is an extremely deadly, very fast-growing
malignancy . “I told my patient that he must have immediate surgery
to relieve the pressure that his tumor was creating,
followed by radiation and chemotherapy . He was quite
disturbed by the prospect of treatment and refused. I
completely lost track of him after that. Eight years later, a
man came to see me with an enlarged lymph node in his
neck. I took a biopsy , and it turned out to be oat-c ell
carcinoma. Then I realized that it was the same man.“We took chest X rays, and there was no trace of lung
cancer . Normally , 99.99 percent of untreated patients
would have died in six months; as many as 90 percent
would not live ﬁve years even with maximum therapy . I
asked him what he had done for the earlier cancer , and he
told me he hadn’t done anything—he had just decided he
was not going to let himself die of cancer . And he may
refuse treatment again with this second cancer .”
By deﬁnition, scientiﬁc medicine deals in predictable
results. Yet, whenever spontaneous remissions appear ,
their behavio r is completely unpredictable. They can occur
without the presence of any therapy , or they can
accompany conventional cancer treatment. The myriad
alternative approaches to cancer available in the United
States today may each have distinct merits, but no one has
proven that they prom ote spontaneous remissions any
better than standard radiation and chemotherapy , nor are
they apparently any worse. How advanced the cancer is
seems not to matter , either . Both tiny tumors and extremely
large masses of malig nancy can disappear , virtually
overnight. Because of their rarity and because they happen
as if by chan ce, spontane ous remissions have so far taught
us very little either about  the cause of cancer or about how
an “impossible” cure is achieved. It seem s reasonable to suppose that the body is ﬁghting
cancer all the time and winning a huge majority of the
battles. Many kinds of cancer can be induced, either in test
tubes or in laboratory animals, using toxic substances
(carcinogens), fatty diets, radiation, high doses of stress,
and viruses, among other  things. Since we are subjected to
all of these at a furious rate, they must be causing  damage
inside us. DNA is known to break down under these
extreme conditions; usually , however , it knows how to
repair itself or to detect the damaged material and discard
it.This means that early  cancers are probably  being
detected and combatted in the body on a regular  basis. If
you take this process and step it up in intensity , you have
the “miracle” of a spontaneous remission. It is no miracle
at all, in fact, but a natural process that has yet to be
explained, just as curing  pneumonia with penicil lin would
be a miracle  if you could not explain it through the germ
theory of disease. The point is that the mechanism behind
miracle cures is not mystical or random—and it deserves to
be investigated. —
In ordinary practice, once the miracle is over, the doctor
goes back to his routine, including his routine concepts. Even these, however , the stock -in-trade of medical school,
have buckled. To give just one example:  Since its inception
as a ﬁeld of rational scien tiﬁc study , medicine has accepted
the degeneration of brain function in elderly people as a
natural occurrence. This deterioration was thoroughly
documented with “hard” ﬁndings—as we age, our brains
shrink, grow lighter , and lose millions of neurons every
year. We have our full complem ent of neurons by age 2, and
by age 30, the number starts to decline. The loss of any
single brain cell is permanent, since neurons do not
regenerate. On the basis of this well-known fact, brain
decline seemed to be scientiﬁcally valid; sadly but
inevitably , to grow old must lead to memory loss, decreased
reasoning ability , impaired intelligence, and related
symptoms. These time- honored assumptions, however , have now
been shown to be wrong. Careful study of healthy elderly
people—as opposed to the sick, hospitalized ones whom
medicine habitually studi ed—has revealed that 80 percent
of healthy Americans, barring psychological distress (such
as loneliness, depression, or lack of outside stimulation),suﬀer no signiﬁcant memory loss as they age. The ability to
retain new information can decline, which is why old
people forget phone numbers, names, and the reason for
walking into a room; but the ability to remember past
events, calle d long-term memory , actually improves. (One
authority on aging quotes Cicero, who declared, “I’ve never
heard of an old man who forgot where his money was
hidden.”)
In tests where 70-year-olds were matched with 20-year-
olds, the older people performed better than the younger in
this area of memory . After they practiced the other kind of
memory—called short-te rm memory—for a few minutes
every day, the older group could almost match the younger
subjects, who were at their prime of mental functioning. Perhaps the “prime of life” should be extended. The
secret, as with almost every other “natural” decline in old
age, depends on habits of mind, not the circuitry in the
nervous system. As long as a person stays  mentally active,
he will remain as intelligent as in youth and middle age. People will still lose over one billion neurons throughout
their lifetime, at an average rate of 18 million per year, but
this loss is compensated for by another structure, the
branchlike ﬁlaments called dendrites, which connect the
nerve cells to one another . A nerve cell tends to be highly individual in shape, but
typically it has a bulbou s central section from which thin
arms radiate, like an octopus. These arms, or axons, end in
a swirl of tiny ﬁlaments that looked treelike to the early
anatomists, so they named them dendrites after the Greek
word for “tree.” Dendrites, which can vary in number from
less than a dozen to more than a thousand per cell, serve as
contact points, allowing the neuron to send signals to its
neighbors. By growing new dendrite s, a neuron can open
new channels of communication in every direction, like a
switchboard sprouting extra lines.It is not known how a thought is actually formed among
brain cells or how the bewilderingly vast number of
connections interrelate—millions of dendrites come
together at major junctio n points in the body, such as the
solar plexus,  not to mention the billions upon billions in the
brain itself . But experiments have shown that new
dendrites can be grown throughout life, up to advanced old
age. The current view is that this new growth easily
provides us with the physical structure for unimpaired
brain function. In a healthy brain, senility is not physically
normal. A rich multiplication of dendrites might even lie
behind growing wise in old age, a time when more and
more of life is seen in its totality—in other words, more
interconnected, just as the nerve cells are more
interconnected through their new dendrites. This exampl e illustrates how radically wrong medicine
can be if it insists that matter is superior to mind. To say
that a nerve cell creates thoughts may be true, but it is just
as true to say that thinking creates nerve cells. In the case
of the new dendrites,  it is the habit of thinking,
remembering, and being mentally active that creates the
new tissue. Nor is this an isolated ﬁnding. Curiously
enough, as soon as the concept of the “new old age” was
permissible in the eyes of doctors, our views of many forms
of degeneration began to alter . As long as you exercise, for example, your body’s
musculature will not wither , and your strength will be
unimpaired for life, altho ugh there will be a slow decline in
stamina. You can train for a mara thon at 65, provided you
are in good physical shape and train sensibly . Similarly ,
your heart changes with age, growing less resilient and
pumping less blood per beat, but heart disease and
hardening of the arteries , thought absolutely normal with
old age a few decades ago, are now seen as avoidable, too,
depending on diet and lifestyle. Strokes, another given ofold age, have declined by 40 percent just in the last decade,
thanks to better control of hypertension and less fat in our
diets. A large  perce ntage of “unavoidable” senility has been
traced to vitamin deﬁciency , poor diet, and dehydration. The overall result of these ﬁndings is that old age is being
drastically reconsidered; a less obvious result is that the
whole body , at any stage of life, has to be rethought. —
What is happening on every front in medicine is that the
healthy body is showing  itself to be more resilient and
versatile than was hithe rto suspected. Whereas medical
school teache s that germ A causes disease B and is treated
by drug C, nature seems to feel that this is only one option
among many . The mental approach to treating cancer , for
instance, would have been ridiculed a decade ago. But
people do seem able to participate in their cancer
treatment, and even to control the course of the disease, by
using thoughts. In 1971, Dr. O. Carl Simonton, a radiologist
at the University of Texas, met a 61-year-old man with
throat cancer . The disease was very far progressed; the
patient could hardly swallow , and his weight had dropped
to 98 pounds. Not only was the prognosis extremely poor—the doctors
gave him a 5 percent chance of surviving ﬁve years after
treatment—but the patient was already so weak that it
seemed unlikely he would respond well to radiation, which
is the standard therapy for this condition. In desperation,
but also curious to try a psychological approach, Dr.
Simonton suggested that the man enhance his radiation
therapy through the use of visualization. He was taught to
visualize his cancer as vividly as possible. Then, using any
mental pictu re that appealed to him, he was asked to
visualize his immune system as the white blood cellssuccessfully attacked the cancer cells and swept them out
of the body , leaving only healthy cells behind. The man said he envisioned his immune cells as a
blizzard of white particles, covering the tumor like snow
burying a black rock. Dr. Simonton had him go home and
repeat this visualization at intervals throughout  the day. The man agreed, and soon his tumor seeme d to be
shrinking. In a few weeks it was deﬁnitely smaller , and his
response to radiation was almost free of side eﬀects; after
two months, the tumor was gone. Naturally , Dr. Simonton was surprised and baﬄed,
though elated that the psychological approach had been so
powerful. How does a thought defeat a cancer cell? The
mechanism was totally unknown—in fact, given the ﬁendish
complexity of the immune system and the nervous system,
both of which were obviously involved here, the mechanism
might be unknowable. For his part, the patient accepted his
cure without undue surprise. He told Dr. Simonton that
arthritis in his legs kept him from going stream-ﬁshing as
much as he liked. Now that the cancer was gone, why not
try visualizin g the arthritis away too? Within a few more
weeks, that is exactly what happened. The man remained
free of both cancer and arthritis for a follow-up period of
six years. This now-famous case is a landmark in mind-body
medicine, but unfortunately it is not the whole story . Dr.
Simonton’s visualization therapy (it has branched out into a
broad mind-b ody program ) does not reliably cure cancer . One of my patients used it with success to cure herself of
breast cancer, I believe, although she practiced the
technique on her own and not under a doctor’s scrutiny . Long-term statistical studies, however , dispute whether
such sporadic results are any better than those of
conventional treatment. At present, conventional  therapy
has a big edge. If a woman with breast cancer , for example,detects the tumor while it is still very small and localized,
the chances of curing her (a “cure” means surviving at
least three years without  a recurrence of the disease) are
currently better than 90 percent. In comparison, the
number of spontaneous remissions, at the most generous
estimate, would be well below 1⁄10 of 1 percent. Until a
mental or other alternative therapy outperforms radiation
and chemotherapy , it will not become the treatment of
choice. Although patients may long for such approaches ,
most doctors still fear and distrust them. But even if Dr. Simonton’s patient were one of a kind, he
is enough to rock our conception of how the body cures
itself , for here is nature ﬁnding a way to combat death that
no doctor had ever tried—and here also is the dark
possibility that what the doctor usually tries is not helping
nature but stiﬂing it. Curious and adventurous doctors have ﬂocked to
experiment with mind-body innovations over the last
decade, from biofeedback and hypnotism to visualizations
and behavior modiﬁcation. The results across the board
have been amorphous and hard to interpret. Psychologist
Michael Lerner spent three years conducting an in-depth
study of forty clinics oﬀering alternative approaches to
cancer , whose metho ds ranged from herbs and
macrobiotics to visualization of positive mental images. He
found that these “complementary cancer centers” were
sought out by patients who were generally well educated
and prosperous, that the doctors running the clinics were
also serious and well intentioned, but that nothing close to
a cure for cancer had been discovered anywhere he visited. When he interviewed the patients, a fairly large
proportion (40 percent) thought that they had experienced
at least a temporary improvement in the quality  of their
lives. Another 40 percent reported that they experienc ed
actual medical improvements in their condition, lastingfrom a few days to a number of years. About 10 percent fell
at the extreme ends of the spectrum, one group saying that
they got nothing from the treatment and the other that they
were now partially or wholly recovered from their disease. Generally , the record of alternative approaches is that they
give a measure of comfort and relief to patients, but
disappointingly , the remission rates are not radically
diﬀerent from those of standard therapy . There are other problems that run deeper than
inconsistent results: the mind-body ﬁeld continu es to be
plagued by an inability to rigorously prove its basic tenet,
that the mind inﬂuences the body toward either health or
disease. It seems utterly self-evid ent that sick people and
healthy people enjoy diﬀerent states of mind, but the causal
connection is still elusive. In 1985 a major study of breast
cancer conducted at the University of Pennsylva nia failed
to ﬁnd any correlation between the mental attitude of
patients and their chances of surviving their disease
beyond two years. In an editori al accompan ying the study ,
which appeared in the prestigious New England Journal of
Medicine , the whole concept of emotions aﬀecting cancer
was denounced. “Our belief in disease as a direct reﬂection
of mental states,” the editorial declared, “is largely
folklore.”
In response, letters deluged the journal, most of them
from physicians who heatedly disagreed with the editorial’s
conclusion. It certainly seems unreasonable to discount
mental attitu des as a factor in illness, much less as folklore. Every practicing physician knows that the patient’s will to
recover plays a vital part in his treatment. Wedded as they
are to “hard” medicine, most doctors nonetheless cannot
condone the idea that attitude, belief , and emotions do not
play their part. Hippocrates stated at the dawn of Western
medicine that “a patient who is mortally sick might yet
recover from belief in the goodness of his physician.”Numerous modern studies have corroborated this, by
showing that people who trust their doctor and surrender
themselves to his care are likelier to recover than those
who approach medicine with distrust, fear , and antagonism. In the wake of the edito rial, tempers ﬂared and lines of
allegiance were drawn, while the issues became even more
confused. Three separa te studies of breast-cancer survival
rates from the mid-1980s came up with three entirely
diﬀerent results. In one, the women who displayed strong
positive attitudes tended to outlive those who were
negative, and it did not matter if their diseases were more
advanced—positive emotions, it seemed, helped them
recover from a late-sta ge, metastasized cancer , while
patients with negative emotions died from small tumors
that had been diagnosed relatively early . A second study , however , found that any strong attitude,
if expressed rather than held back, helped in survival of
this very deadly disease. While the ﬁrst ﬁnding bolsters
common sense—the idea that positivity is better than
negativity—the second does much the same from  another
angle, the idea being that it is better to ﬁght than to give
up. Publicity was given to a so-called cancer personality ,
who bottles up emotions and somehow converts repression
into malignant cells. The opposite would be the “strong will
to live” type, who can be either positive or negative. All of this follows a certain logic, except for the study that
appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine  to begin
with, second ed by supporting studies, which found no
correlation between any emotional pattern and surviving
breast cancer beyond two years. Even as it grew in
popularity , becoming one of the most welcome innovations
since the Salk vaccine, the concept of mind-body medicine
was shaken. Now, a familiar pattern has emerged, in which
the public is informed of some elating break through,followed by disappointing  clinical results that are generally
known only in restricted medical circles. A classic example was the division of heart-attack
patients, more than three-quarters of them middle-aged
males, into high-risk Type A personalities and low-risk Type
B’s. The Type A personality was supposed to be a hard-
driving, compulsive worker , constantly racing deadlines
and churning his system with stress hormones, as opposed
to the relaxed, tolerant, more balanced Type B. Type A
suﬀered from  “the disease of being in a hurry”; therefore, it
seemed logical that his heart would eventually rebel,
leading to a coronary . Unfortunately , controlled  studies have indicated that this
widely accepted division is not so neat. It turns out that
most people have some Type A in them and some Type B,
and that tolerance for stress varies widely , with certain
groups stating that they thrive on it. Finally , a 1988 study
found that if a man actually has a heart attack, Type A’s
survive better than Type B’s. Their drive to succeed
apparently turns into a beneﬁt once the coronary strikes. The intricacies of the mind-body relation were not to be
easily solved. If one asks why a positive mind cannot be
easily correla ted with good health—it appears to be one of
the most obvious facts of life—the answer has to do with
what you mean by “mind ” in the ﬁrst place. This is not a
philosophical question but a practical one. If a patient
comes in with cancer , is his mental state judged by how he
feels on the day of the diagnosis, long before,  or long
afterward? Dr. Lawrence LeShan, author of the pioneering
studies from the 1950s  correlating emotions to cancer ,
went back into the childhoods of cancer patients to ﬁnd the
black seed that poisoned their psychology , and he theorized
that it lay dormant in the subconscious for years before
inducing their disease.In my own practice, I saw a lung-cancer patient who had
lived comfortably with a coin-sized lesion in his lungs for
ﬁve years.
Quantum_Healing_by_Deppak_Chopra.txt
Summarize the following text section accurately and concisely. Maintain specific details and numerical information, and use anti-repetition mechanisms:

        OceanofPDF. comIn order to ensure the privacy of the patients mentioned in this book, their
names, circumstances, and other identifying details have been changed. Copyright © 1989, 2015 by Deepak Chopra, M. D. All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of R andom House,
a division of P enguin R andom House LLC, New Y ork. BANTAM BOOKS  and the HOUSE  colophon are registered trademarks of
Penguin R andom House LLC. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Bantam Books, an
imprint of R andom House, a division of P enguin R andom House LLC, in 1989. ISBN 9781101884973
eBook ISBN 9780804179980
randomhousebooks. com
Book design by Jo Anne Metsch, adapted for eBook
Cover design: V ictoria Allen
Cover art: Francisco Javier Gomez Quesada
v4. 1_r2
ep
OceanofPDF. comContents
Cover
Title P age
Copyright
Foreword
Introduction
Part I: The Hidden Physiology
Chapter 1: A fter the Miracle
Chapter 2: The Body Has a Mind of Its Own
Chapter 3: The Sculpture or the River. Chapter 4: Messengers from Inner Space
Chapter 5: Ghosts of Memory
Chapter 6: The Quantum Mechanical Human Body
Chapter 7: Nowhere and Everywhere
Chapter 8: Silent W itness
Chapter 9: The Mystery of the Gap
Part II: Body of Bliss
Chapter 10: In the Rishi’s W orld
Chapter 11: Birth of a Disease
Chapter 12: “ What Y ou See, Y ou Become”
Chapter 13: Body of Bliss
Chapter 14: The End of the W ar
Acknowledgments
Reading List
Bibliography
Bestsellers by Deepak ChopraAbout the Author
OceanofPDF. comWhenever the word quantum  comes  up, the word physics
follows automatically. This habit of mind made Quantum
Healing  a novel and provocati ve title in 1989, but its
author, a curious-minded endocrinologist outside  Boston,
was implying a legitimate question. If every atom and
molecule in the universe emerges from the quantum ﬁeld,
doesn’t this mean that our bodies do, too. The answer is
undoubtedly yes. In that case, we possess a quantum
mechanical body. Dr. Deepak Chopra then reasoned that
the mysteries of the human body, particularly the mystery
of healing, are inevitably immersed in the quantum ﬁeld. Very few scientists were thinking that way almost thirty
years ago. Medical schools approached the human body
essentially as a machine subdivided into the working parts
of a machine—organs, tissues, and cells. When the body
broke down through illness, something materia l was at
fault. Bacteria had entered to disrupt the mechanical
operation of an organ, or a worn-out part had failed. An
arthritic joint was consi dered similar to a tire with the
tread wearing thin. Modern scien tiﬁc medicin e goes into sophisticated  detail,
but in essence it embra ces the two basic principles that
bind all the sciences together: materialism and
reductionism. Materialism holds that there must be a
physical explanation for every phenomenon. Reductionismholds that complex problems can be broken down into
smaller component parts, wherein lie all solutions and
answers. Quantum Healing  blew the whistle on both
principles, not because they are inherently wrong, but
because they left out some extremely important things,
especially when it came to the human body. Materialism left out the mind-body connection. Mind isn’t
material. Yet our thoughts cause our bodies to move,
something we take for granted the minute we get out of
bed in the morning but which stands as a great mystery. When you break the body down into organs, tissues, and
cells, you can’t ﬁnd the slightest trace of a thought, and yet
the mind must be related to the body. How. Reductionism left out the holistic nature of the body. Trillions of cells cooperate to sustain one another, acting to
preserve overall balance and health. Up to a quadrillion
neural connections in the brain generate a microscopic
electrical storm, and yet the result is organized thought,
not a jumble of static. As skilled as medical science is at
dissecting body and brain, it has little to say about the
experience of life as a whole, yet that experience impinges
directly on who gets sick and who stays well. Deepak was not the ﬁrst to see these ﬂaws and
omissions, but Quantum Healing  was very bold in becoming
the ﬁrst book to oﬀer a path to new answers. He proposed
that quantum  physics describes an invisible domain from
which mind and body both emerge and unite. Quantum
Healing  struck a nerve by focusing on the most baﬄin g
phenomenon in medicine, spontaneous remission from
cancer. How could the most intractable of diseases, the
object of billion-dollar campaigns to ﬁnd a cure, suddenly
disappear from a patient’s body. Since oncology is a
numbers game, it was easier simply to ignore these
extraordinary cases as anomalies. But if science prides
itself on going wherever  reality leads us, such cases arewell docume nted in medical journals. They force us to
rethink the entire materi alist, reductionist model—Deepak
was willing to go there. Even today, not everyone  is willing. As a neurogeneticist,
I have  been fortunate to study the wondrous interplay of
genes and the brain. All organic processes are coded in our
DNA. Since that includes all brain processes, the mind-
body connection is directly engendered in our genes. The
same is true for healing,  another process that cannot take
place absent genetic activity. However, most geneticists
don’t think in such broad terms; our research studies are
extremely detailed and focused (my specialty is the
neurodegenerative disorder Alzheimer’s disease). The mind
is all too often left out of the equation, and as for quantum,
the word has traditionall y had no bearing on our training,
being the province of physics. Quantum Healing  looked past this long-accepted
compartmentalization, opening up genetics, along with
every other corner of physiology, to quantum thinking. I
didn’t delve into the mind-body connection when I ﬁrst
began my quest to end Alzheimer’s disease, but since it’s a
brain disorder, I discovered common ground with a broad
thinker like Deepak. After getting  excited about how our
interests and passions overlapped, we wrote a book, Super
Brain,  together. The gist of the book, based on solid
neuroscience, is that the brain is plastic, inﬂuenced by
thoughts, feelings, choices, and most important, self-
awareness. We also explored a radical possibility that
Quantum Healing  ﬁrst proposed: What if the mind is
creating the brain at the same time that the brain is
creating the mind. This was a mind-blowin g (or brain-
blowing) idea, because it ﬂew straight past the insistence
that only physical processes matter in the brain
(materialism) and that every answer lies at the level of the
neuron (reductionism). The basic research that was showing how messenger
molecules carry information from the brain to every cell in
the body was new when Quantum Healing  was published. Now our knowledge in this area is extremely sophisticated. The next frontier is the mind-gene connection. Here
Deepak and I have found the most exciting possibilities. We
are actively pursuing the beneﬁcial genetic chan ges that
occur in meditation and other contemplative practices. Long portrayed as spiritual, these are actually mind-body
techniques that speak to every cell and even deeper, to
every gene. The implications are explosive when it comes
to cutting-edge science in preventing or reversin g chronic
disorders, attacking the causes of aging, and ﬁghting
against the subtle imbal ances that lead to inﬂammation,
now the prime suspect in many disorders, including cancer. We are proposing that lifestyle choices, insofar as they
aﬀect a person’s genes, can lead to transformati on at the
level where personal evolution occurs. Genes are not the
ﬁxed, stable, immovable entities I was taught about; they
are ﬂuid and dynamic, and their activities are altered by
every experience, thought, word, and action in a person’s
life. So, why not direct your experience to inﬂuence your
genes in the most positive ways. Ground is being broken in
“self-directed biological transformation” (SDBT), our
phrase for personalized conscious evolution. (And a new
book is emerging from this concept, titled Super Genes,  to
bring SDBT into the practicalities of daily life. ) Quantum Healing  didn’t set out to cure cancer or
Alzheimer’s or any other  intractable disease. It set out to
see the human body, and human existence in general,
through wiser eyes. As a scienti st I’m passionate about
genes and the brain; as a person I’m totally fascinated by
the origins of consciousness. Quantum Healing  galvanized
my intuition that these areas do not have to be separated. They belong together naturally, and once we feel securethat self-awareness is integral to the healthy workings of
the body, it will be integral to existence itself. Beyond that,
the possibilities are inﬁnite. —
Rudolph Tanzi, Ph.
Deepak Chopra, M.D.
Who is the author of the book "Quantum Healing"?
The book argues that the mind and body are connected, and that the mind can influence the body to heal or become sick.
What is the main argument of the book "Quantum Healing"?
Adi Shankara
What is the name of the Indian philosopher who stated that people grow old and die because they see others grow old and die?
The book proposes that the mind and body are not separate entities, but are connected and can be influenced by each other, and that the mind can be used to heal the body.
What is the main point of the book "Quantum Healing"?
Quantum healing
What is the term used to describe the connection between the mind and body, as proposed in "Quantum Healing"?