262: Miracle Cures
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Back in the 60s, when Stephen was a young surgeon in Boston, a guy came in with abdominal pain, which turned out to be his gallbladder. He needed an operation. But the guy tells Stephen this story of how, 12 years before, he had come into that exact same hospital and had had cancer. It started in his stomach and it spread to his belly. The doctors opened him up. And the surgeons had seen cancer that had spread into his liver and throughout his abdomen. They could do nothing and they just closed the abdomen and sent him home to die. And yet here he was, 12 years later, seeming quite healthy. Stephen was skeptical. Cancer usually does not just go away with no treatment at all. The guy must have gotten the story wrong in some way. Then I went back to the patient's chart and I read, in fact, the pathology reports and I was still skeptical. So then I went back and actually pulled out the slides to be sure. In fact, it had cancer and we reviewed the slides and in fact it was a cancer. And then I made sure it was in fact the same patient and in fact it was. And then when you opened him up, were you fully expecting you were going to still find some cancer? Well, it was 12 years later and I didn't know what to expect. I operated on him, took out his gallbladder, examined the inside of his abdomen and all of the cancer that had been present to 12 years earlier had completely disappeared in the absence of any treatment. It appeared that this patient's body had somehow rejected his cancer. This patient set me on a quest for the next 25 years to try to explain how such a thing could happen. And in fact this doctor, Stephen Rosenberg, is now a pioneer in inventing immunotherapies based on that research at the National Cancer Institute, where he's chief of surgery. And it's interesting, you know, you can find the story about this early case of his all over the place. It circulates on the internet. It shows up in books about people spontaneously recovering from cancer. And he is not happy about that. He kind of hates it in fact because he says that this story gives people false hope. In his career he's seen maybe 10,000 cancer patients and this is the only case like this that he has ever encountered. It is just fantastically rare. And it is so easy, he says, for patients to get their hopes up. How could anybody not get their hopes up, you know? At Dr. Rosenberg, he's seen lots of patients take an advantage of by people who play on this dream of a spontaneous recovery. People who prey on cancer patients are offering quack treatments often take advantage of cancer patients who are desperate. And I've seen entire families devastated as their entire resources are devoted to treatments of no value. Still, hope is important. So what do you do when people place hope in things that probably are not going to work? Well, lots of times his patients come to him asking about vitamins and herbs and visualization and other treatments that have not been proven by science. And if the treatments aren't actually going to hurt them in any way, he says, sure, do it. Studies have shown that patients who are embracing life feeling more hopeful, feeling more in control of their situation. Do better, respond better to medical treatment of all kinds. There are real health effects to hope itself. And so, today on our radio show we have two stories of hope, the power of hope. Hope in some things that are not very likely, I have to say. We have stories about the great side of that and the maybe less great side of that. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International, I'm Ira Glass, our program today in two acts. At one, a son tries to help his mom in a far away place defy the laws of medical science. At two, a daughter tries to help her dad by going to a far away place to defy the laws of the United States of America. Stay with us. [Music] At one, changing the channeler. You may remember Davey Rothbard, he's been on our show a few times. At one point he came onto the show to tell the story of his mother Barbara, who's a suburban mom in Ann Arbor, Michigan, who seems like lots of funny, smart moms that you have met in your life. Except that she channels an ancient being named Aaron. Aaron is a Buddhist monk. Aaron gives advice along Buddhist lines to people who come into the house. He showed up in Barbara's life. I think that's the right way to say that. He showed up in Barbara's life years ago. Barbara is also deaf. She hasn't been able to hear anything for decades. And a while back, she heard about this healer in Brazil, a man who goes by the name Chao Dadeos, John of God, who, people said, could make the deaf here. And she wanted to go down and see if he could help her out. Davey is really close to her, and he agreed to go along. She was very hopeful about it. She wouldn't say, "I'm going to come back. I'm going to be hearing." But I could just tell that in the months leading up to her trip, she was getting more and more excited about it. She started just dropping little things into conversation. Like, one night me and her were talking about, "My little brother has a new album coming out." "Your brother's a band." Yeah, he's like a musician. So, some of them, she gave me, she just kind of like, she'd give me a little funny smile. And she'd just say, "I can't wait to hear it." I got excited, too. I talked to her about this on tape. I want to hear Peter sing. I want to hear my mother's voice.
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