Why Am I Like This?
In medicine, many diseases exist in subclinical forms. Symptoms may be mild or nonexistent, but laboratory testing shows the disease to have occurred. For the West Nile virus, for example, over a hundred people become infected for each one who actually gets sick. Mononucleosis and hepatitis, particularly in children, are usually asymptomatic.
Consequently, Stevenson wonders if there are lesser, incomplete forms of the previous-life phenomenon, such as a strong personality trait or penchant appearing in a child within a family where it would be unusual. Corliss Chotkin, Jr. had a fascination with engines, and a precocious ability to operate and repair them. He didn't learn this from his father, who was far from mechanically inclined. But Victor Vincent had repaired engines. Stevenson cites another case of a boy who had a fascination with watches, as well as an uncanny ability to repair them, in a family where watchmaking was quite alien.
Further conjecture along these lines includes the differences between identical twins. With precisely the same genetic material, twins arising from a single sperm-egg union (known as monozygotic), even when raised together and in the same way, often show differences. A new branch of science called epigenetics tries to explain this by showing how some genes can be activated or de-activated so that the same DNA may drive a cell in different directions. A newspaper report about this research refers to the process as "a mysterious biological mechanism." Which is to say, even if we know hot' the body steers a cell in a particular direction, we still don't know i'&y.
Among the University of Virginia's twenty-five hundred reincarnation-type cases are forty-two identical-twin pairs where both twins had memories of previous lives. Thirty-one of these are solved: Two previously living persons (each corresponding to one twin's memories) were identified. These "corresponding pairs," interestingly, had usually been related to each other, like husband and wife. Needless to say, these twins' personality differences and relationships to each other resembled those of their earlier counterparts, however their genes lined up to express this.
Then there are the children whose current sex differs from their "previous" one. Cross-dressing and other gender-inappropriate behavior may be seen. Stevenson followed some of these children into adulthood, and found that most had come to accept their bodies and their genders. I suspect that in the times and cultures in which this happened, "coming out" was, shall we say, less fashionable than it currently is in the U.S., and same-sex orientation may have been more frequent than it appeared. Stevenson considers homosexuality a possible outcome of male/female reincarnative mismatch. As I noted in chapter 6, no one else as yet has come up with a better explanation.
Process and Outcome
Whatever process Stevenson has spent his life studying, he stops short of labeling it "reincarnation." An earlier book (1974) was titled 20 Cases Sugge.,tive )/* Reineariurtian. The most recent work (2001), which I cited at this chapter's beginning is subtitled A Question o/' Reincarnation. At other times, Stevenson has referred to "cases of the reincarnation-type" (all emphasis mine).
In the 2001 book, he reflects about some other implications. He is often asked about the math: Since more people are alive today than at any previous time, from whence do their spirits derive? Aside from the fact that the number of all the people who ever walked this planet is greater than the earth's current population, or that souls might be created as needed, he replies that a reincarnation need not be one-to-one, or that multiple bodies might share one mind (as the Igbo of Nigeria and the Inuit believe), or that animals may at times occupy positions in the cycle of birth/rebirth (as the Hindus and Buddhists believe).
As to the preponderance of violent deaths among the cases, are these simply more memorable? Or might such avenues of dying focus the karma more sharply? Why do children, if they remember at all, only remember one life? Is it because that is the one most recent? Why do genetics and environment, the scientific one-two punch of all biologic determinism, fail to explain many personality traits and illnesses?
What about individuals who, as children, seemed to "know" their destinies? Stevenson cites Florence Nightingale, who as a small child doctored her dolls and ultimately went into nursing despite her parents' objections. St. Catherine of Siena fasted and scourged herself and played hermit in her early childhood. Although her parents were pious, nothing in their lives presaged their daughter's path to sainthood. While these examples, unlike Stevenson's "typical case," never morphed away from their childhood personae nor specified a findable person who they claimed to be, one wonders how a child so clearly sees a road that no one else can see.
Of course, we only notice the ones whose paths lead to fame. In my contemporary culture, Bob Dylan imagined himself, early on, as an archetypal American Folksinger. While his mother's family owned theaters, I have never heard mention of any of' his relatives being a serious performer or musician. Although some considered his act phony in that it belied his middle-class Jewish upbringing, a sense of self is not a simple thing to trace. In a 6OzWinute., interview (December 5, 2004), Dylan told Ed Bradley that he knew as a boy that he was destined to become a music legend. He said he changed his name (from Robert Allen Zimmerman) because "you're born, you know, the wrong names, wrong parents." He said he had no idea how he wrote his great songs of the sixties, that they were "almost magically written." In a PBS broadcast (September 26, 2005), No I)ircvtion Hoene, Dylan reiterated: "I was born very far from where I'm supposed to be ..." and "... not even born to the right parents or something...."
Another example: the Reverend Al Sharpton. According to a Ai',,' Thrk-er profile (February 18, 2002), he began preaching "almost as soon" as he could talk. He would regularly arrange his sister's dolls as a congregation, don his mother's bathrobe, and preach using a candle as a microphone. In public school, he would only sign his name as "Reverend Alfred Sharpton." No one knew where this came from, and no one could make him stop doing it. (He did ultimately accept advice to shorten "Alfred" to "Al".)
How does a four-year-old have a sense of destiny? How does a child claim to really be someone else, and supply verifiable details of the life of another person that he could not possibly have known? Stevenson ruled out fraud in all but a very few cases. He also ruled out a forgotten source of the information, because there are too many families where this would have been impossible. How is the information acquired? Telepathy? Possession? Stevenson considers these, but favors some sort of' survival of personality after death.
I have no explanation either, but the findings and the thorough, meticulous research of the cases that has been Stevenson's life work are undeniable. Reviewing one of' his earlier works, in 1975, the ,Journal o/' the American JIer)i'eal tleeoeiation notes that while he may not convince skeptics, he has "painstakingly and unemotionally ... placed on record a large amount of data that cannot be ignored." Read one of his books and see for yourself'.
mart 2
sixteen
One Person's Paranormal Is Another
Person's Science: Acupuncture
An American ear, nose, and throat surgeon from New York's Mount Sinai Hospital traveled to China in 1971, when the first trickle of Westerners was being allowed to do so. Dr. Samuel Rosen was invited to show the Chinese an operation to restore hearing that he had developed, and to witness Chinese medicine. One thing he witnessed was something he couldn't have imagined; this description is taken from his autobiography.
A Most Unusual Scenario
The patient was a forty-year-old man, a physician himself, suffering from tuberculosis that could not be eradicated with drugs. He needed part of his lung removed-a lobe infested with the germs-to cure, or at least control, his disease. A lobe is a sizeable piece of lung, up to a third, and getting to it requires what is known in medical slang as "cracking the chest."
This, unfortunately, is very much like it sounds; but if you're a surgeon doing it every day, you develop a businesslike detachment: You might as well be cracking an egg. Needless to say,
this operation requires anesthesia well beyond what a few shots of novocaine can do, because thoracotomy (the non-slang term) necessitates breaking ribs.
In what he describes as a familiar, standard operating room, Dr. Rosen watched the anesthesiologist-an acupuncturistclean the patient's right forearm with alcohol, select a fine, stainless-steel needle, and then insert it, almost an inch deep, into the outer forearm about halfway between the wrist and elbow. Keep in mind that in 1971, almost no one in the U.S. had ever heard of acupuncture, let alone seen it, so this doctor from New York was already bewildered.
The Chinese practitioner began to twirl the needle; she continued this for about twenty minutes, occasionally questioning the patient about his sensations. She nodded to the surgeon, and then Dr. Rosen saw something he couldn't believe. Without hesitating, the surgeon sliced an incision over a foot long from back around to front, while the American braced himself for the patient's screams. They never came. Which was good, because then it was time to crack the chest. With a scissors-like instrument, the surgeon began cutting ribs, in their entirety, away from the breastbone, so they could then be spread, opening a window in which the heart and lungs could be seen.
All this while the patient was awake. He sipped some tea as the nurse held the teakettle spout to his lips. He conversed with the surgeon, who showed him the removed section of lung for a quick medical consultation as to whether this looked adequate. It did. The surgeon closed. The patient, smiling and comfortable, sat up and bade his "American friends" goodbye, and was wheeled away.
All told, Samuel Rosen watched fifteen major surgeries under acupuncture anesthesia, including operations on the brain, stomach, thyroid, and tonsils. As strange as this appeared to a Westerner, it worked.
James Reston Visits China
That same year, New York Time. columnist James Reston traveled to China, where he ended up needing an emergency appendectomy. Although a more conventional type of anesthesia was used for the operation itself, on the second night afterward, Mr. Reston had a lot of abdominal pain. Rather than a shot of morphine, an acupuncturist was called in, with Reston's approval. Long, thin needles were inserted into the outer right elbow and below the knees, and these were manipulated to enhance the effect. Reston at first thought this a rather complicated-not to mention circuitous-way of dealing with his pain, as the needles were inserted at locations far from the pain itself.
But ... an hour later, the pain and the abdominal gas distention abated and did not return. Reston was struck by the unusual nature of the treatment he had received and, being a columnist, wrote about it ("Now, let me tell you about my appendectomy in Peking ... ," Neu' York Tunes, July 26, 1971). This was the first mass-media introduction to acupuncture in the United States.
A Blast From the Past
The history of acupuncture goes back several thousand years, overlapping Judeo-Christian biblical times. Its origins are a little obscure, but most historians cite a basis within the philosophy of Chinese medicine having to do with energy flows through the body and a need to balance them. It was not used exclusively by the Chinese; a system sounding like acupuncture was described in an Egyptian papyrus, and forms of healing based on stimulation of far-away points can be found in a variety of cultures. When a frozen five-thousand-year-old man was found in a glacier way up in the Alps of northern Italy in 1991, his unusually well-preserved body showed, some believe, tattoo evidence of acupuncture treatment.
Other tales of its provenance are more practically and empirically based. Ancient warriors who had been shot with arrows in certain areas of the body couldn't help but notice that chronic ailments elsewhere got better as a result. Or huddled around a fire in olden times, flying embers accidentally burned specific body areas, resulting-lo and behold - in an unexpected cure of something. (Acupuncture points, in fact, don't have to be needled -they can be lightly burned as well. The herb moxa [mugwort] is used for this, and the process is known as moxibustion.)
However it developed, acupuncture, upon its arrival in the West, appeared sufficiently strange to be considered ... paranormal. In fact, a symposium on the topic at Stanford University in 1972 was sponsored by a California organization known as the Academy of Parapsychology and Medicine. The program was hosted not by the Stanford Medical School, which thought it too weird, but by the Department of Industrial Engineering and Materials Science. Fourteen hundred physicians attended (twice the number expected).
This information derives from a paper in the Journal of the American Medical Wrornen:+ A,osociatinn later that year, by Stanford psychiatrist J. Elizabeth Jeffress, who entitled the piece "Acupuncture: Witchcraft or Wizardry?". She concluded "that the failure to understand how it works should not deter us from using acupuncture."
Acceptance of the Craft
In my professional lifetime, acupuncture has moved over a long bridge. It is now practically mainstream. Insurance often pays for it. Veterinarians use it on animals. Our National Institutes of Health (NIH), in a 1998 consensus statement, found "promising results" in the treatment of dental pain and of the nausea and vomiting that follow chemotherapy or surgery. "May be useful" was the designation for a host of other conditions. The point, as it were, is that acupuncture's effectiveness has been validated via scientific study for a variety of conditions.
Here's an example, from the Journal ol'the American .4fedieal Aoociation (JAMA), in the November 11, 1998 issue: "Moxibustion for Correction of Breech Presentation, a Randomized Controlled Trial." Breech presentation is when a baby comes out bottom first, and it's a difficult delivery (in this country, it usually means a Caesarian section). The infant's position in the womb can be ascertained by ultrasound images, so it needn't be a delivery-room surprise.
Breech orientation in the womb is common early in a pregnancy, but the small, mobile fetus often rights itself' into the correct position. Attempts can be made to manipulate it into alignment by pushing from the outside. Sometimes this works, but there is another way: moxibustion. As mentioned, this is the burning of moxa at specific locations corresponding to acupuncture points.
The study was done in China. The 130 women studied were thirty-three weeks pregnant with their first child. All had ultrasound-confirmed breech-positioned fetuses. The 130 were "randomized": Half got the usual prenatal care; the other half got that, plus moxibustion. This meant firing up a cigar-shaped roll of moxa and singeing, as much as the patient could stand, the outside of each little toe. This is the location of a particular acupoint; it was cooked, you could say, until it was red and short of blistering, fifteen minutes on each fifth toe. That's thirty minutes a day, and daily treatment was given for a week. If baby hadn't turned by then, another week of therapy was given.
After two weeks, the trial stopped, and any pregnancy still a breech was referred for the standard turning procedure. It is hard to have control patients in an acupuncture study, since it's a little obvious who's getting the real McCoy. You can stimulate areas that aren't known acupoints, but sometimes even that has a therapeutic effect. In the treated group, three-quarters of the fetuses converted to a normal (vertex) lie; in the usual care ("control") group, slightly less than half corrected. Increased fetal motion was noted in the treatment group; presumably this enabled the redirection.
In other words, burning a little mugwort on the outsides of your pinky toes rights your fetus's position. I read it in the Journal of the American Medical Aeeociation. And if I had read it somewhere else, and if it had been called witchcraft, I wouldn't have known the difference.
In fact, in 1995, Japanese acupuncturist and physician Yoshiaki Omura went to Brazil and observed several psychic healers. Omura had been one of the first acupuncturists to demonstrate acupuncture anesthesia in the United States in the early 1970s. The healing ritual he watched in Sao Paulo included sham surgery, some real minor surgery, and injection of a strange-looking liquid. Omura noted that the injections were at known acupuncture points, and that the healer twirled the needle, as an acupuncturist wou
ld. Other aspects of the process also looked familiar. Pointing fingers at patients without touching them resembled a Qi Gong distant-healing technique. Massage and a manual procedure appeared to be a form of chiropractic manipulation. In other words, what looked like a primitive healing ritual actually contained aspects of known medical processes. Omura's "Impression of Observing Psychic Surgery and Healing in Brazil Which Appear to Incorporate Qi Gong Energy and the Use of Acupuncture Points" was published in Aeupuet Eleetrother Re:leareh in 1997.
Uses
What are the therapeutic uses of acupuncture? As seen in the opening example, it can be used for surgical anesthesia. I remember a brief time, after acupuncture first made its way westward, when people wondered if it would replace our standard inhalation anesthesia, colloquially known as "gas." It seemed as though American anesthesiologists risked obsolescence.
This never happened. Aside from all the politics that would have been involved, gas is basically a sure thing. You may have to give a little more sometimes, and there is always the risk of a serious allergic reaction, but your patient won't start kicking on the operating table while your hands are inside his abdomen. Acupuncture, for whatever reason, doesn't work on everyone, and may work better for some areas of the body than others. I understand that in China nowadays, most surgical anesthesia is done as we do it here, and sometimes for a very American reason: the reimbursement is better!
The Witch in the Waiting Room: A Physician Investigates Paranormal Phenomena in Medicine Page 16