Cure: A Journey into the Science of Mind Over Body

by Jo Marchant

  One of the reports I look at is different. This is the case of a young Italian soldier named Vittorio Micheli; the sixty-third miracle, recognized in 1976. Vittorio was admitted to the hospital in April 1962, when he was 22, with pain in his hip. He was diagnosed with a malignant tumor—an osteosarcoma—in his pelvis. Over the next few months, the tumor destroyed the bones in his left hip, and invaded the surrounding muscle. According to the report, Vittorio received no treatment for his cancer—no surgery, chemotherapy or radiotherapy. With his leg dangling precariously from his body, doctors encased him in a plaster cast from head to foot, and said there was nothing they could do.

  At his mother’s insistence, Vittorio went to Lourdes in May 1963. He was frail and desperately ill—not eating, on high doses of painkillers, confined to his stretcher. “When I was there in Lourdes, I didn’t feel anything extraordinary,” he recalled in 2014. “But on the way back, on the train, I didn’t need any painkillers anymore. And I started to be hungry. I started to eat again.”31 He returned to the hospital in Italy, but his doctors didn’t pay much attention to his story until months later, when Vittorio started to feel that his leg was once more attached to his body. In February 1964, his doctors removed the cast, and he was able to walk. Vittorio has returned to Lourdes many times since, often as a volunteer, and even got married there. Now in his seventies, he can still walk perfectly well.

  This is the case I choose to investigate further. Once I’m back in the U.K., I show Vittorio’s report to Tim Briggs, an orthopedic surgeon and expert on osteosarcoma at the Royal National Orthopedic Hospital in Stanmore, Middlesex. Radiographs taken before Vittorio’s visit to Lourdes show an enormous mass of tumor covering his left hip, with the head of the femur and the socket of his pelvis completely eaten away. Histology samples—slices of cells from the surrounding tissue—show rampant, invasive cancer. Then, over the page234an X-ray image taken after Vittorio returned from Lourdes and his cast was removed. There’s no longer any sign of cancer, and the bone has regrown. The bone is a bit misshapen, like scar tissue, but the structure is there—the ball of the femur, the socket of the pelvis—all perfectly functional.

  Briggs seems impressed at first. “It’s astounding,” he says. He takes the report to study in detail, and a few weeks later calls me back to his office. “I’ve got an answer for you!” he says, triumphantly. After studying the histology slides, he confirms that the cancer was indeed malignant, but says that rather than osteosarcoma it looks like lymphoma, a more common cancer that affects not the bone cells themselves but lymphocytes, a type of white blood cell, within the bone marrow.

  Lymphoma is “a completely different malignancy,” says Briggs. Osteosarcoma is aggressive. Today it is treated with chemotherapy, surgery to completely remove the tumor, then more chemotherapy, and even then only 60% of patients survive for five years. If Micheli’s tumor had been osteosarcoma, “He would have been dead.”32

  By contrast, patients with lymphoma don’t usually require surgery, and it can respond very well to chemotherapy. What’s more, Briggs and his colleagues have spotted a mention, buried deep in the Lourdes report, that Micheli may have received a drug called endoxan. This is another name for cyclophosphamide, an immunosuppressant drug often used to treat lymphomas because it kills white blood cells. The report is ambiguous on this point—elsewhere it states that Micheli was not treated for his cancer—but for Briggs, the only plausible explanation is that the mention of endoxan is accurate. Micheli “obviously had a very good response” to it, he says.

  Once the cancer was gone, Briggs isn’t surprised that Micheli’s hip joint regrew. “After chemotherapy, bones are amazing in their capacity to regenerate,” he says. He reckons that in Micheli’s case this might have taken around 6–12 months. From the limited information in the medical report, it’s impossible to know for sure what happened. But although Micheli’s recovery must have seemed miraculous to him at the time, there does not seem to be anything here that science is categorically unable to explain.

  Back in Lourdes, De Franciscis insists that even if we subsequently find medical explanations for some of the miracles, it won’t change their status as signs of divine intervention for those who want to believe. “A miracle is an interpretation,” he says. “A bishop believes that the person has received a gift from God.”

  I’m left feeling rather confused about the point of scientifically validating cures in the first place. For all of the committee’s meticulous work, it seems to me that the existence of divine miracles remains a matter of faith rather than science. What de Franciscis and I do agree on, however, is that religion—with Lourdes as a shining example—is a powerful mix of all of the ways in which the mind can benefit health, including social connection, stress reduction and placebo effects. And while this may well help people to feel better in all sorts of ways, it also proves that the mind cannot, in general, produce miraculous cures. Lourdes pilgrims, for all their belief, don’t generally go home physically transformed. Of the hundreds of millions of pilgrims who have visited, after all, there have been just a few thousand reported cures, and only 69 claimed miracles.

  “If Lourdes regarded itself as being a clinic, it should have closed the day after, it is a complete failure!” says de Franciscis. “No, Lourdes is not a clinic. It is a place of worship.” Counting cures misses the point, he argues; there is something much bigger, more transformative, that Lourdes has to offer. The original purpose of the medical bureau, he says, was to document miracles and therefore prove the existence of God. But now de Franciscis has a different mission.

  —

  I SAY HELLO and Christopher beams at me. He is 24, but looks much younger. He’s small, crunched up in his wheelchair with a hunchback and frail limbs. He pulls at my hand, then points at his huge smile to encourage me to take his photo on my phone. I show it to him and he holds the screen just an inch or two from his crossed eyes to scrutinize the picture before nodding, he’s pleased with the result.

  Christopher was born with a rare genetic condition called Rubinstein-Taybi syndrome. A mutation in a single key gene causes wide-ranging problems including mental retardation, stunted growth, heart problems, and difficulties with breathing, feeding, vision and speech. Christopher can’t walk or speak, his mom, Rose, tells me. He’s in diapers, and he needs constant care.

  I’m still taking this in as Rose introduces me to her daughter, Mary-Rose, who is three years younger than Christopher. She too was born with a devastating genetic syndrome, unrelated to her brother’s condition. Her body is riddled with benign tumors that damage the organs they inhabit, from her eyes and brain to her heart and lungs. Mary-Rose is taller and heavier than Christopher. She’s wearing a pink tracksuit, and her blond hair is adorned with pink and orange flowers. Like Christopher, Mary-Rose uses a wheelchair, wears diapers, and can’t speak. She can’t feed herself. She has epilepsy, and she’s blind. I hold her hand and tell her that I love the flowers in her hair, but her blank expression doesn’t change.

  Rose and her children are from County Cork in Ireland. They’re in Lourdes as part of a 130-person pilgrimage run by a small Irish charity called Casa. We meet in the hotel lobby just after dinner, towards the beginning of their weeklong stay. Rose is bright and down to earth but her dark eyes scream of exhaustion.

  She first brought Christopher here when he was four months old, she tells me. He had never left the hospital, and the doctors said he had just one month to live. Accompanied by a medical team, she took him to the airport and boarded a plane to Lourdes. “It’s the nearest place to heaven,” she says. “I wanted him to have no pain when he died.” Now she brings her children every year. In Lourdes, Rose says, they can be accepted. “People at home don’t understand that they’re loving individuals. They just see the wheelchairs. Here, people take them into their hearts and love them.”

  Since that first visit, Christopher has defied expectations. He has been through 17 rounds of surgery, says Rose, “on his heart, lungs,
legs, ears, eyes—all parts of his body.” But she attributes much of his progress to their annual pilgrimage. “Christopher wouldn’t be alive other than coming to Lourdes,” she insists. “He was never supposed to eat or interact. Now look at him.” Her son is indeed having a ball, spinning around the lobby in his wheelchair, the darling of the other guests. Meanwhile Mary-Rose “was getting 40 seizures a day,” says Rose. “Now she is getting three. Her first smile was at the grotto when she was nine months old. Then I knew she was going to be okay.”

  It seems to me, though, that the one who needs Lourdes the most is Rose herself. She looks after both of her children full-time at home, as well as her husband, who she says is severely ill. “At home, I can’t go anywhere,” she says. “I can’t push two wheelchairs.” This pilgrimage is the only break she gets. “I have no other life,” she says bluntly. “Here, I can be Rose. I’m a person as well. Once the children were born, people at home forgot I existed. When I’m here, I know I exist. Our Lady knows I exist.” Without this yearly trip, and the support of the medical staff and other pilgrims, she doesn’t know if she would have the strength to carry on. “There’s a big weight on my shoulders, and by the time I get home, it is gone,” she says. “I don’t know if it’s the baths. The grotto. The hugs. The looks. But it’s here it happens. I go home a new person.”

  The striking thing about Lourdes, I’m finding, is that cured or not, everyone I talk to here feels that they have experienced a miracle.

  Over the river in the Accueil Notre Dame, another Irish pilgrimage is packing to leave. Here I meet Caroline Dempsey from Dungarven, a 47-year-old teacher with short, fair hair and purple Crocs. She’s sharing a hospital room with three women in their eighties. We sit on her bed and chat as the nurses bring around biscuits and mugs of tea.

  Her partner died of cancer. And now Caroline has a sarcoma. It appeared seven years ago in her leg and was surgically removed, but it’s back in her abdomen. Caroline isn’t deeply religious; she didn’t want to come to Lourdes and is here only because her mother insisted. But now she doesn’t want to go home.

  “There’s something different about the Masses here,” she says. “At home, it feels like it’s just a ritual, nobody really means it. But here they are genuine. It feels as though thousands of people are praying for you to be well.” She didn’t get much out of the baths. But earlier that day, she had attended an anointing Mass, and as soon as the priest approached her with the oil, “I couldn’t move. I was melting. I felt a huge release.” When Caroline’s cancer returned, “I was so afraid,” she says. “But today I got this feeling. Have hope, live life, don’t dread it.”

  Across the corridor is 82-year-old John Flynn. He’s bald, and breathless as he talks. Scattered on his bed is a dizzying array of pills and capsules—pink, white, red-and-green; packaged in yellow bottles, foil packets and white plastic jars. John worked in an iron foundry for 30 years until he tore the tendons in his shoulder and could no longer work. That’s when he first came to Lourdes, in 1988. “I loved the experience,” he says. “I got hooked.” Now he’s back for the sixteenth time.

  He suffers from nerve pain, a dead hand and dragging leg after a stroke seven years ago, and arthritis everywhere. At home, he says he gets frustrated about the things that he can no longer do. But coming to Lourdes puts things into perspective—you see people far worse off than you, he says—and helps him to accept the situation that he’s in.

  Outside the hospital, women sit in the darkness, smoking and chatting as they look across the river towards the floodlit grotto. I’m ushered to a spare wheelchair by Joan—“I have MS and cancer and diabetes and arthritis,” she says. “I’m 56”—and Ann, who suffers from recurrent depression. “My brother drowned when I was four,” she says. “My father died when I was seven. I was sexually abused as a child. I got married, then my husband went off with someone else.”

  For them, what’s special about Lourdes is the social support. The chance to talk through problems is something they don’t feel is offered by the medical profession—or by society—back home. The two women only met this week, but “we’ve shared our lives,” says Joan. “When I’m at home, I’m on a journey alone. Here, there’s a great togetherness.”

  “At home, no one talks to each other,” echoes Ann, with a mug of tea in one hand and a cigarette in the other. “If we go to the psychiatrist, we’re given a pill. The psychiatrist said to me, ‘I’m not here to listen. I’m here to diagnose and prescribe.’ ” She’s not criticizing the medical profession, she says. Doctors can’t listen to every story, and without psychiatric hospitals she wouldn’t be here today. “But here, there’s less fear. People are not afraid to talk. Love is oozing out of the walls.” What every single one of the pilgrims also mentions is the care and support they get from the volunteers here, from teenaged helpers to senior doctors. “It is fantastic,” says Joan. “They treat you with respect.”

  Surprisingly, I hear similar sentiments from the volunteers themselves. They pay their own way and give up a precious week of holiday to come here every summer. “I don’t come here for the pilgrims,” one volunteer tells me as we line up for dinner in the staff cafeteria. “I come here for me. Because I need this in my life every year.” Another volunteer, a London banker who doesn’t tell his friends that he comes to Lourdes, says he first came as a teenager, to give thanks after he recovered from an illness. Decades later he still comes, because he gets “such a buzz out of helping.”

  Volunteers and medical staff tell me that Lourdes puts their own life concerns into perspective, and provides a camaraderie they don’t get in their normal lives. It is the kind of place where you make best friends immediately, they say. Everyone here—sick and well—is equal, no matter what they do back home.

  I’ve seen what they mean. Healthy, sick, rich and poor really do mix intimately here in a way that I’ve never experienced, and random acts of kindness are the norm. In the baths, volunteers tie pilgrims’ shoelaces. In the basilica, the sick are lined up right at the front. Even in the back streets full of tacky tourist shops, there are wheelchair lanes instead of bicycle lanes. A nun I’ve never met before secretly pays for my lunch. I go to the station to help pilgrims off the train, and find out later that my fellow volunteers included a CEO and a garbageman.

  This, says de Franciscis, is the real miracle of Lourdes.

  In Western society, he argues, the sick are sidelined, and stripped of their humanity. “Once you get admitted to a hospital,” he says, “you become a leukemia. You become a hypercholesterolemia. You become a diagnosis.” Whereas in Lourdes, he reckons, the sick are treated not as diseases but as people, equal to the most senior doctor. “It is normal in Lourdes to sing together, to pray together, to chat, to dance, to have beer.”

  This, then, is de Franciscis’s new mission. As head of Lourdes’s medical bureau he still documents unexplained cures. But his priority now is to show the wider world the benefits of an approach in which the sick are respected, valued and cared for by all. He ultimately hopes to transform how the sick are treated not just in hospitals and clinics but also in everyday life; to inspire a different way for us all to live that doesn’t necessarily involve religious belief. “It’s above the church,” he says. “This is a different model of society.”

  It’s a model in which our biological state is entwined with psychological, emotional and spiritual health. This seems to add up to a different kind of healing, one that goes beyond cells and molecules to encompass our humanity too. We’ve seen some examples of that throughout this book, with researchers repeatedly finding that people treated in a more holistic way do better physically as well as emotionally. Here in Lourdes, this approach is being played out on a grand scale. And millions of patients, volunteers and medical staff alike are coming back year after year just to get a taste of it.

  —

  IT’S HOT in the baths, and I’m dripping with sweat as I near the end of my shift. This afternoon we’ve lifted stretcher
after stretcher. It is hard work, physically and mentally. Trying to understand the instructions barked in French. Trying not to slip on the wet tiles. Navigating a whirlwind of underwear of all shapes, sizes and designs. And now here is the old lady with the mountainous tummy.

  Her eyes widen as we plunge her into the water. “Ohhhhh!” she says, her toothless mouth forming a perfect circle. She’s in only for a second, then we lift her out and tilt up her stretcher. She fixes her eyes on the Mary statue as the water rolls off. We all speak together: “Notre-Dame de Lourdes, priez pour nous! Sainte Bernadette, priez pour nous!” Then we remove the wet sheet that covers her and replace it with the blanket.

  As we carry her back to the gurney she is calm, no longer shaking, and she grips my arm tightly as the others dress her. “Merci!” she says. She pulls me close and smiles. “Merci!” Her eyes are pale gray. Before I saw only the ugliness of age: wrinkles, fat, wasting muscles, dwindling limbs. Now I see kindness, love, laughter, and I’m struck by her beauty. I wonder who she is, what she has done in her life, who she has known. What it’s like to be so close to death.

  I’m not sure what to say. I have limited knowledge of French, and of her faith. “C’était parfait,” I whisper. It was perfect.

  CONCLUSION

  “Can you see it?” Mary Lee McRoberts arranges herself against the wall. “Drop your lids and dull your eyes,” she advises. “You don’t want to look hard.”

  We’re in a small, darkened room in McRoberts’s home in an exclusive community in Washington State. The space is lined with bookshelves and dominated by a tall massage table on which I’m lying, padded with cushions and covered with a soft, velvet blanket. McRoberts is a reiki master, and she’s trying to show me her aura.

  The local TV news recently featured McRoberts apparently curing a patient with fibromyalgia.1 The report described how she works with people’s energy fields to clear blockages and heal the body. Her patient, a blond executive named Sue, says her pain subsided after just a couple of sessions with McRoberts. Sue also lost weight after the reiki therapy, and says blood tests show she has improved on cholesterol and blood sugar too.