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The Human Body Can Heal in Astonishing Ways
Even for energy healers, people’s sudden recoveries can be hard to explain
The first acupuncture patient I ever worked with on my own was a woman who had broken both of her legs. She had been visiting a fire station with her women’s group and was encouraged, ill-advisedly as it turned out, to slide down the fire pole. When I met her, she was still walking with two canes — a full year after her accident.
I was just beginning my third year of a four-year master’s degree in acupuncture and Chinese medicine in San Diego, California, and a long way from my native Britain. Before treating this woman, I had only ever performed acupuncture on a patient as an assistant to a more senior student; before that, I’d practiced on sewn bags of rice. Though I did have a supervisor, he was also watching several other students, so I was practicing acupuncture unaccompanied for the first time.
I forged ahead with my first patient, putting needles in a selection of basic acupuncture points to address her pain. The woman was completely still and silent throughout. I had no sense as to whether anything I was doing was having any effect at all. The session seemed rather unremarkable — disappointingly so — until the end. What happened next will sound too good to be true, but bear with me: The point of this story is that it’s easy to attribute recoveries we don’t understand to the miraculous when, in fact, they are really just recoveries we don’t understand.
After I removed the last needle and whispered a quiet “thank you” to indicate the treatment was over, the woman opened her eyes and said, “That felt amazing!” She sat upright from the table and declared, “I’m going to try walking without my canes.” And that she did. She walked slowly around the room. I felt as if we were on a daytime talk show—the whole thing was so surreal.
People can heal in astonishing ways.
It was immediately clear to me that, tempting as it was, I couldn’t take credit. For a start, I wasn’t sure that the patient’s sudden impulse to walk, although dramatic, was all that miraculous. After a year of using canes, there was bound to come a time when she felt confident enough to discard them. Perhaps the…
