Jeffrey Rediger, M.D., M.Div: The Mystery of Spontaneous Healing
Dr. Jeffrey Rediger, physician, psychiatrist, author and speaker who joins us today to discuss his best-selling book, Cured: The Life-Changing Science of Spontaneous Healing. Dr. Rediger, the medical director of McLean and an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, has spent over 15 years studying spontaneous healing, exploring and analyzing unexplained, “miraculous” recoveries in cases conventional medicine dismissed as hopeless. A leading voice challenging current healthcare systems and treatment models, in Cured, Dr. Rediger explains the science behind these miracles—digging into the root causes of illness and revealing how to create an environment that sets the stage for healing that beats the odds.
There is a part of us that knows how to heal, Dr. Rediger tells us, pushing us to explore how we can tap into the curative, regenerative potential of our own bodies rather than engaging in the endless search for external healing solutions. Our minds exert deep control over our physical reality, his research shows, making mental healing as important as, and a tool for, physical healing. Dr. Rediger’s work creates a new paradigm of healing from physical illness—for those with life-altering diagnoses, and for those of us who simply want to live healthier lives.
EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:
The miracle of homeostasis…
Mining spontaneous recovery for commonalities…
Is there a message my body is sending me?...
Setting yourself up for long term health…
MORE FROM DR. JEFFREY REDIGER:
Cured: Strengthen Your Immune System and Heal Your Life
A Medicine of Hope and Possibility | Dr. Jeffrey Rediger | TEDxNewBedford
TRANSCRIPT:
(Edited slightly for clarity.)
ELISE LOEHNEN:
You can really tell when people have poured all of their wisdom into something. I count Cured as one of those great book.It's such a gift and so important, I think. And obviously we'll get into why, but big snaps to you. One of its central thrums is is there is this part of us that knows how to heal, or this is possible. Tapping into something outside of medicine. And yet culturally we're trained rightly and wrongly to look out there for the solutions to what's happening in here. And that can take us farther away from sort of the blueprint for health.
JEFFRY REDIGER, M.D.:
Yes. There's a lot of pieces to this, I believe because the west evolved for very specific historical reasons in the direction of looking for external solutions, whether it's an external medication, for example, or technology in medicine. But in religion, it's a similar thing. It’s looking to an external priest or religious figure or pastor, or even Christ as an external figure who is going to save the person who has no goodness at all left within them in the west. We began to emphasize original sin and to minimize the primary role of everyone in is created in the image of God. And that's the primary reality, but some of the Western approaches began to emphasize that the whole thing of original sin instead of image of God, and that ends up then with the person having no good inside of them, looking for, and needing an external Christ to save them, which is a really different understanding than for example, Eastern Christianity, which is what Christianity was for the first 1200 years. It was Eastern, not the Western variant that then grew out of that. So there's a lot to that.
ELISE:
Yeah. But it is a systemic belief whether people are secular or maybe more, more affiliated with this Western ideology of I'm born a sinner, born depraved, born bad. I must be redeemed. The body must be overcome. God heaven, it's all outside of me. Rather than, oh, it is with, I, I am living it. The goodness is inside of me. I can tap that at any point. Take us to this, and I know that you worked on this book for so long, but take us to this moment of like watching these literally miracles the, or that's how we would, what we would call them. But really more, you could almost call it a miracle of homeostasis right of like the body healing itself or coming back into balance.
JEFFREY:
Right.
ELISE:
Not magic. Um, take us to that moment.
JEFFREY:
Well, there's a lot of steps along the way. I mean, I, I did this research since 2003 and it was a very halting journey for me, a very slow learning process because it, it ended up working such a deep transformation in my own beliefs at a very deep level, in such a way that ended up having many of my beliefs as a physician, as a psychiatrist, and even as a theologian turned upside down. And this changed the way I view the world, the way I work with patients that changed me professionally and personally. So it was a very deep, slow, learning. Medical school was a very powerful socialization process. And so one comes out of that medical training after being kind of broken down and built back up into a very specific worldview that is powerful ins own. But also very limiting in terms of seeing the forest for the trees.
One of the experiences that I did not put in Cured, but that came up a lot in hearing people describe their healings. It was fascinating to me that it would be not uncommon for the person, and this happened usually with women, but women would be telling me their stories and they would say something like I started having these dreams with the blue that's in Mother Mary's robes, for example. Or they would begin to pay attention to the theoandrocacy of Mary, that one sees reported around the world, whether at Lords or in Spain or Mexico or other places. And I begin o wonder if what was happening in the healing of these physical illnesses, if there's a rebalancing that seemed to take place in a person's psyche, as something more balanced between the masculine and the feminine aspects of themselves was achieving homeostasis, like you say, or a new kind of balance.
And, and it was like other aspects of themselves came into more full presence in their lives, as well as these healings occurred. And so I began to believe, sometimes their careers would shift in a way that they wanted to have more time for more creative endeavors rather than a life that had been more unilinear in its focus. And sometimes perhaps, participating in the more masculine kind of world that I think is reinforced in our society a lot. But this blue or some aspect of the feminine came up a lot in, in people's stories as they were talking about their healings. So that comes to mind just with you telling me a little bit about your own interests and work.
ELISE:
That's beautiful. And that doesn't surprise me. And, the visitations that I've felt are, have been from Mother Mary in my own life, where I have conversations with her in my dreams, where she plays with my hair. So I very much relate. In fact, she sort of mid-pandemic had come to me and told me that I had to stop drinking. And in that, in that night, I was like, felt like I was gonna vomit. I wasn't drunk or hung over, but I was like having those feelings. And she struck a bargain with me that was effectively like, you really cannot drink. And you've got to be more conscious of your energy. And I wasn't teetering towards alcoholism or anything, but it was an interesting intervention from Mother Mary in my dreams. And I'm sure people listening think I'm crazy, but hopefully you've listened to me long enough to know that I'm not that nuts.
JEFFREY:
Well, I'm a psychiatrist. I can tell you. You're not crazy. So I'm qualified to determine that.
ELISE:
Thank you. Um, no, but I'm not surprised. I mean, what I also loved about Cured is you talk about sort of the rates of these, and obviously they're rare, but they're not that rare. They're just no way to study them. So they're typically dismissed as, you know, wacky situations rather than mined for wisdom. But I love that you were like, I'm gonna mine them for wisdom. And from that, I will create a map to healing. Andthey don't abide, right? Like that's all, this is deeply personal work for each person. There’s no map.
JEFFREY:
They're not that rare. It's just, we, we ignore them and minimize them when they occur. We kind of put them in this pigeon hole in our minds and, and nurses around the nurses station will talk late at night sometimes about these things about, remember that case of spontaneous submission or whatever, and this bizarre story. But it's so outside of our normal way of thinking. And since we are taught that these things are flukes with no medical or scientific value, we don't explore them and we call them spontaneous remission, if you're on the scientific side. If you're on the spiritual or religious side, you call this a miracle or spiritual healing. But the word spontaneous in this use means without cause. And that's such an unscientific way of thinking about this. I mean, how can you be more unscientific?
Everything has a cause we just, weren't asking the questions. And every time a person reports this to their doctor, the good doctors say, well, whatever you're doing, keep doing it's working, but they don't have curiosity about what's going on. And so these actually are not as rare as we think it's just that they're ignored and they're not part of our worldview. And so we ignore them or minimize them. And I have yet to give a talk where somebody doesn't come up to me afterwards and say, you need to talk to this patient, or you need to talk to my aunt, or you need to talk to this friend. These things do occur more often than we realize.
ELISE:
Yeah, no, certainly. But as you said, they don't really fit in our paradigm. And in part it's like, there is no toolbox to guarantee this outcome, although I do appreciate that and we'll get into this, but that you did distill some commonalities.Which in a way, like, maybe I can sum it up as like radical change in people's life for the most part. Like a death of identity. So a new identity can emerge.
JEFFREY:
Yeah. I mean, this is probably too simple of a statement to say, and I could be wrong, but it appears to me whether the healing occurs in a few hours or in 10 years, the pattern looks similar to me. Even though the length of time can be very different. So it's my belief, or my hypothesis, that as we continue to investigate these remarkable healings, there's so much for us to glean from these things. And whether it occurs again through a meditation experience, or a spiritual experience, at a retreat, or on ones own, or in psychotherapy, our illnesses have messages that we should be paying attention to. And once we begin to understand these patterns and what healing is really about at the deepest levels, we have a doorway into begin to really change our lives in a way that gives us a life and an understanding of our value that we just never realized was a possibility.
ELISE:
One of the things I think is really important is in, in the book is that you, for example, spent time with John of God, or you went down to under try to see what's happening with John of God. And so for people who aren't familiar with John of God, he was this healer who promised to cure people of all of their maladies. And there were some people who were cured, but he in of himself was somewhat of a nefarious character and lots of bad things happening there. He’s this Western idea of a guru of like, give me all of your sovereignty and yes, I'll make you whole, which is sort of antithetical to the work that we're talking about here. But there was something that was happening there, which I thought was interesting that you distilled. Can you take us through that experience?
JEFFREY:
Yeah. I mean, it's a complicated experience, right? Because I could document that, objective medical evidence of accurate diagnosis had occurred in a number of cases and genuine healings of illnesses that in the west we know are typically incurable. They occurred. And yet, this is back in 2003, there were these soft reports of possible sexual abuse. I tried really hard to see if anyone, I tried to verify these stories. And I think probably what was going on was that nobody felt comfortable coming out with their story at that point. So it was very complicated. I pulled out of a few films and TV shows because I was concerned about sending people down or people being encouraged to go down, and perhaps being their most vulnerable state and then being sexually assaulted. And so it's a very complicated thing.
And it took many years before reports started coming out that were more verifiable. Now there's a lot of different ways to walk around this. I think that healing comes from within us. It's not really coming from a healer so much. So there's that whole dialectic of where healing comes from. It's not really about the healer. Healers can be characters. I think that we all are wounded healers, whether it's a healer, or a physician, or a loved one. And it's, what's that Leonard Cohen saying, our cracks are how the light gets in. And so it's important to not dismiss or pathologize or feel bad about our cracks. Our cracks are what cause us to need other people in our lives. And to know we can't do it alone or by ourselves. But healers are human beings, too. And I think in the case of John of God, this is a guy who had a second grade education, doesn't know how to read or write.
He says, and then at age 15, he wakes up out of a trance in a culture that's very different than ours. And he was told that a bunch of people have been healed while he was in this trance. And so then in a very patriarchal culture, he was from a young age given a massive amount of power that was unopposed and not held to account. And so he has spent many decades. He's now in his seventies, I believe, many decades with no one who held him to account for anything. And I think we all know that power unlimited power is dangerous for any human being. And in his case, you know, a second grade education given a massive amount of power, this whole town builds up all these businesses and hotels and restaurants and a whole cottage industry around his healings and ended up, I think being willing to turn, to turn a blind eye. And Brazil is a very different culture than the United States and the United States has a lot of problems ourselves.
But Brazil is a place where women have even less rights than they do in the United States. I have a friend she's worked at the Royal Bank for years and lives in Brazil, and she told me with pride, the Brazilia, the capital of Brazil has more divorces than any major city in the world. And she was very proud of that because she viewed that as a sign, that women were getting their rights and starting to stand up for themselves and not allow abuse any longer. But she talked about the women's police force and how they try to combat the patriarchal nature of things there. But still, there's a lot of challenges there. And I think John of God was part of a patriarchal structure, where power wasn't opposed. And he got away with a lot of things and there was no one to stand up to him and say, you can't do this.
And I think also I think back to how, when we graduate here in the United States, from medical school, we come out of a developmental moratorium. We watch our friends buying houses, buying nice cars, boats, all those kinds of things, having relationships, going out with friends on the weekends, in med school, when you don't do a lot of those things, and you go through college at a pretty much developmental moratorium as well, and you come out kind of stunted developmentally, and then have to hopefully begin catching up, after you're done with all that training. Well, think about if you are 15 and you go into a trance and you wake up and then you have all this power, but you've never had a lot of education. You don't have anyone to mentor you into healthy patterns and boundaries and all that. Um, he probably wasn't given the kind of environment that allowed him to develop healthy boundaries and to know how to work with people in the ways that were respectful of others. And yeah, and so it was easy for him to really get out of bounds and start things that he was calling normal, were very abnormal and ended up doing a lot of damage to people and people didn't have a voice.
ELISE:
And I've certainly seen this in my career, sort of across my career that people can become very confused and they might be channeling or bringing something down. And then they equate themselves with that energy. They sort of grant themselves a divinity or a superiority instead of recognizing that they're actually just a channel and that they need to be really clean about that. And so you get into a lot of distortions and again, I think it can happen across industries. It's our, it's a natural thing to be like, I'm good at this. I'm gonna control even if my intentions are right. So I think it's a normal occurrence, unfortunately. But that his distortion and damaging aside, I feel like in Cured, you were writing about you were witnessing people sort of even taking the time right. And meditating and being away from their old life. And that maybe that was granting them enough space and distance to transform.
JEFFREY:
I mean, they were moving out of a lot of their stressors, many times going into a different culture, into a very peaceful environment with healthy food. I'm sure that for many people stress hormones begin to subside in that more relaxed environment. And living in a bubble in some ways away from the toxic relationships or toxic work environments that were contributing to, or playing a major role in their illnesses, whether it's cancer or autoimmune illness or something else.
ELISE:
And do you think that, and, and maybe this is more true for women, but I was reading Gabor Maté's new book and I can't remember the exact statistic, but he was talking about how so many women, weren't recovering from heart surgery, like had much worse mortality rates. And they realized that it's because these women, instead of anyone focusing on their healing, they were immediately put back in a care role. And so do you think it's also that women actually being in a situation where everyone's focused on the them, and taking care of them?
JEFFREY:
Yeah. I think what I see having spent many years working in both, a medical hospital and a psychiatric hospital, it's the same situation in both that I think in our culture, women are taught to be caretakers and they often, so often are taking care of everyone except for themselves. And Gabor Maté’s statement is brilliant. If you don't know how to say no, your body will eventually say no for you. I think there is so much depth to that. And that's why it's so important that we help people begin asking, is there a message that my body is trying to give me about this illness. Many times, there's different ways to language this for different situations, but is there a way in which a person is spending so much time taking care of others or responding to the perceived needs of others instead of taking up space in the world, doing the things that put a light in your own eyes, the things that create authentic wellbeing. It took me years to begin understanding the deeper sense of what's true here. But I think the truth is sometimes the illness is really a message that this inauthentic self that we have become that needs to die. And if we can let that death occur, which can be messy and painful and scary, but if we can let that occur and let a more authentic version of who we really are be born well, I'll tell you sometimes that's astonishing sometimes what then becomes possible.
ELISE:
Yeah. You write such a beautiful section of the book you write: “One way to look at it is that there is a kind of figurative death of the false self, many survivors describe it in these terms. And in fact, tell me repeatedly that their illnesses were their greatest gifts because they liberated their true selfs. By dying, they found life by facing the worst that could happen and moving through it. They “excised” the disease of fear that binds all of us and then realized that unexpectedly they were free to live.”
JEFFREY:
Yes. I think it's such a huge deal. And I started, once you start to see that you start to see it in so many different places. It's shocking to me, for example, how often when a person is diagnosed with cancer and told that they have 12 months to live, for example. They’ll be terrified at one level and horrified, but it's so much more common than I would've ever expected that the person also feels like, wow, if I only have 12 months to live, then I don't have to go to law school anymore, just because dad's telling me I should. Or I don't have to take over the family business, or I don't have to do this or that. And so to begin letting go of these activities and these things that have come to define our lives, when they're not even part of who we really are meant to be At the deepest level, these things begin to grind some deep part of us down when we are overcome with living an inauthentic life.
ELISE:
You have this great quote in her too, from Bernard Taz, the founder of the death cafe movement. “If you put all the intensity of your self in this moment, then you live.” Which is, is so beautiful. And in the book, and I know it's sort of a complicated example because Cortes you know, conquered and killed a lot of indigenous people, but you talk about this metaphor of Cortes telling his, I guess, troops to burn the boats, right. That there was no retreating. They were to survive. They had to move forward. And how apt that is as a metaphor for so many of us. Like, you can't go back. That doesn't work for you. Right. That backside though is so, um, there's a lull there.
JEFFREY:
Yeah. I mean, letting go of the old life and the inauthentic self is a painful journey. How many times do we stop ourselves from letting that journey actually happen? Because it's messy, right? If we change, then those people in our lives, who we care about, if we start to begin to recognize our value and set different boundaries, then the people we love have to either change with us, or we have to let go of those relationships. And boy, these are messy, real world situations. And so to have the courage to change our lives in that way is real courage. And sometimes I think many times we put it off until it gets so painful that we feel like we have to do it.
ELISE:
Yeah. Or we leave ourselves an out. There's always that boat, where we're like, well, we can just retreat or get back with our ex or if this is too painful and uncomfortable, right. I can, I can go home, or back to what I've known. I think it's such an important metaphor though, for what, what you're talking about or what a lot of these people were talking about, which is a complete transformation or shedding. Which is also why it looks so different. Why there is no real map, because what's true for me is not true for you.
JEFFREY:
Yep. Completely true. Boy, this brings to mind a story, you know, some it's some stories just really stick in your head. This one woman told me about her recovery from breast cancer and how in the process of healing, she began to change from being this demure kind self-effacing woman into someone who was more, tell it like, it really is more, sassy, more racy, more assertive. And, you know, I think that was an important shift for her. It was more about stepping into her own personhood, into her true self as a person and as a woman being willing to take up space in the world, less needing to just be responsive to the needs of others. And I think that shift was probably really critical to the healing that she ended up experiencing with her cancer.
ELISE:
Yeah. And it will always defy studying. I do think that this list, you know, that you do have is interesting, it's the conditions associated with poor survival outcomes, right? Inflexibility associated with low self-esteem or fixed worldview. Skepticism about self-help techniques or limited ability to apply them. Other activities seem more immediately appealing. Meaning was habitually sought outside the individual from some external source. Strong, contrary views about the validity of spiritual ideas. And then on the flip side, conditions associated with longer survival: Strong will to live. Actual changes in habits of thought and activity, relaxation practices, meditation, mental imaging, cognitive monitoring, and becoming involved in the search for meaning in one's life.
JEFFREY:
Yep.
ELISE:
That's the recipe.
JEFFREY:
Yeah. And it's also work, right?
ELISE:
Just not a silver bullet.
JEFFREY:
Yeah. It's not just taking a medication it's, it's not just showing up to psychotherapy and chatting for an hour. It's actually, it's not just talking about change. It's about actually making change and that's hard for any of u.
ELISE:
And do you think that the change in your experience is more that are there like addictive patterns like that we're all sort of succumbed to where it's like, but I like eating terribly, or I'm addicted to, or I'm codependent with my spouse. Is it more that that keeps us bound or is it actually a fear of being what we know we are?
JEFFREY:
Let's see if I answered that in a way that is getting at what you're asking. I mean, I think one of the spiritual lessons at the core of everything is that we all have to, at some point come up against ourselves and realize that something in us needs to be let go. And so we have to die in order to live. We have to be last in order to be first. We have to go down in order to go up. There's all these paradoxes. But I think to wake up to the dignity and value of who we really are and to give up or eliminate the false beliefs that prevent us from experiencing that is a huge piece of what this is at the deepest level. I think there's something in the deeper self or in the deeper soul that doesn't rest until it experiences unconditional love.
And there's so many different ways. I think that we are, we long for that. And we also block ourselves from experiencing that. And to begin identifying and removing those blocks, so that we can experience unconditional love from within us in a way that allows us to then enjoy people, rather than try to get something under the table from them that's not theirs to give. I mean, these kinds of dynamics are a really big deal in these healings I study. When you talk about codependence, yeah. What is it where, where is it that we, uh, get this experience of our dignity and our value in a way that really nurtures a deep part of us, but gets it from within, and doesn't try to get it in a codependent way from someone else in a way that's not theirs to give. Is that a little bit what you're trying to get at here?
ELISE:
I think so much of it is, and I think this is very difficult work maybe for women in particular, but the statement of needs, and then going out to rightfully get those needs met either from self or from others. But having an expectancy that those needs are valid. And real, and those turn are, you know, boundaries. But so often I think we consume our needs or deny that we even have them that's right. We see them as needy.
JEFFREY:
I've come to believe that we can't really understand a lot of these stories without understanding what it means to heal from the different traumas that are a big part of human life. Whether it's sexual abuse, physical abuse, emotional abuse or a developmental trauma from just the drip, drip, drip of, um, growing up in a home where the love was conditional or, uh, where you really take in the bullying of other kids in a way that causes one to end up feeling like they're not good enough, or that there's something defective. And have those false beliefs that, that drip constantly in a person's life and really impacts the way one experiences their own value and possibilities. Um, and the way that affects work and relationships, these end up being really big deals that need attention sometimes on these healing paths.
ELISE:
And there's obviously the cultural trauma it's a lot. But I think it's incumbent on all of us to heal this on the micro to the macro. And to really peel this onion, but going to that idea of love, I have, I've never, so the Barbara Fredrickson and her Vagal Toning, can you talk to us about that and this which she calls the upward spiral of the heart as you increase your vagal tone?
JEFFREY:
So Barbara Fredrickson is doing some really brilliant research and she's at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, I believe. And just doing great work on helping us understand not only what's right about who we are as human beings, but also what it means to activate the vagus nerve. And so many of us live in chronic fight or flight. I'm sorry to say that more of us live with this sustained, release of stress hormones, like cortisol and norepinephrine. And we know on the basis of both laboratory research and clinical data, that, that when we are bathing the brilliant cells of our immune system and our body in this mostly constant drip of stress hormones, we know that the body and the immune cells begin to malfunction. The immune cells begin to misfire. They begin to attack the body instead of the pathogen, for example.
And, uh, they get confused about what's the pathogen and what's the body they're sworn to protect. And so, uh, the stress hormones cause that confusion to occur. Barbara Fredrickson's work around the vagus nerve is about the healing parasympathetic response. And that's the vagus nerve. That's the central highway of the parasympathetic response that runs through the center part of our body and connects with all our major organs. And it's activated by deep relaxation, but it's also activated by love. And so when I smile at you or when our eyes light up and as we're talking about really fascinating material and making a genuine connection, that sparkle in our eyes, that smile, that's all the vagus nerve operating. And so when we make genuine eye contact, when we have a genuine smile and really connect with somebody, that's activating the parasympathetic response, that's activating the vagus nerve.
And that is what puts us in the direction of activating a whole different cascade of neurochemicals, which then bathe the immune cells and our body in a very different chemical environment than the fight flight or freeze chemistry. So for example, when you and I smile and make a genuine contact, and it's authentic, then whether it's one minute with a stranger or an hour with a loved one or somebody else, that cascade of oxytocin, which is the love molecule or dopamine, the pleasure pathway, or serotonin the antidepressant molecule. These kinds of neurochemicals have a very different response for the body. And the body just loves being bathed and that kind of chemistry. The immune cells and the other cells in our body begin to wake up. They begin to function properly, healing can occur, and that chemical environment is so different than the fight flight or freeze of the stress response, the fight that it's our body, with its parasympathetic pathways opened up heals, and the body functions correctly, including the immune cells. So it's not just about nutrition. It's also about getting this chemical cascade going, which is what our body loves.
ELISE:
It's such great advice too, because obviously the book is about people who touched bottom, right? And it feels incumbent on our collective survival that many of us start swimming up rather than feeling like we need to go all the way down in order to find her authentic selves, or truly turn this around. Where do you advise that people, obviously they should read your book. I recommend your book all the time, but where would you advise someone, it's probably all of us, right. Who feels like they're on shaley loose soil here, and slipping. Where would you advise people to start?
JEFFREY:
Well, I think different things work for different people. In regards to the four pillars that I write about in Cured, for me, the easiest changes to begin making were the ones that I began to understand soonest in this 18-year-long trajectory, which was to begin changing my nutrition. That's a big topic because there's so much misinformation about nutrition, the relationship between industry and all the processed foods and how that interacts with the academics who are paid to sign off on certain results or to, or to design kind certain kinds of studies and the interaction of both of those with the government and lobbyists and recommendations by the FDA. All that's very complicated and not completely pure science. It's also spin science with a big business interest. And so there's so much confusion about what genuine nutrition is that most doctors and unfortunately, even nutritionists have a lot of misunderstanding. But by documenting the recoveries of these people who had such amazing recoveries in the face of such odds, I was able to begin understanding what genuine nutrition density is. And that was the easiest place for me to start because, that’s a big change that a lot of people begin with while they're then slowly and more slowly figuring out the deeper changes.
ELISE:
There's some great books about just general public health and lobbying and which are, are fantastic and terrifying and clarifying reads. I think for people it's just, again, you wanna be, you wanna have faith in these systems unfortunately. Ugh, it’s tough.
JEFFREY:
Well, if I can just make one comment about that. I think we're in a very exciting and perilous time because what's great is, our institutions are being exposed as being inadequate for containing the human spirit with who we now are becoming. So it's great that these enlightenment or post-enlightenment based structures are being exposed as somewhat corrupt, or faulty, or inadequate for who we are now, but it's difficult because now we don't know how to trust. You can't trust can't trust politicians. You can't trust the media. You can't trust religious figures. So it's great that all this stuff's coming out of the closet, and we're seeing what's definitely a shadow side. It leaves us with the question of who can you trust? You can't trust the healer. You can't trust the priest. You can't trust all these different people. So we need to begin constructing more reliable pathways that I believe have to do with continued democratization of the world at every level where we begin to find what's right and great within each person. That's starting to trust each person and the capacities that lie latent within us, uh, at a whole new level. And we have a lot of work to do there yet.
ELISE:
Yeah, no, but it's true. It comes back to that idea of sovereignty and strong foundation and self, and then you engage with the world and you obviously, you wanna come at it from a place of optimism and love, yet you also need discernment and to decide, is this resonant for me, is this dissonant for me? Like, what do I need? And recognizing that you can still state your need. I mean, this is impossible work, and I struggle with this. So I'm saying as though it's easy, but you can state your needs without abandoning other people. But it's this dance and finding our, as you said, you know, this idea of evolution, like can we evolve to keep up with our progress, our technological process and progress, and to better match the two. So since the book came out, I mean, it's been a minute, but not that long, but I'm assuming just even going out and then talking about it, you're hearing tons of stories. What's what's next for you? Will you write another book or are you frontline COVID doctoring?
JEFFREY:
COVID has been a huge deal. The place where I was chief of behavioral medicine at the medical center for years, we were a hotspot for COVID. So that was a lot of intense work there. And I've given that up now. And s I've kept my medical director position at a branch of McClean hospitals. So I'm still doing that. And I'm still at Harvard. I'm now in discussions about starting a center here and trying to just more effectively take on the ways in which modern medicine and even our culture are brilliant in some ways, but also partially broken and trying to find a way that empowers people to take charge of their health and wellbeing. Because I think that's the future. Doctors should no longer be the expert on a person's mind or body.
I think a coach is good, but we need to be helping people find their own intuition, helping people find their own pathways to a more authentic life and a new level of wellbeing where we listen to the illness, and ask questions of it, and interrogate it. But don't think that health or wellbeing are simply about being compliant with the medical doctor or recommendations. And so trying to find a voice and a path around that is challenging in our current medical industry, for all kinds of reasons. Doctors who are very well-intentioned are not only powerfully socialized into a particular way of being, but they’re hemmed in by regulatory requirements. They're hemmed in by what insurance pays for and doesn't pay for. They're hemmed in by licensing requirements. They're hemmed in by malpractice laws. So there's a lot of things that keep medicine from democratizing the way many other institutions in the world are slowly moving.
ELISE:
Yeah. And I would say, or how it seems to me too, is that, and this is where it gets very, it's like when you wanna tease out the behavior, rather than the person, right, there are so many loving, considerate, compassionate doctors who are in a system that is not very loving or compassionate. And so also figuring out who are burnt out, certainly post-COVID and frustrated and can't deliver the care that they want. So it's also hard for us to hold, you know, doctors as distinct from the system and understand that the system needs to evolve.
JEFFREY:
Right. That's right. The system hems in a lot of forces that and that also prevents doctors from being able to think about the forest for the trees. There's so many demands on their time. There's a lot of pressures on you know, pleasing everal different masters, whether it's the insurance companies or the administrators. There's a lot of forces that keep everyone hemmed in in and prevents people from getting the care that they deserve.
ELISE:
Yeah. I'm hopeful. I feel like in this age of disruption and technology, that we're starting to find the solutions that we need, even if they come from outside,
JEFFREY
It's starting to occur. For sure.
ELISE:
As Dr. Rediger explained, and I’m quoting: “When we dig deep into these cases of remission that doctors haven’t been able to explain or understand, we see that there is a powerful link between our very identities and our immune systems. Perhaps what ultimately determines the health of the “soil” of your body is how well you know who really are at the most authentic level—beneath appearances, “shoulds,” perceived expectations, and all the masks and roles that you assume for yourself and the world. Because of the ripple effects that stem from this one deep, central aspect of identity flow through everything. It determines the way you think, the way you feel, the way you see yourself. Whether you make time for yourself or not. Whether you move your body and go outdoors and breathe deeply or not. Whether you prioritize putting excellent food in your body or not. How and when and how often the stress response clicks on in your body, and the precise levels of hormones that tumble out, and the way that your specific cells respond to that wash of hormones.” I love this book Cured. I think it should be required reading regardless whether you, or someone you love, is facing a diagnosis, because I think in many ways it is map back to health, but only because in many ways it is a map back to ourselves.