Medicine, Faith and the Healing Process

There are a number of examples that lead to the conclusion that it is not medicine alone that cures the patient. A young man reported his own experience. He was visiting India in the early 1970’s and was afflicted by a severe case of amoebic dysentery while there, to the point that he was in extreme pain, bleeding and undergoing constant bowel disruption. He asked some people where he was staying how he should deal with the situation and they recommended a homeopathic doctor nearby. They made it clear that taking allopathic drugs or seeing an allopathic physician practicing Western medicine would not be as successful for him. His only prior experience had been with allopathic medicine and he had, to that point in time, never encountered homeopathy. Nevertheless, he went to the homeopathic physician who started by asking him a number of questions, seemingly irrelevant, such as whether he preferred hot or cold showers generally. After responding to the questions, the physician gave him some pellets to take, which consisted of sugar infused with the homeopathic remedy, diluted, based on homeopathic principles, to the point that no active substance could be found if analyzed. The doctor advised him to take a pellet and let it dissolve under his tongue, and with that, he dismissed the individual with the promising statement that by the time he got back to his guest house, 15 minutes away by rickshaw, the bowel movements would come to a halt. He further advised that it would take some time for the internal damage to heal, but the worst was now over and the patient would be on the mend. The doctor’s certainty in the matter influenced the young man and he followed the directions. Lo and behold, within the designated 15 minutes, in fact, the bowel movements had stopped and he began his recovery from that point.

Homeopathy is a controversial healing modality in the West. The US FDA does not consider it to be ‘real’. But as this young person found out, and as many others have testified, it ‘works’.

The placebo effect is another instance where we can eliminate the medicine as the curative agent. As previously noted, some 30% of test subjects who received a placebo recover without the actual medicine. And an unknown number of those who received the medicine were aided by the mental will and faith in the medicine, not simply by the chemical/biological action of the medicine itself.

Sri Aurobindo notes: “It is not the medicine that cures so much as the patient’s faith in the doctor and the medicine. Both are a clumsy substitute for the natural faith in one’s own self-power which they have themselves destroyed.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Powers Within, Chapter VI Faith, pg. 54