This Surgeon’s Prescription Includes Faith, Hope and Love
Throughout the three-hour operation, surgeon Bernie Siegel talked to his sleeping patient.
“You’re doing fine, sweetheart,” Siegel called to her over the operating-room bustle and the music of his tape machine. “We’re in the home stretch. You are going to be fine. Just heal the way you have before.”
In the waiting room of the Hospital of St. Raphael, Siegel spoke frankly to his patient’s family. It was cancer, but she will probably get over it, he told them. Have her pay attention to what she eats--vitamins can help keep chromosomes healthy.
Later, on his rounds at Yale-New Haven Hospital, Siegel studied a picture of a butterfly drawn by a dying 2-year-old.
Leaves Them With a Smile
“He’s always picking a black crayon,” the boy’s father said.
“He’s reflecting the despair he feels around him,” Siegel replied.
In the room of a seriously ill artist, Siegel asked advice about silk-screening. On the next floor, he coaxed a kiss from a middle-age patient and told her he expected to dance with her the next day.
“I try to leave them with something to smile about,” Siegel says.
Siegel is a 53-year-old pediatric and general surgeon with piercing eyes, a shaved head and a degree from the Cornell University Medical College. He recommends surgery, chemotherapy, radiation and medication to his cancer patients. He also prescribes prayer, love and self-induced healing.
“Bernie Siegel will tell you straight up that nobody ever gets well based on what a doctor does for him,” says Gail Daniels, a Providence, R.I., stockbroker who was treated by Siegel. “You get well when you learn how to tap into your own consciousness and your body gets well because you are making that demand on it.”
Siegel’s philosophy prompted him to write a book, “Love, Medicine & Miracles,” which was published by Harper & Row this year.
He concedes that some of his colleagues are skeptical of his technique.
“Everyone acknowledges that he (Siegel) is a good surgeon,” says Dr. Francis Albis, a pediatrician that Siegel has operated on twice. “Some of the doctors are reluctant to accept the other side of him.”
Although Siegel can cite scientific studies to back up many of his beliefs, he is more likely to tell a story to make a point.
“There was a man in here today who was very angry,” Siegel says, sitting in his purple office. “His cancer has probably come back. We finally got around to the fact that he is 61 and he lost his job in December. He has no income and certainly there is a sign of the cancer.
“I don’t think that is a coincidence. I was talking about how despair affects the immune system and then, he said, ‘Well, I lost my job.’ ”
In the 1970s, Siegel says, he transformed himself from a doctor who dealt with diseases to one who dealt with people. “I committed the physician’s cardinal sin: I ‘got involved’ with my patients,” he wrote in his book.
He began encouraging patients to call him by his first name. He shaved his head, a symbol “of the uncovering I was trying to make, baring my own emotions, spirituality and love,” he wrote.
Beating the Odds
Believing that unconscious people can hear and benefit from encouragement, he started talking to patients in comas or under anesthesia.
Siegel also began to pay attention to the people who recover from life-threatening illnesses despite overwhelming odds. He constantly tells patients that they too can beat the odds and live longer, but they have to work hard to do it.
In 1978, Siegel, his wife and a nurse started a therapy group called Exceptional Cancer Patients. Siegel urges them to take control of their lives--to understand and authorize their medical treatment, question their doctors and make changes in their personal lives.
“I teach people to love themselves, to redirect their lives, to not take abuse,” he says. That may mean standing up to a spouse, quitting a hated job or shedding financial worries, he adds.
“Most people in this world are not thrilled with living,” he says. “If you take out their colon or their gall bladder or their appendix, you haven’t done a hell of a lot for them. You give them a box of pills and sew them up. So they go back to the same miserable lives. But, if you say, ‘Why do you have an ulcer, why are you sick, why can’t you say no without guilt?,’ he might go home and change.”
Siegel suggests that patients try meditation and imagery, where they picture their cancers and their bodies fighting back. In his book, he wrote about a boy with a brain tumor that doctors had stopped treating. The boy regularly imagined his cancer being bombarded by video-game rocket ships. The cancer disappeared.
With all his talk of life, Siegel doesn’t deny death.
“Today I see that even death can be a form of healing,” he wrote. “When patients whose bodies are tired and sore are at peace with themselves and their loved ones, they can choose death as their next treatment.”
