This is 1 of the 10 topics from Richard van der Linde's – Bukuru founder – research into superhuman skills.The main source to be credited is www.dmtquest.com. At the bottom of the page is a link to the other topics.

“Perhaps the root cause of the spontaneous remission lies in the brain?” 

~John Chavez

From DMT Quest:

In 2011, ten year old Annabel suffered from conditions known as pseudo-obstruction motility disorder (POMD) and antral hypomotility disorder (AHD). POMD is caused by the severe impairment of the intestines to push food through the digestive tract (peristalsis). It’s been stated that this condition may be caused by an injury to the smooth muscle or the nervous system of the gastrointestinal tract. AHD is characterized by weak contractions in the antrum, the funnel shaped lowermost part of the stomach. As of 2016, it appears as though both of these conditions in combination are extremely difficult to address with many secondary illnesses arising from them. Annabel’s case was considered a chronic situation that would eventually lead to her premature death due to an inability to process food in addition to multiple complications arising from it.

[Back in 2011,] her condition continues to worsen and hope of recovery continues to fade. However, during one fateful day, Annabel climbed up a tree in the backyard of her family’s home and accidentally fell 30 feet down into the center of the hollowed tree. After falling, she was knocked unconscious but was able to regain consciousness at some point during the 5 hours she was trapped inside. Somehow there were no major injuries from the fall. She was subsequently hoisted out of the tree by emergency personnel and life-flighted to the nearest hospital for observation.

Following this accident, Annabel reportedly experienced a dramatic recovery from her primary illnesses and showed no more symptoms. This reversal of her condition has been verified by the doctor that was treating her, Dr. Samuel Nurko [from Boston Children’s Hospital].

Such a case is generally called spontaneous remission. These are sudden, complete cures without any medical treatment. Often, the person involved has some sort of a dreamlike experience in which treatment takes place.

Sometimes remission happens without any external intervention – at least none that one could correlate – while at other times seemingly non-medical routines seem to correlate, at least regularly, with an improvement of conditions. In 1993, Carlyle Hirshberg and Brendan O'Regan published a collection of over 3,500 such cases.

Healers and placebos

In another topic, we already touched upon the somnambulist Cayce, who not only got rid of his own speech impediment through hypnosis, but also had a healing effect on people by tuning in on their image. Besides Cayce, there are thousands of people around the world who offer healing services that presumably take place on a different density level of reality – in other words, another dimension.

From a scientific perspective, any sudden improvement in a condition without any medical treatment could be accounted as spontaneous remission. When induced through a suggestion, science generally labels it as a placebo effect. Science cannot yet exactly explain this effect with a purely materialist model. Yet, that such cases exist is beyond debate. A leading researcher in this field, Ted Kaptchuk from Harvard Medical School, suggests a relation between brain activity and physiological change (Interestingly, Kaptchuk is also a guest speaker in some of the medical hypnosis courses offered by Sharon Waxkirsch).

Supporting this idea, Jo Marchant, a freelance journalist specializing in science and history, provides an interesting case in her 2016 book. One summer evening in 2005, Bonnie Anderson went out of bed to get some water. Walking into the dark kitchen, she slipped and landed on her back, as the water purifier had been leaking, making the tiles slippery. She had fractured her spine. While thankful that she didn’t break her back and become paralyzed, the fall left her in constant pain. To find relief, she decided to participate in a trial for a new surgical procedure where medical cement was injected into the fractured bone. After receiving the treatment, she immediately felt better – and the improvement proved to be permanent. You could consider it an illustration of the value of regular healthcare, except there is a peculiar plot twist: She had been in the placebo control group of the study and had undergone a fake surgery.

In the study, each patient was taken into the operating room, and a short-acting local anesthetic was injected into their spine. Only then did the surgeon open an envelope to discover whether the patient would receive the real vertebroplasty or not. Either way, the operating team acted out the same predetermined script, saying the same words, opening a tube of the cement so that its characteristic smell of nail polish remover filled the room, and pressing on the patient’s back to simulate the placement of the vertebroplasty needles. The only difference was whether or not the surgeon actually injected the cement. Afterwards, all of the patients were followed for a month, and asked to rate their pain and disability using questionnaires. […] was no significant difference between [the real] and the fake operation.

We see similar cases again and again. In 2012, a popular class of sleeping pills called Z-drugs was shown to be of little value after accounting for the placebo effect. The same year, the sedative ketamine was tested in a double-blind trial for cancer pain; previous studies had described its effects as “complete,” “dramatic” and “excellent,” yet it too proved to be no better than placebo. In 2014, experts analyzed 53 placebo-controlled trials of promising surgical procedures for conditions from angina to arthritic knees, and found that for half of them, sham surgery was just as good.

While mainstream science does not have a ready explanation for the effect and why it seems so random, a number of heretic scientists with respectable backgrounds have come to a similar model, which is built on the premise that the bio-electric currents within a human, the existence of which is beyond debate, is the place where impairments show up before they manifest physically.

Vitalism

Dr. Harrold Saxon Burr, a Yale University scientist, discovered that he could predict the health of a plant by measuring the energy field of the seed. He could predict physical characteristics of salamanders when still in their unhatched egg, and he could predate cancer in mice when there were no indicators through physical measurement. All Burr did was measure microcurrents in the body and look for patterns. Yet, his experiments proved that the appearance of physical changes such as ovulation, illness, cuts and scratches often occured after a measurable change in an organism's bio-electric field. This led him to the hypothesis that there was no difference in the development of diseases between humans and animals. While his ideas of vitalism were not always accepted in his own time, a variety of Burr’s predictions have come true in the last 20 years.

Dr. Robert Becker, a professor from the State University of New York, dedicated his career to investigating the healing effect of electric currents to the body. As discussed in a previous chapter, he was able to stimulate regeneration by changing the direction of currents within salamanders and rats after he measured similar changes when autonomous healing was taking place.[6] He extrapolated these findings to the hypothesis that this is also how human bodies can be helped with healing. However, his research didn’t get to the point where his evidence was conclusive and convincing for the mainstream scientific community.

While healing through electric currents would not typically classify as a medical treatment and is an interesting phenomenon in its own right, any effect from it would not be strictly spontaneous remission either. Especially not if we compare it to practices such as reiki, shamanism or “plain” energy healers such as André Visch.

Visch explains in his book that when he starts a treatment, he experiences this as astral travel, which means that what he considers his energetic body travels outside his physical body (while remaining attached through a cord). He then connects with his client’s energy body and stimulates natural flows where these appear stagnant, just like a physiotherapist might do on a physical level with blood flows.

Dr. Robert Beck, a nuclear physicist, measured the brain waves of energy healers from a wide range of practices and noticed that they all operated in the alpha brain wave band when they were engaged in their healing. More specifically, energy healers seem to couple their brain wave with the earth’s electromagnetic energy field frequency – the Schumann resonance – which fluctuates between 7.8 and 8.0hz.

In an article, Fergus McMahon explains how this particular frequency was identified: In 1952, the Munich physicist W. O. Schumann “calculated the different spin rates of the Earth's solid iron inner core and liquid outer core would create a magnetic field around our planet. This is the magnetosphere which extends into space and protects us from the Sun's radiation.”

Subsequently, Schumann identified that within the 100-km-long cavity between the earth’s crust and the ionosphere, “extremely low frequency (ELF) ‘resonances’ activated by lightning discharges into the magnetic field are generated. These energy pulses combine into electromagnetic standing waves that stay low inside the earth-ionosphere cavity. They have wavelengths equal to the circumference of the earth.”

Schumann's research was later extended by Dr. Beck, who found that “during healing moments the healers brainwaves became both frequency and phase synchronised with the Schumann Resonance.” This in essence means that the healers' brain waves vibrate “not only at the same frequency, but also at the same time, as the Earth's electromagnetic waves.” According to McMahon, this is why ancient Hindu rishis called 7.83Hz the frequency of “OM” – the primary sound from which the universe vibrated into existence, just like vibratory plates create structure from the sand on top.

Image: Chladni's vibrating resonance patterns using sand grains

Possible mechanisms on a physical level

Like there are various recorded types of spontaneous remission, there also seem to be various ideas about the underlying mechanism. Yet, when looked at closely, one may still discover some similarities.

Assuming that the story [of Annabel Beam, the little girl who experienced a spontaneous remission from intestine conditions that were considered terminal] is true let us speculate the mechanisms which took place to manifest it’s occurrence.

A 2015 write-up in the Annals of Gastroenterology outlines the gut-brain axis (GBA) linking it’s bidirectional communication involving emotional and cognitive centers of the brain with peripheral intestinal functions. The review outlines signaling between the gut and the brain via neural, endocrine, immune, and humoral links.​It’s relatively clear that there are multiple signaling pathways from the brain to the digestive system and the digestive system to the brain. In Annabel’s case, she suffered a traumatic fall that resulted in a near death experience which subsequently altered the signaling in her gut from dysfunctional to once again functional. Based on cortical homunculus principles, it would seem that prior to the fall, a faulty neural pathway in the brain was directly effecting her signaling in the gut.

[John Chavez speculates] that Annabel experienced robust, global gamma waves as a consequence of her fall.

Melatonin levels have been observed to surge nearly 500% in cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) following traumatic brain injury. In a 2013 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, the EEG activity of rats experiencing heart attacks were measured. The study concluded the following: “High-frequency neurophysiological activity in the near-death state exceeded levels found during the conscious waking state.”

This potential surge in global gamma waves essentially restructured the sub-par neural pathway. Simultaneously with the neural pathway restructuring was the change in genetic expression of the neuron or neurons involved with the faulty signaling. This would then signal the neurons in the gut with the gene expression for the development of POMD and AHD to change to a gene that normalizes gut function.

In short, it might be the case that Annabel's fall from the tree stimulated her brain and nervous system into secreting the hormones that triggered gamma waves. As a result, new neural pathways were created that improved the communication between her brain and her gut.

If this is indeed the case, Chavez speculates further, then people might be able to replicate the mechanism for treatment of other ailments and perhaps eventually every disease. It also might explain the large number of anecdotal reports from Wim Hof Method practitioners who experienced remission from a wide range of diseases, including cancer.

This might sound far-fetched, but it is commonly accepted that there are many cases of spontaneous remission from cancer. There just seems to be no clear pattern of why and how it happens. In the words of Chavez,

Perhaps the root cause of the spontaneous remission lies in the brain? If virtually all disease can be linked to faulty neural pathway development in the brain and if a person can permanently restructure that pathway, it would seem illogical to assume that disease must persist. The effectiveness of WHM [and other gamma-wave inducing practices] seems to be based on the gradual restructuring of the signaling pathways in addition to positive systemic biological changes that are induced.

Possible mechanisms on a subtle level

The literature on energy healing often mentions that energy healers seem to be required to establish three things:

1. Match their brain wave with the frequency and timing of the Schumann resonance;

2. Balance the brain waves of their left and right hemispheres; and

3. Connect with the client and phase-sync their brain wave with their own.

It is supposed that this sequence of steps links the client to the Schumann resonance, not only with the frequency, but also the actual timing, which is considered to infuse a healing force within the patient. A simple way to put it is that this synchronization corrects any dysfunctions in the patient’s bio-energy field, which immediately or gradually spills over to the physical body. It restores the flow of energy throughout the body, similar to blood flows.

Yet, there seems to be quite some variation in the actual frequency with which healers work. While the Schumann resonance range of 7.8–8.0 hz is generally considered to fall within the alpha range, it would classify as a theta frequency on perhaps half of the scales used for brain wave bands (in which alpha starts at the 8.0 hz mark). However, EEG recordings of renowned Reiki master Frans Stiene during healing sessions are unmistakably within the delta range. This range is generally associated with deep sleep. As you’d expect by now, his client synced with his frequency and also showed bursts of high-gamma activity.

Overall, based on the vast number of people with amazing healing stories, there is no question about the existence of bio-energetic frequencies and for example a Schumann resonance as well as a vast number of people with amazing healing stories, there is no conclusive evidence that one human consists of an energy body that can disconnect from the physical body and connect to another person’s energy body to heal it. Even the syncing of brain waves might be a meaningless coincidence. Any effect might just be through the power of suggestion – a placebo effect. However, even the placebo effect might be larger under the right conditions, these being the right brain wave frequency and mental images related to a healing activity. In this scenario, a placebo might just be an effective medicine.