by Lewis Mehl-Madrona, M.D., Ph.D.
Medicine in a Quantum Universe
Native American healers expect miracles but modern medicine typically discards the possibility of
miraculous recoveries. Yet “miracle” patients have everything to teach us about healing and survival.
Looking at 100 cases of people who experienced miracle cures and examining the energies, attributes
and common features of their path back to wellness, Dr. Mehl-Madrona reveals that survivors found
purpose and meaning in their life-threatening illness and that peaceful acceptance was their key to healing.
Coyote Healing Miracles in Native Medicine
 In Coyote Healing, Miracles in
Native Medicine I tell stories of
people who heal in ways that surpass
conventional medicine’s
understanding. People at the
fringe have always interested me. I’ve
been a person who pushes the edges, so
I’ve often found myself there. What
interests me is what we don’t know.
How many impossibilities can actually
be realized. They just haven’t been tried.
A key to understanding miracles or
remarkable patients is the concept of
system. A system is a whole that is
greater than a simple sum of its parts.
The behavior of systems cannot be predicted
by studying the behavior of each
of its component parts. The behavior of
a person cannot be predicted by
studying the function of each organ.
Similarly, healing cannot be understood
by studying all of the ingredients in isolation
that go into the process. Healing
will always surprise us because many
interactions produce a complexity not
contained in the study of each individual
member.
Yesterday I saw a new patient who
came because of anger. She had been
referred to her company’s psychologist
because she exploded at a coworker.
They talked long enough for the psychologist
to discover that she had been
sexually abused as a teenager by her
father. Then he stopped. “Well, now we
know why you were angry at John. He
just triggered something that reminded
you of your father.”
End of story, so call a private therapist
if you want to continue. She left that
encounter frustrated and more angry. A
month passed and she called me.
As we talked the story progressively
changed. It changed to how her whole
life had been ruined by her father. She
had been ill with an easily diagnosed
medical condition from ages 14 to 24.
No one diagnosed it because her father
said it was all in her head, that there was
nothing wrong with her, that she was
psychosomatic. So no doctors in their
community took her seriously. Her
father was an influential doctor. He
should have known.
As we continued to talk, the story
changed some more. Soon we were
looking at her unhappy marriage. We
were talking about her frustrations of
not having risen higher in her profession
than she had. The story became
one of frustrated near success, that she
had never lived up to her full potential,
that something had always gotten in the
way of the best job, best husband, best
career, best life. She felt empty and frustrated.
She blamed her father for this.
Then we turned the glass around.
Given her terrible upbringing, I marveled
at how well she had done. Despite
her dissatisfaction, she had married, she
had worked at the same company for 26
years and had risen from the lowest
position to a vice presidency. She was
financially comfortable. She had lived
some adventures. She smiled at this. She
did feel proud of what she had accomplished. “In fact,” I suggested to her, “there’s a
deep inner part of you who is already solving
this problem of what to do with the rest of your
life and how to come to peace with your past.
It’s already solving the problem. All we have to
do is stimulate it some and step back and watch
it work. And of course, not try to fix things too
quickly before it has the best solution.”
She smiled at that idea. She seemed proud.
She said, “You’re right. I’ve already been feeling
better over these past two weeks. Maybe I’m
already solving the problem.”
“Right,” I said. “So my job is just to stimulate
you to continue to let this creative,
problem-solving part of you work. It will find
an answer and when it does, we’ll know it.
Until then, there are things we can do together
to facilitate the process.”
“Like what?” she asked.
“Write me a story of your life,” I asked. She
declined, saying that there were things she’d
done that no one needed to hear. Though I told
her she could edit out those parts, she still
declined. “Then write me a story of the life you
would have lived if your father had never abused
you and your medical problem had been
quickly solved at age 14.” This intrigued her.
“How will this help?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said, “but I trust it will
stimulate that inner part of you to keep
working by showing it what you believe you
could have achieved. Maybe it will begin to
figure out how to get there yet.”
“But this must be so frustrating for you,”
she said, “to not know the answer, to not know
what it’s going to decide.”
“Oh, no,” I replied. “It’s quite exciting to
wonder about which solution you’ll choose
and how you’ll make it work best to your
advantage. Only you know that. I just trust
that we’ll encourage you to follow that path.”
This is my approach to solving any problem,
whether it’s the problem of self-criticism and
low self-esteem (as this woman had) or the
problem of cancer or the problem of anorexia.
People have this fantastic capacity to solve
their own problems if we only stimulate them
and let them. That’s what Coyote Healing is all
about—the interesting ways that some people
solved their problems of having a disease that
they didn’t want.
Here’s another example. A mother brought
her daughter who was threatening suicide. She
had been anorexic and was also threatening to
stop eating again. I couldn’t begin to figure out
the complexities of their system but I recognized
another property of systems—non-separability.
It means that the state of the whole is not determined
by simply adding up the states of its
individual parts. The best way to study the
behavior of a complex system is to treat it as a
whole, and not merely to analyze the structure
and behavior of its component parts. The
natures of some wholes or systems are not
simply determined by the nature of their parts.
This means that I can’t completely
predict the behavior of
either mother or daughter. All
of our typical assessments look
at parts of the person, or at
individuals, but none can completely grasp the
whole of the family and the culture that contains
all these people. Non-separability means
that action at any one level of the person will
be taken up and processed by all the other
levels and may produce changes that cannot be
anticipated. Similarly, change in any one area
of the family can change any other area or
person in the family. The concept of an inner
healer suggests that people do internalize and
work with what they experience to move
toward healing in ways that cannot be predicted
or anticipated.
So I began by telling the teenager how she
knew that I couldn’t let her leave the office if
she remained suicidal. I would have to send
her to the hospital and then she would become
a part of another discourse, that of psychiatric
patients. I told her they would give her medication
and would make rules for her to follow
and that it might not be pleasant. We sparred
for a while and then she agreed to wait one
month before killing herself. She had never
tried my kind of treatment before, so what did
she have to lose? That was what convinced her.
She wanted a prescription, so I gave her venlafaxine,
telling her that it was her choice
whether or not to fill the prescription. I also
told her about homeopathy and gave her a
10M dose of Aurum metallicum to take there
in the office.
On the second meeting I learned she had
not filled the prescription. She was ambivalent
about medication. She took another dose of
Aurum. I told her and her mother a modified
version of the Wizard of Oz (slight Native
American flavor added). I love this story about
all these perfectly fine characters wandering
about feeling they are defective and looking for
validation to prove that they are whole.
Validation comes in the form of having a successful
adventure that even the expert (the
great and powerful Oz) couldn’t have anticipated.
All Oz could do was acknowledge their
success as the audience.
On the third meeting, I focused on her
mother’s inability to take care of herself and to
lead a happy life. We talked about the recent
divorce. Prior to dad’s leaving, mother and
daughter had formed a unified front against
dad’s irresponsibility. Perhaps the family was
missing dad, I suggested. Someone had to be
unhappy to take his place.
Over the course of six more meetings the
mother dramatically changed. She became
able to just listen to her daughter without
trying to offer suggestions or advice. She
stopped working so much and began to take
care of her own needs. The suicide cut off time
came and went. She agreed that she could wait
until summer to kill herself. Later, she decided
she would just be anorexic in the summer and
not kill herself at all. We listened respectfully
and I suggested she examine the life of
Hildegarde of Bingen, who had turned anorexia
into a spiritual pursuit. I suggested she do it
well if she were to do it, like Hildegarde who
composed music, produced art and prayed.
Several more doses of Aurum metallicum probably
helped and also giving the mother
Natrum muriaticum, 10M—her homeopathic
remedy.
Eventually, the daughter got her driver’s
license, a car, decided to rebel against therapy
of any kind including medication (which she
never took but carried the prescription in her
purse the entire time) and homeopathy. She
decided to live her own life and stop coming to
adults for answers. She has remained free from
restricting food and from thoughts of death.
I don’t know what worked. I don’t know
how she solved the problems. I’m still not
quite sure how she even saw the problem. But
the system changed. We can’t break down this
process into bite sized parts like classical science
does. That’s the beauty of systems and it’s
what Coyote Healing is all about.
 LEWIS MEHL-MADRONA, M.D., Ph.D.
Center for Frontier Medicine
in Biofield Science, Program
in Integrative Medicine and
Department of Psychiatry at
the University of Arizona,
Tucson, Arizona.
Fax: 520-626-3518
E-mail:
This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
 He is the author of Coyote Healing published (2003) by Bear & Company, Rochester, Vermont and
Coyote Medicine a Fireside book was published by Simon & Schuster (1998).
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