| Mr. Wright Why We Believe What We Believe: Uncovering Our Biological Need for Meaning, Spirituality, and Truth (Mark Robert Waldman) - Highlight Loc. 84-104 MR. WRIGHT WASN’T EXPECTED TO LIVE THROUGH THE night. His body was riddled with tumors, his liver and spleen were enlarged, his lungs were filled with fluid, and he needed an oxygen mask to breathe. But when Mr. Wright heard that his doctor was conducting cancer research with a new drug called Krebiozen, which the media were touting as a potential miracle cure, he pleaded to be given treatments. Although it was against protocol, Dr. Klopfer honored Mr. Wright’s request by giving him an injection of the drug, then left the hospital for the weekend, never expecting to see his patient again. But when he returned on Monday morning, he discovered that Mr. Wright’s tumors had shrunk to half their original size, something that even radiation treatments could not have accomplished. “Good God!” thought Dr. Klopfer. “Have we finally found the silver bullet—a cure for cancer?” Unfortunately, an examination of the other test patients showed no changes at all. Only Mr. Wright had improved. Was this a rare case of spontaneous remission, or was some other unidentified mechanism at work? The doctor continued to give injections to his recovering patient, and after ten days practically all signs of the disease had disappeared. Wright returned home, in perfect health. Two months later, the Food and Drug Administration reported that the experiments with Krebiozen were proving ineffective. Mr. Wright heard about the reports and immediately became ill. His tumors returned, and he was readmitted to the hospital. Now, Dr. Klopfer was convinced that the patient’s belief in the drug’s effectiveness had originally healed him. To test his theory, he decided to lie, telling Mr. Wright about a “new, super-refined, double-strength product” that was guaranteed to produce better results. Mr. Wright agreed to try this “new” version of what he believed had healed his tumors before, but in reality, Dr. Klopfer gave him injections of sterile water. Once again, Mr. Wright’s recovery was dramatic. His tumors disappeared, and he resumed his normal life—until the newspapers published an announcement by the American Medical Association under the headline “Nationwide Tests Show Krebiozen to Be a Worthless Drug in Treatment of Cancer.” After reading this, Mr. Wright fell ill again, returned to the hospital, and died two days later. In a report published in the Journal of Projective Techniques, Dr. Klopfer concluded that when the power of Wright’s optimistic beliefs expired, his resistance to the disease expired as well. Next |
Manipulation of Humans by Beliefs
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