"Documenting the life of the Hungarian community in New Zealand"
- Az új-zélandi magyar közösség lapja.
A couple of years ago, I had a coetaneous growth on my nose - not the proverbial sausage of the Grimm fairytales. The doctor burnt it off. It reappeared recently… When our eldest son was about six years old, he had warts on his hands. The local doctor, who was a friend of the family, gave Peter a small bag of white pebbles with instructions that he should leave it in the letterbox before going to bed. Were the bag to disappear overnight so would his warts. Well, the bag was gone and the warts dried off within a week never to return. Which of us got cured?
....
In the mid-sixties I worked at a rehabilitation unit in Auckland. My job was to evaluate the intellectual damage, due to brain injury or degenerative neurological problems and the emotional readiness of people to re-enter everyday life. One day, I met “Lazarus”. He was a young man, condemned to a wheelchair existence for the rest of his life. The ambulance was delayed, so the neurologist and I waited for his arrival in the foyer of the institute. I will never forget the surprised look of the good doctor. Instead of being delivered in a wheelchair, in walked the patient, on his feet, without assistance. In those days, there was a Methodist minister, practising in Otara, with a considerable reputation as a faith-healer. This young man met a girl from his congregation, fell in love with her, was prayed upon by the members of the church and decided to get well in order to marry her and live a normal life. We shifted to Lower Hutt at the end of that year, so I do not know what happened to him in the long run. However, three months after that consultation, the young couple became engaged and during the time I maintained contact with him, he moved around without difficulty. The case suggests that belief alone can elicit healing.
Unfortunately, the technological mania that now dominates the world and the medical fraternity makes people think that other methods of intervention are not scientific enough and are practised only by charlatans. The drugs, prescribed by doctors, are believed to have the curative properties attributed to the chemical substances contained in them. They are the “weapons” with which to fight the invading agents. The pharmacopoeia is conceived of as a therapeutic arsenal and we often use the expression of “fighting” a disease. We are told by various fund-raising organisations that by inventing a new substance, we are on the way to “winning the war” against a particular disease.
What doctors do not like to hear is that the mere act of prescribing a treatment, independent of its contents, elicits a cure by means of a placebo response. The fact that the administration of innocuous sugar pills can produce the same results as the highly touted drugs bedevils medical research. The power of the “dummy pills” is something mental, spiritual and its curative effects are due to the patients' belief in them.
....
As I stated before, I myself was the recipient of modern laboratory science but to make sure, I also used relaxation and “visual imagery” to expedite healing. Conceptualising my inner resources, if nothing else, made me feel better and stronger…