Journal of Sacred Work

It is the human commitment to high purpose that can brighten and change our world.
-Erie Chapman 

   We all know the phenomenon. A certain number of patients in research studies designed to test new drugs will recover from their illness even though they are in a control group that is only taking a so called "sugar pill" or some other harmless substance. The notion is that these patients are getting better because they believe they are taking some magical new treatment.
   It turns out the placebo effect is the wrong way to describe the quantum impact of this phenomenon. What the studies prove is the role our belief has on our bodies ability to recover. Drs. Daniel Moerman and Wayne Jones believe, therefore, that we should rename this process "The
Meaning Effect." 
   The great Dr. Victor Frankl (photo) would probably have preferred that we call it the "Purpose Effect" based on his discovery that there was a direct relationship between the purposefulness of concentration camp victims and their ability to survive…

   What these thinkers are telling us is something we know but underestimate. Belief affects healing. This is also part of the theory I recently advanced called Quantum Caregiving. When caregivers accept and live out the understanding of the power of the human mind and spirit to heal itself, they become partners in sacred encounters with their patients, not simply robots administering drugs.
   The existing patterns in the American medical-industrial complex do little to support caregivers in this approach. It will take at least a generation for Quantum Caregiving to be practiced as well as understood. We know how to hand people pills. We are less clear about the kind of presence we can offer that can have a different and more powerful impact than any medication.
   You and I have seen this phenomenon many times. I saw it recently at Alive Hospice in Nashville as a mother climbed into bed with her dying eight-year old son to catch his tears, to comfort him, to hand him the gift of her love.  When Ginger, the boy’s nurse, saw what was happening, she backed away. "He needs his mother at a time like this, not me." What a beautiful recognition on Ginger’s part of the healing power of a mother’s love.
   A housekeeper stops to comfort the confusion of an elderly patient crying out for his absent daughter. And in her touch, she brought relief and, for a time, healing. A nurse strokes the back of a dying baby. She has no medicine to cure him. But instead of abandoning the baby’s case as hopeless, she loves him on his final journey out of this world. Another housekeeper at another hospital sings Amazing Grace to ease the pain of a patient. An operating room nurse holds up the entire schedule to give a blind wife the chance to hear her husband’s voice one more time before surgeons remove his cancer-ridden voice box forever.
   All of these are examples of Quantum Caregiving. Each of them reflects the impact of the Meaning Effect. These are not examples of curing, they are expressions of the gift of loving care – of healing beyond curing.

Questions:

1) How do you interpret the Meaning Effect in your work versus the Placebo Effect?

2) Is Quantum Caregiving a phrase you find useful in describing the exponential impact some caregivers have on patients or is it too confusing?

-Erie Chapman