[Aedes]

Individual anecdotes that are easy to negate with many other anecdotal counterexamples -- many among my own patients. I've seen people with great attitudes, outlooks, and beliefs who are ravaged by diseases, and people with those same attitudes that do extremely well, better than expected. I've seen depressed pessimists do extremely well with some diseases, and I've seen some do terribly. The mind certainly influences self-care behavior and indeed can affect outcomes. But this tight, causal connection you describe in your long story bears little resemblance to biology or medicine.

And anecdotes are pretty unenlightening in medical practice when both the conditions and observations are uncontrolled. You can put people on chemo regimens and do biopsies to measure percent necrosis within a tumor, as is done for some malignancies. You can do controlled studies with hundreds or thousands of patients to see whether the addition of a chemo drug like cisplatin or cyclophosphamide or adriamycin or methotrexate improves outcomes as compared with regimens that lack this drug. I'd like to see a controlled study that uses the same objective outcome measures and controls the experimenal conditions before I take anecdotes like this seriously.

Let me also add that Walter Russell strikes me as either patently insane or a habitual user of hallucinogens, and I find little that is philosophically insightful in his writings. Just because he proved to himself that he could cure his own illness does not mean that this is believable let alone generalizable -- unless you think his word is somehow divine.