Several years ago on a balmy winter day in Texas, 9-year-old
Annabel Beam fell from a branch into the hollow body of an enormous cottonwood
tree in her family’s cow pasture. She tumbled down 30 feet, landed on her head,
and was trapped for hours before rescuers could reach her.
That Anna survived the fall unharmed is amazing. That she
emerged from the tree free of the two rare, chronic diseases she suffered from
is described by both her pastor and her doctor as a miracle.
For Anna’s physician, Dr. Samuel Nurko, director of the
Center for Motility and Functional Gastrointestinal Disorders at Boston’s
Children’s Hospital, the abrupt disappearance of Anna’s intestinal disorders
following a major trauma is an extreme example of a certain kind of medical
event he witnesses on a regular basis — the kind for which there is no
scientific explanation.
“I haven’t seen it to this degree, but we do see patients
who have experiences that can reset the body,” says Nurko. “It’s like pressing
control-alt-delete.”
For Anna’s family and their devout Christian community,
there is no question that the girl’s miraculous recovery was an act of God.
While she was trapped in the tree, Anna told her parents, she met Jesus in
heaven and he sent her back to earth with a guardian angel.
Her mother, Christy, wrote a memoir about it. “Miracles From
Heaven,” a film based on the book, is in theaters now, and Nurko is having a
Hollywood moment. He walked the red carpet at the film’s Chestnut Hill premiere
with Jennifer Garner, who stars as Christy Beam. He’s had boldface shout-outs
in glossy magazines. He’s watched himself played on the big screen by Mexican
superstar Eugenio Derbez, right down to his signature Elmo tie.
“I loved the movie,” Nurko says. But he declines to address
the Beams’ interpretation of Anna’s sudden return to good health. “That is
their story to tell.”
Prior to Anna’s fall, mother and daughter traveled regularly
from their home near Burleson, Texas, a rural suburb of Fort Worth, to Boston
for treatment and monitoring at Children’s Hospital. Anna had been sick since
she was 4 with pseudo-obstruction motility disorder and antral hypomotility
disorder, illnesses for which there is no cure. The nerves and muscles in her
intestines didn’t contract normally, and as a result food, fluid, and air
weren’t able to properly move through Anna’s body. By the time she was 5 she’d
had multiple surgeries for intestinal obstructions. Anna’s diet was largely
liquid, her drug intake copious, and she was in near-constant pain.
Then she fell into the tree. Nurko thinks that Anna had a
near-death experience, although he says it’s impossible to know for sure.
“It was a major event in her inner self,” he says, “that’s
the message. It’s been shown in many cases that your inner well-being, your
faith, your attitude, your beliefs and experiences, your family interactions,
they are all going to affect how you react to disease.”
Nurko is describing the biopsychosocial model of medicine,
known more colloquially as the mind-body connection. It is a driving principle
of his practice, but despite growing evidence, Western medicine has been slow
to embrace the notion that forces outside of the body may impact illness. Dr.
Jeffrey Rediger, a practitioner at the nexus of medicine, psychiatry, and
spirituality, is trying to change that.
“We’re groaning toward a larger understanding of the power
of the mind,” says Rediger, who is medical director at the McLean Southeast
Adult Psychiatric Program in Middleborough, an instructor at Harvard Medical School,
and a graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary. “We can’t think ourselves
into health, but the pattern I’ve seen over and over again is that if a person
can have a deep change in their psyche or their soul, whether it happens
quickly or over 10 years in psychotherapy, the body responds. It’s an unmapped
wilderness in our culture.”
Spiritual experiences are an especially knotty problem for
traditional science, Rediger says, rooted as it is in the assumption that
thoughts and feelings must be excluded from the data in order to uncover
objective reality. Regarding Anna Beam’s “miracle,” Rediger takes issue with
the very definition of the word.
“I believe that miracles only contradict what we know of
nature,” he says. “I believe that miracles are actually consistent with mental
and spiritual laws, it’s just that we’re in the very early stages of mapping
them in the West. Modern physics values consciousness, and this is very slowly
revising science. As we continue to become more interested as a culture in the
power and capacities of the mind, I suspect we will see more interest in
researching such capacities.”
Nurko, meanwhile, would like to see more interest in
researching gastrointestinal disease, and it’s his fervent hope that the
publicity surrounding “Miracles From Heaven” will increase awareness and
funding for a range of disorders that he says affect 10 percent of all
children.
He said the public is not inclined to get involved in
gastrointestinal disorders.
“When you talk about poop and vomiting, people don’t want to
engage. It’s not stem cells. Cancer is sexier. These kids get forgotten.”
Anna’s story, however, is unforgettable. When she returned
to Children’s Hospital for the first time after her fall, she was asymptomatic.
Completely normal. A pizza eater. Nurko saw no need to run even a single test.
Asked how surprised he was by Anna’s headlong return to good health, he says he
is consistently surprised by diseases not doing what doctors expect them to do.
“We think we know what’s going to happen, but nature has a
way to play games with us,” says Nurko. “We see miracles every day here in the
hospital.”
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