Seeds of Doubt

“Doubt is the vestibule through which all must pass before they can enter into the temple of wisdom.” – Charles Caleb Colton

“Yashraj Singh and Anil were involved in a very bad road accident last night.” came a familiar voice from behind.

I turned around and saw my roommate and close friend, Shyam Sunder, coming into the hostel room.

It was the year 1977. I was in the fourth year of medical school.

“What happened?” I was alarmed, as Yash and Anil were also friends, studying Medicine with us.

“They were coming back from a late-night movie,” Shyam explained. “Yash was driving his Royal Enfield motorcycle and Anil was the pillion rider when a truck hit them from behind.”

“Oh, my God,” I said. “Are they OK?”

“Anil seems to be fine, but Yash has a very nasty fracture of the femur. They are admitted in the casualty emergency beds.”

“We must go and see them,” I said, as I put on my white coat and hung a stethoscope around my neck. We used to be so proud to have those symbols of being a “doctor” going for clinical teaching, even though we had still not qualified. It was a great feeling of being able to do good for humanity.

Yash was lying on his bed with his leg plastered. He seemed to be reasonably cheerful and made jokes about the accident. We chatted for a while and wished him an early recovery. Unfortunately, things did not progress well with the healing. He stayed in the hospital bed for nine months and had several operations on his leg, but the two pieces of his femur bone refused to heal. Eventually, the orthopaedic surgeon treating him gave him the bad news that his bones would never heal as the last X-ray had shown the broken edges of the bone had become calcified and would never be able to fuse.

Yash was devastated. He had lost precious time during critical stages of his medical school curriculum and now it seems that he may never walk again without crutches. We all felt very sorry for him. His parents came from a remote village in Punjab. His mother had heard about a babaji, a faith healer in the village who had done miracle cures for many. She wanted Yash to go and see him for his broken bone. Initially, he was very reluctant. After all, he was studying to be a doctor in the Western system of medicine and it seemed very silly to go and see a faith healer for his condition when all the senior surgeons had said that the bone would not heal. But his mother convinced him and told him he had nothing to lose. He agreed eventually.

The babaji in the village saw Yash a few times and gave him a paste made up of some local plants and herbs to be put on the leg regularly. After a few weeks of this treatment, Yash started to feel better. He could put weight on his leg without having any pain. He could walk without support and did not limp. So he came back to Delhi and went to the orthopaedic surgeon who had given him the bad news. The surgeon couldn’t believe it when he saw Yash standing without support. He ordered an X-ray and lo and behold, the X-ray showed the two ends of the bone had fused! There was no scientific explanation for the “miracle”.

This was not my first experience with the success of alternative therapy when modern medicine wasn’t very effective. I remember when I was nine years old, I had a very nasty injury. I had just joined secondary school. One day there was a Cricket match. I was watching the rival team practising before the match. Suddenly one of the players decided to hit a loose ball very hard and it hit me straight on my left eye socket. The impact was so immense that I fainted. I don’t remember what happened after that till I woke up in the local primary care dispensary & saw my mother looking over me with tears in her eyes. The doctor had already stitched the wound on my forehead while I was unconscious – apparently, I didn’t need an anaesthetic agent. I was discharged home. My face was badly bruised with blood on the white of my eyeball. Later in the day, I started to vomit blood. Another doctor was called who gave me some medicines but it didn’t help.  My father was away on official work for a couple of days. My mother took charge and made a concoction of herbal remedies and made me drink that. I rapidly recovered from the injury and was ready to go to school within two days. I later realised that my mother was very knowledgeable about herbal home remedies. Whenever we had a minor injury, she would put turmeric on the wound and make us drink it mixed with warm milk. She also regularly used to give me Thandai a herbal drink containing almonds, cashew nuts, black peppercorns, raisins, green cardamoms, poppy seeds, fennel seeds, melon seeds and saffron, as she believed it increased intelligence. She attributed all my academic successes later in life to that Thandai she used to make me drink as a child.

So, coming back to Yash’s experience, the doubts started to invade my mind. Was it the herbal paste that cured him or was it the faith? No one knew the answer, but his mother was certain that it was babaji who had done it. Yash himself lost belief in the subject that he was studying – the Western system of medicine also referred to as Allopathy in India. He decided to take the Indian Administrative Service exam and succeeded. He became a bureaucrat and served in various capacities in the Indian Government but never practised Medicine again. His decision and the whole story left an indelible impression in my mind about the power of alternative/faith healing. Is it the power of belief, I wondered. It was much later in my career that I could discover the scientific basis of what was happening. Dr Siddharth Mukherjee, Pulitzer Prize winner Oncologist at the University of Columbia, New York describes the experiments in his book “The Song of The Cell” published in 2022, which might explain the mechanism by which ‘later-born, second army’ of cells in the edges of the bone can be stimulated, or rather coaxed into forming new bone cells, resulting in fusion of the broken segments. He doesn’t know how exactly or why we have a second army. He calls this mysterious force the ‘song’ that plays between all cells of the body. I hope I have discovered the song in Ipsicura effect. We will discuss Stem Cells and this phenomenon in much more detail in Chapter 11. Let me narrate another case that shaped my journey and had a significant impact 45 years later on.