Natural Causes
I have been interested in alternative medicine since the day I started medical school. My school, Case Western Reserve University, was very psychiatrically oriented, and spent more time than most schools looking at the mind-body connection. During those years, I once witnessed a hypnotist do a C-section on a woman with no anesthesia save his voice. The operation took only minutes, and the joyful mother walked back to her room. Another time, a hypnotist told a woman she was going to be touched by a hot poker, and touched her arm instead with a pencil eraser. The skin beneath the eraser became red and blistered! That event spoke to me.
Sarah Baldwin, the heroine of the book, says many of the things that I believe about mind-body medicine. "Our microscopes keep getting bigger, and the things we can look at keep getting smaller, but we still don't know why person "A" got a strep throat and person "B" standing right next to them didn't."
It is Sarah's belief, and mine, that whatever helps a patient is worth doing, provided there is minimum downside, and also that he is not kept from finding the therapy that will do the most good. Ultimately, I believe that emotional state and the immune system will prove at least as important as genetics in determining who gets sick and who doesn't.
Natural Causes was a breakthrough book for me in that it was the first of my novels to make it into the top five of The New York Times Best-Seller List. Also, although I generally steer away from listening to the audio abridgment of my books, I did enjoy Natasha Richardson’s reading of this one.
—Michael Palmer
