To the Editor (NY Times):

Medicine professor Jerome Groopman, M. D. is appropriately in awe of the miracle (defined in Webster's as a wonderful thing, worthy of admiration) of Dr. Einhorn's Cisplastin cure for his patient's testicular cancer but sadly begrudges that the patient's 'wife and twin daughter kept a steady vigil at his bedside, praying for a miracle.' While disparaging what he perceives the family pass_ folksy faith in the efficacy of prayer, Dr. Groopman fails to realize the self-contradiction in his attitude when he expresses a boundless faith that 'the secrets of how a drug can so definitively destroy a cancer cell will be deciphered'. Dr. Groopman's view is unduly one-sided.

While advances in molecular biology are truly miraculous, science can no longer ignore the role of negative and positive emotions as an essential co-factor in the cause (the state of giving up on life) and cure (the will to live) in cancer and other medical conditions. It was none other than Alexis Carrel, the pioneering cell researcher at Rockefeller Institute, who wrote in 1935: 'certain spiritual activities may cause anatomical as well as functional modifications of the tissues and the organs. Those organic phenomena are observed in various circumstances, among them being the state of prayer' (Man the Unknown, p. 147). The other factor of a spiritual kind is the labor of love and devotion coming from relatives or friends and the much-needed, nay, necessary, emotional support these offer to the person in the throes of cancer.

The story of Lance Armstrong and others like him is miraculous on both counts: the achievements of science and technology, so outstanding as to seem to be beyond human capability, and that vital energy of overcoming despair, as he stated himself: 'you go through this whole spectrum and cycle of diagnosis and the bad news and the depression and the treatment. You spend a year so scared and terrified that you feel like you feel the rest of your life to have a vacation. But you can't. You have to return to your life and your family and your peers' (NY Times, July 26, page D4). The permanent miracle is understanding and working with the unity of the body and the emotions.

Zvi Lothane, M. D.
Associate Professor of Psychiatry
Division of Behavioral Medicine
Mount Sinai--NYU School of Medicine

Address: 1435 Lexington Avenue, NYC
Telephone: 534 5555
e-mail <zl@doc.mssm.edu>