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At Lourdes, Spiritual Healing happens. Medical records there offer the most organized body of data stretching back in time. There has been an international medical commission investigating claims of healing at Lourdes since 1947, but the whole thing actually began in 1858. Of the six thousand claims of extraordinary healing that have been made at Lourdes, only sixty-four have survived the extremely rigorous protocol of the medical commission's investigation and made it to the category called *miracle*. It's actually quite difficult to be a miracle. One of the first things that the commission does, when a claim is submitted, is reject it if they are aware that the claim involves a condition which has been known to go into spontaneous remission. For this group, spontaneous remission is natural, not supernatural! Read Cancer Free For Life for many examples of spontaneous healing.

One of those cases, finally validated in 1976, involved a man named Vittorio Michelli. He had a sarcoma of the pelvis and was in a full body cast in a military hospital for over a year. His leg was completely separated from his pelvis at the hip, because the bone was being eaten away by the cancer, and there was nothing they could do for him. It was an incurable condition that was progressing on a daily basis. Eventually he asked to be taken to Lourdes where he was bathed in water and instantly felt a sensation of electrical charge or heat running through his body. He immediately claimed to be well, but the doctors at Lourdes have seen so many cases with people saying things like that that they ignored him. Of course, he had arrived in a stretcher and full body cast. Two months later, he was walking with the aid of a cane, and today he is alive and well and walks with only a slight limp.

Many doctors who visit Lourdes work with the Bureau des Constatations Medicales in its long-standing effort to verify and understand cures there. Founded in 1883, the Bureau requires sick pilgrims to bring medical documents and register with the Medical Bureau when they arrive (...) so that they may be cared for properly at the sanctuary's hospitals and subsequently studied if they are cured.

Because the cures at Lourdes have been screened with such care and examined from so many points of view, there is overwhelming evidence that many of them are authentic. Though medical science cannot explain them all, there can be no doubt that a great number of them happened just as their witnesses said. The Bureau's careful work, furthermore, has produced a huge store of case histories, which provide many insights regarding the body's remarkable responsiveness to spiritual influence. Its archives conceivably contain the world's largest and richest source of evidence for the authenticity and power of religious healing.

Alexis Carrel, a Nobel laureate in medicine and medical director of the Rockefeller Institute, told the story of his first trip to Lourdes in 1903 with painstaking honesty. Having gone there as a curious skeptic, he attached himself to a woman with a hopeless case of tubercular peritonitis. While he watched, her sickly features changed so dramatically that he felt he might be suffering an hallucination. Then, before his eyes, a large abdominal tumor, which had filled her navel with pus, disappeared within a few minutes, and to his astonishment she seemed free of pain. Later that day, when he visited her at a local hospital, he found her sitting up in bed, eyes gleaming, and her cheeks full of color. Her abdomen seemed normal, showing no sign of the hopeless-looking tumor he had seen a few hours before, and it didn*t hurt when he pressed it. This and other cases convinced him that many of the cures at Lourdes were authentic, whether they were "miracles" or not, and could not be attributed solely to the relief of functional disorders. He was forced by his experience at Lourdes to admit that human beings possessed mysterious capacities which science should explore as thoroughly as it did germs and new surgical procedures.

Healing of cancer is possible. It might be miraculous healing, or it might be spontaneous remission. Whatever one chooses to call it, it is a fact that there are thousands of documented cases around the world of people who have cured themselves of cancer without medical intervention, devastating chemotherapy or destructive radiation.