Macular
Degeneration
Recovery
CASE STUDY
HIGHLY UNUSUAL MACULAR RECOVERY
www.macular-degeneration-recovery.com
subsequent to treatment by MAHARISHI AYURVEDA
Discussion
This discussion seeks to examine the nature of the relationship between
my highly atypical recovery from macular degeneration and the treatment I received
from Maharishi Ayurveda Hospital.
Specifically, it considers placebo effect, coincidence,
the role of my belief as an active ingredient in physiological repair, and the precedence
or indeed the lack of it -
1. Was the Ayurvedic treatment responsible for my
vision recovery?
2. Do I believe my Ayurvedic treatment was responsible for
my vision recovery?
3. Could my improvement have been merely a placebo effect?
4. Could my improvement have been a coincidence?
5. Would my improvement
have happened without the treatment?
6. Why hasn’t my right eye improved to
the same degree as my left eye?
1. Was the Ayurvedic treatment responsible for my vision recovery?
Throughout this site I have deliberately described my recovery as subsequent to my
treatment, rather than explicitly stating that it was caused by it.
Just because
one event follows another, it does not of course follow that there is a causal relationship
between the two. However, as the improvement and especially the degree of it, was
SO contrary to clinical expectation, it cannot be unreasonable to advance the proposition
that my treatment and recovery are indeed associated.
Obviously, further case history data of macular recovery subsequent to the kind of
highly skilled and authentic treatment I received at Maharishi Ayurveda Hospital
is needed to strengthen the case for the correlation. Indeed, that is the very purpose
of this site: to present a reasoned and reasonable healing option for people who
are told, just as I was, that there is no effective treatment for their macular
degeneration.
2. Do I believe the Ayurvedic treatment was responsible for my vision recovery?
Of course, inner conviction and outer reality are not necessarily the same. Just
because I am certain that I see a snake in the grass, does not make it true -
The above notwithstanding, I do have strong conviction
that my treatment was deeply associated with my recovery. In addition to the empirical
facts of the highly atypical macular regeneration, I had several subjective experiences
during my retinal recovery that contributed to my belief. I will now outline two:
EXPERIENCE 1
The perception of rapid flickering light spots in the visual field is
not uncommon for people with retinal problems, and may be indicative of retinal activity.
After my first residential treatment in India, once back in the UK, I had a dramatic
increase in the quantity, intensity and duration of the phenomena compared to pre-
EXPERIENCE
2
This experience was extraordinary, and I readily admit cannot be explained with reference
to any existing evidence-
After taking Ayurvedic herbs for just 12 days (before I went to Delhi for my first
residential treatment), I woke up one morning with the unmistakable experience that
the cells in my eye had DECIDED to try to see again. The experience was totally
unexpected, deeply visceral, and completely different to the feeling that “I” (my
sense of self) had decided to see again. This bears repeating -
Though it is obviously outside the scope of this site to speculate whether physiological
entities in themselves can express volition, the experience appears to be fully consistent
with one of Ayurveda’s core paradigms:
To the limited degree that I understand it,
their model of illness involves the belief that illness expresses ‘memory loss’ -
It occurs to me that this experience may represent something that is not conceptually
so very different from that which is driving research in regenerative medicine,
especially with regard to the use of embryonic stem cells. While the goal here
is to implant pre-
3. Could my improvement have been merely a placebo effect?
I suspect that psychological attitude does indeed have a part to play in recovery. Ironically, however, if my recovery was indeed only the result of belief, this would surely give rise to the proposition that belief alone can dramatically regenerate retinal (and presumably other central nervous system) tissue.
In my case, the relationship between my belief and my recovery produces a negative
correlation: because my vision recovered so much after my first residential treatment,
belief was stronger going into the second residential treatment -
4. Could my improvement have been a coincidence?
Of course, from the point of view of pure logic, the answer to this question has
to be yes, but only in the sense that a monkey, given infinite time, could write
the works of William Shakespeare. We all know however, this ain’t gonna happen!
The
more clinically meaningful issue therefore is whether my recovery would have happened
without the treatment.
5. Would my improvement have happened without the treatment?
Although my recovery was contrary to all clinical expectation and verbally described
as ‘astonishing’ and ‘stunning’ by my UK ophthalmologist -
I have to say however,
that I have been totally unable to substantiate previous precedent with reference
to published scientific papers. Searches through
It may be important
to note here that the condition of Myopic Macular Degeneration is distinct from,
though of course related to, the more common condition of Age Related Macular Degeneration
(sometimes abbreviated to ARMD or AMD). Unlike ARMD, Myopic Macular Degeneration
is related to the stretching of the retina as a result of the elongation of the eyeball
from substantial short-
In my searches through the published scientific
literature, I used tags that were indeed mindful of this distinction. However, as
I do not have a scientific background, it may be that my search protocols and/or
results interpretation were flawed. If any clinician or researcher would be kind
enough to send me citations that clearly show spontaneous recoveries of the same
(or even approximate) magnitude, I will add them to this site and revise this discussion
accordingly.
There is, however, one further important point to bring out here: even if my recovery
is not unprecedented, and on very rare occasions spontaneous recoveries of parallel
magnitude do occur, it does not of course mean that my treatment was not deeply
associated with my highly atypical recovery.
In essence then, I believe the issue
can be summed up by considering the following two propositions:
a.
dramatic spontanoues recovery may occur on very rare occasions ..
so
rare that neither of my two UK ophthalmic consultants felt it
appropriate
to indicate even the possibility in their prognoses.
And additionally,
and perhaps even more importantly, searches
through the published
literature fail to corroborate the proposition
b. dramatic recovery
occurred as a result of an unproven treatment
Which of these possibilities seem most likely to you?
6. Why hasn’t my right eye
improved to the same degree as my left eye?
As far as I can establish, the degree of right eye recovery is still atypical for
the eye’s pathology, but of course not nearly as dramatic as my left.
It also has
to be said that my ophthalmologist stated that there was no possibility that my right
eye recovery could equal my left eye, because of their different pathologies. Certainly
to date, this is borne out by the facts.
the discussion