Cured: The Power of Our Immune System and the Mind-Body Connection

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Dr Jeff Rediger, a world-leading Harvard psychiatrist, has spent the last fifteen years studying thousands of individuals from around the world, examining the stories behind extraordinary cases of recovery from terminal illness. He is best known as a founding member of the band that virtually invented alternative music, The Cure. Formed in 1976, The Cure is one of the most influential, successful and critically acclaimed bands of its generation. The aim, though, is not to define categories, but to showcase and explain a sensibility that is fascinated with the bleaker side of life. While more outre corners of goth culture focused on vampires, ruined abbeys and somewhat alarming sadomasochistic practices, Tolhurst is primarily interested in a kind of ethereal pessimism: the mournful yearning and heightened emotional drama expressed in songs such as Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights, Joy Division’s Love Will Tear Us Apart and I Know It’s Over by the Smiths. Descriptions like that perfectly reflected my own experience seeing The Cure live and why it remains one of the best concerts I’ve experienced. Robert’s charisma to win over the unlikeliest of fans is showcased numerous times.

Cured is not only the first insider account of the early days of the band, it is a revealing look at the artistic evolution of the enigmatic Robert Smith, the iconic lead singer, songwriter, and innovative guitarist at the heart of The Cure. A deeply rebellious, sensitive, tough, and often surprisingly "normal" young man, Smith was from the start destined for stardom, a fearless non-conformist and provocateur who soon found his own musical language through which to express his considerable and unique talent. Obviously this book is never going to give you the magical miracle pill. There is no real answers. All the people do different things. There isn't one thing that everyone did that links them together. These people who managed it are outliers. They are not the norm. And like I said, you can do everything right and never achieve healing. It's a book about case studies with a lot of question marks around them. There is nothing definite. These book talks about what might have made them achieve spontaneous healing but can offer no facts. It's a lot guesses and "Maybe this helped". I mean, how can you actually get a definite "THIS is the reason." from something that has happened that should've been impossible? In the meantime, he feels it is his job – his “duty” even – to make people aware of the discoveries he and others have made in recent years. “I feel a responsibility for passing on this knowledge.”I was excited to read this, but it turned out to be quite disappointing. The topic is incredibly interesting, but I feel that the whole book could have been executed better. As there are no explanations behind the miraculous recoveries, it felt like a lot of emphasis was put on things that these patients did that could be a complete coincidence and not actually "the cure". A trip to Brazil, changing your diet, or even just having the mindset of 'wanting to get better' - we are told that the people who were miraculously cured did these things and somehow got better. I worry that it could make a reader who has a terminal diagnosis (or even loved ones who have passed from a terminal condition) have feelings of guilt/negativity because they aren't doing good enough or haven't changed their diet. Another important point Rediger makes is that there are no silver bullets, neither any guarantee that making radical changes is going to improve a chronic health condition. In fact, there is nothing "spontaneous" about spontaneous healing, as in most cases the seeds for healing are planted long before any noticeable changes take place. However, scientific studies have proven that the amount of involvement and participation that an individual puts forth has an enormous impact on their treatment recovery. The last case I read about before finally putting this book down in disgust was of a patient who "cured himself from kidney cancer" through meditation only. Seriously? Marchant explores the possibilities of psychology-based approaches to improving physical well-being in this open-minded, evidence-based account… A powerful and critically-needed conceptual bridge.” Publishers Weekly (starred review)

On our first day of school, Robert and I stood at the designated stop at Hevers Avenue with our mothers, and that's when we met for the very first time. We were five years old." As two of the first punks in the provincial English town of Crawley, Lol Tolhurst and Robert Smith didn't have it easy. Outsiders from the start, theirs was a friendship based initially on proximity and a shared love of music, from the punk that was raging in nearby London to the groundbreaking experimentation of David Bowie's "Berlin Trilogy." First known as The Easy Cure, they began playing in pubs and soon developed their own unique style and approach to songwriting, resulting in timeless songs that sparked a deep sense of identification and empathy in listeners, songs like "Boys Don't Cry," "Just Like Heaven," and "Why Can't I Be You?," spearheading a new subculture dubbed "Goth" by the press. The music of The Cure was not only accessible but also deeply subversive, challenging conventional notions of pop music and gender roles while inspiring a generation of devoted fans and a revolution in style.Lol Tolhurst photographed in his home in Los Angeles, September 2023, by Pat Martin for the Observer New Review. He is currently in the middle of research to find out whether there’s any way of discovering, via a blood test, when people are heading into this dangerous territory and their fat cells are putting out what he describes as “distress signals”. The second half of the book miserably spiraled into something I had no interest in reading. Tolhurst removed the focus on recording the albums and his experience with the band and started to give lengthy descriptions on the topic of his, at this point full-blown, alcoholism. Very understandable, might I add, as it was such a big part of Tolhurst's life and impacted his relationships with the band members very much, but it just wasn't something I was particularly interested in. In the early nineties, Lol relocated to Southern California where he continues to write, record and tour with his own band, Levinhurst. She said it’s the one conversation we never have – about how to die. She’s about the same age as me, and over the three days of the festival we had an ongoing debate together. And then I went and read her books. I’m in the third act of life now, whichever way you look at it, so my mind is focused on these themes. A goth sensibility at least opens such things up and allows you to get to grips with them. It doesn’t try to sweep uncomfortable stuff under the carpet.”

Unfortunately, all too often the book reads like: “we did this, then we did that, I was wearing this, I got drunk, I urinated on this.” I would have loved more focus on the creation of songs and how they came to be. Instead such moments are just vague and often repetitive. Crashing a jeep while drunk was the only thing mentioned about the making of my favourite Cure album, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me.As The Cure’s drummer, Lol toured the globe many times over, supporting the ground-breaking albums Three Imaginary Boys, Seventeen Seconds, Faith and Pornography. He took on keyboard duties in the mid-eighties until his departure from the band in 1989, at the time of their masterwork Disintegration. For as long as I've known Robert people have been out to get him. On stage, in the pubs, or on the street, he's always been a target. I've never seen Robert instigate a fight, yet there's something about him that provokes people."

Throughout the book, Rediger explores the mind-body connection, and how our perception of the world and our stress response has a profound impact on our immune and nervous system, altering how our body functions on a deep cellular level. Rediger believes that along the journey to health, individuals need to confront those unconscious, often self-limiting beliefs that we carry about ourselves and the world, which are deeply ingrained in our psyche, and often developed through traumatic childhood experiences. Also, an acceptance of one's own mortality is an incredibly important part of the healing process, relinquishing individuals with chronic and life threatening illnesses from their fear of death, allowing them to live their fullest and most authentic lives possible. Marchant] has chosen very moving characters to show us the importance of the research…and she has an equal flair for finding inspirational figures… the studies are irresistible.” New York Times One of Taylor’s most important new discoveries is that everyone has their own fat threshold: an individual level of tolerance for levels of fat in the body. “It’s a personal thing. It’s nothing to do with the sort of information that’s often provided about obesity, which is about average BMI and what the population is doing. The bottom line is, a person will develop type 2 diabetes when they’ve become too heavy for their own body. It doesn’t matter if their BMI is within the ‘normal’ range. They’ve crossed their personal threshold and become unhealthy.”I'm not a religious person AT ALL but this book looks at the affect of prayer, meditation and other more spiritual activities on the outcomes of patients given terminal prognoses. As Taylor explains in his book, if you have increased your BMI by three units or more since you were in your early 20s, you are at risk. It doesn’t matter how slim you look to other people. “People imagine that if everybody says they’re slim, they won’t get type 2 diabetes, but in fact that’s not true. Our present research involves people who are not obese, and indeed, have a normal BMI.” Enter Dr. Jeff Rediger, who has spent over 15 years studying spontaneous healing, pioneering the use of scientific tools to investigate recoveries from incurable illnesses. Dr. Rediger digs down to the root causes of illness, showing how to create an environment that sets the stage for healing. He reveals the patterns behind healing and lays out the physical and mental principles associated with recovery: first, we need to physically heal our diet and our immune systems. Next, we need to mentally heal our stress response and our identities. This explains why only half of people are clinically obese when they are first diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, and why studies have shown that almost three-quarters of extremely obese people, with a BMI of over 45, do not suffer from type 2 diabetes. “Some people can put on glorious amounts of fat and store it all under the skin without any metabolic problems at all.” It provides an insight into some medical terminology/physiology, e.g. explanations of the immune system and its role in cancer, and I thought that this was explained clearly for those who may be new to the topic.