One of the most fascinating questions in healthcare is:
Why do some people recover in ways that medicine cannot fully explain?
As a medical doctor and Intuitive Healing practitioner, I have always been interested in this question. Modern medicine has achieved extraordinary advances, yet healing and recovery remain complex processes — and sometimes a mystery.
Two particularly interesting areas are spontaneous remission and the placebo effect.
The Spontaneous Remission Project
Spontaneous remission describes the partial or complete disappearance of a disease without medical treatment, or following treatment considered inadequate to explain the improvement.
In 1993, the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) Spontaneous Remission Project published Spontaneous Remission: An Annotated Bibliography. The project collected more than 3,500 references from over 800 medical journals in 20 languages, creating what was then the world’s largest collection of medically reported spontaneous-remission literature.
The work continues today. In 2026, IONS launched a new searchable database preserving the original bibliography and adding newly identified cases through 2025.
These include reports of people who recovered from seemingly incurable diseases without medical treatment, or after treatment considered inadequate to explain such significant results.
They demonstrate something very important:
Unexpected recovery can occur, and there are still aspects of healing that we do not completely understand.
The Placebo Effect
Another fascinating phenomenon is the placebo effect.
A placebo is an inactive treatment given in a context in which the patient may believe they are receiving an active treatment. Depending on the condition and how improvement is measured, placebo-group response rates vary considerably, with some studies reporting rates from around 18% to more than 70%.
And the responses are not necessarily only psychological. Placebo research has demonstrated that placebos are also associated with measurable changes in the body. This means that physical symptoms may improve or disappear after receiving a placebo.
This raises a fascinating question about the relationship between expectation, belief, trust and physical responses within the body.
Within Intuitive Healing, we also explore the importance of faith — faith in your ability to heal and trust in the healing process itself.
This brings us to an interesting idea: you can become your own placebo.
Your beliefs and expectations may influence how you experience symptoms and respond to treatment and healing. Developing greater faith in your capacity for healing may therefore become an important part of the healing journey.
A Medical Intuitive Approach
From an Intuitive Healing and Medical Intuition perspective, these observations encourage us to look at the whole person.
A person experiencing illness has a physical body, but they also have emotions, beliefs, fears, relationships, past experiences and expectations.
Helping a client release fears and develop greater faith in their capacity for healing — particularly the belief that they can actively participate in their own healing — can become an important part of their transformation.
This connects with one of the central principles of the Liminalis Method™:
Healing is transformation.
Illness can become a liminal state — a period of transition during which a person’s beliefs, thoughts, emotions and relationship with themselves may begin to change.
Healing may therefore involve more than addressing physical symptoms. It can also involve transforming emotions, beliefs, energetic patterns and the way a person experiences themselves and their life.
The more we understand about healing, the more we recognise how much there is still to discover.
I only corrected the grammar in the placebo paragraph. The rest was already grammatically clear.