Healing is magical

“The tendency of nature is to restore the injured body to health, but in order for health to be maintained there must be a change in behavior or understanding. The burnt hand does not return to the fire. Healing includes not only ... the regrowth of damaged skin but the learning of a lesson which previously had been unknown.”

“In order to be healed, the patient must embrace something which was previously outside him or herself, while at the same time returning his or her organism to the care of nature. The intrusive, interventive element may come from God, the spirit, the supernatural, or the surgeon's scalpel, but at any rate it changes the patient intrinsically from the way he or she was before. Healing is magical.”

- Matthew Wood, “Vitalism”