Dr. Richard Cabot, a Harvard physician, once said that the physician's role is to cure sometimes, relieve often, and comfort always. But what about the moments when curing happens in ways that medicine cannot explain?
Every experienced physician has at least one case that defies rational explanation. The stage IV cancer that vanishes between scans. The patient declared brain-dead who wakes up and walks out of the hospital. The catastrophic injury that heals in a fraction of the expected time, leaving specialists speechless.
These aren't urban legends. They're documented in medical records, verified by imaging studies, and witnessed by teams of clinicians. Yet they rarely make it into medical journals because there's no mechanism to explain them—and medicine has little patience for the unexplained. The peer-reviewed literature does contain some of these cases, typically under headings like "spontaneous regression of malignancy" or "unexpected recovery following devastating neurological injury," but the language is deliberately cautious, the tone defensive. Authors anticipate skepticism and write accordingly, hedging every observation with caveats about the possibility of misdiagnosis, the limits of retrospective analysis, and the need for "further research" that almost never materializes.
The result is a gap between what physicians experience at the bedside and what they feel permitted to discuss in formal professional settings. This gap—between witnessed reality and permissible discourse—is one of the central themes of Dr. Scott Kolbaba's work.
What physicians say privately:
"I've been practicing for thirty years, and I've seen three things I absolutely cannot explain. Not with any medical theory I know." — A cardiologist in New York
"She was dead. Not dying—dead. And then she wasn't. I still don't have an explanation." — An emergency physician in Texas
"I stopped using the word 'impossible' after my second year in practice." — An oncologist in California
These are not clinicians prone to magical thinking. They are products of rigorous scientific training, accustomed to skepticism as a professional reflex. And yet they report events that resist naturalistic explanation with a consistency that itself demands attention.
How different specialties process these events varies in ways that reflect the cultures of their fields. Surgeons, accustomed to direct causation—incision leads to repair, intervention leads to outcome—often have the hardest time integrating unexplained recoveries into their worldview. When a surgical candidate with a documented tumor returns for a pre-operative scan and the tumor is gone, the surgeon's framework has no category for "the surgery became unnecessary." Pediatricians and family medicine physicians, by contrast, often report greater comfort with uncertainty, perhaps because their practices routinely include outcomes—children outgrowing serious conditions, chronic diseases remitting without clear cause—that defy tidy mechanistic explanation. Psychiatrists, interestingly, are among the most likely to accept anomalous experiences as genuine, perhaps because their discipline has long grappled with the reality that subjective experience is real even when its mechanisms are obscure.
The tension is real. Physicians are trained to trust evidence, seek mechanisms, and reject anecdotal claims. But when you're the one holding the chart, reading the scans, and watching the "impossible" happen in front of you—the evidence is your own eyes. This creates a particular kind of cognitive dissonance. The same physician who dismisses a colleague's unexplained case as "probably a misdiagnosis" may have their own unexplained case that they guard privately, knowing the data intimately, having checked and rechecked for alternative explanations, and finding none.
Research on physician belief provides context for this tension. A 2005 survey of physicians published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine found that approximately 56% believed in the possibility of miracles in the present day, with belief rates higher among physicians in primary care and pediatrics than in surgery or pathology. More strikingly, over 70% agreed that "when I don't understand something in medicine, I attribute it to the limitations of medical science rather than to supernatural forces"—suggesting that most physicians maintain a default materialist framework even when they've witnessed events that challenge it.
Some physicians reconcile these experiences through faith. Others file them under "things we don't understand yet." A few choose to investigate, contributing to a growing body of research on spontaneous remission and anomalous healing. The Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia, founded by Dr. Ian Stevenson, has been studying phenomena at the boundaries of conventional scientific explanation for over fifty years, building case databases that are methodologically rigorous even if their subject matter makes mainstream funding agencies uncomfortable.
The professional isolation that accompanies these experiences cannot be overstated. A physician who has witnessed an unexplained recovery may spend an entire career without a single colleague in whom they can confide. At conferences, in grand rounds, in the physician lounge, the conversation returns relentlessly to what can be measured, predicted, and explained. The physician carrying an unexplained case learns to compartmentalize—to hold the clinical facts in one part of the mind and the mysterious outcome in another, never allowing them to touch. This compartmentalization has a cost. It fragments the physician's experience of their own career, creating a split between what they know happened and what they are permitted to say happened.
Dr. Scott Kolbaba collected many of these accounts in Physicians' Untold Stories, giving physicians a safe space to share what they've witnessed without fear of ridicule. The stories remind us that medicine, for all its advances, still operates at the edge of profound mystery—and that the physicians who acknowledge that mystery are not weaker scientists, but more honest ones. The willingness to say "I don't know" in the face of the inexplicable is not a failure of scientific training; it is the fullest expression of the scientific virtue of honesty in the presence of evidence that does not fit existing frameworks. The physician who can sit with uncertainty, who can document an outcome without claiming to understand it, who can let the mystery be what it is—that physician models the intellectual humility that is the true foundation of scientific inquiry.
