Richard B. Dewey, Jr. | "The Neurologic Healings of Jesus" | Math3ma Symposium 2024
00:00:00.000 | >> Well, thank you very much, Tai-Danae.
00:00:09.900 | It's a real pleasure to be here.
00:00:11.360 | I was so honored to receive the invitation to speak to this group.
00:00:15.840 | And I will say I appreciate all of the effort that she went to.
00:00:20.160 | I've never had as many helpful emails in preparation for this as I had from her.
00:00:27.320 | So I appreciate that very much.
00:00:30.120 | I don't normally, when I give a talk, like to talk about my personal background, but
00:00:35.000 | I don't know most of you here, and most importantly, Tai-Danae instructed me to do this.
00:00:40.520 | So I will go over this very briefly, just by way of introduction.
00:00:45.360 | I had the pleasure of being raised in a Christian home.
00:00:49.360 | Both of my parents were believers at the time of my birth, and so I had that huge advantage.
00:00:55.880 | But I was also, as a youngster, fascinated by the natural world.
00:01:00.580 | And every summer, you could find me out in the yard with a butterfly net, capturing every
00:01:06.480 | conceivable insect I could find and studying those.
00:01:10.940 | Eventually, I grew up, went to college at Duke University with a degree in biology.
00:01:18.120 | Most significant thing that happened to me during that time was I met my future wife.
00:01:25.160 | And then I went to medical school, Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.
00:01:30.800 | I was actually born in Houston, so I was back home for that phase of my life.
00:01:36.240 | And I actually got married to Debbie during my final year of training in medical school
00:01:41.720 | there in Houston.
00:01:43.920 | And if you've ever spent any time in Texas, you'll know, unlike Southern California, it
00:01:49.600 | gets very hot there.
00:01:51.120 | In fact, it's one of the hottest places in the country during the summer.
00:01:56.480 | And so what I decided to do was move to the coldest place in the country.
00:02:01.760 | And I did my neurology training and ultimately a fellowship in movement disorders at Mayo
00:02:08.300 | Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.
00:02:11.320 | My final year there was a combined fellowship in movement disorders where I did about three-fourths
00:02:18.840 | of it there in Rochester, but during the winter, I was able to rotate to their Scottsdale,
00:02:24.760 | Arizona operation.
00:02:26.840 | And that was fulfilling a promise I made to Debbie that I would only make her spend three
00:02:32.600 | winters in the frozen north.
00:02:38.760 | Following that, my first job was actually my faculty position at University of Texas
00:02:44.240 | Southwestern Medical School in Dallas.
00:02:47.160 | I joined that as a brand new assistant professor and stayed there for almost 30 years, gradually
00:02:53.920 | progressing up the ranks.
00:02:56.440 | And I'll tell you a little bit more in just a minute about my research interest there.
00:03:02.480 | And then very recently, just in January of '23, so just a year and a half ago, I retired
00:03:09.440 | from that position and moved to a small boutique practice on the beach in Florida.
00:03:16.960 | There are a number of reasons why I decided to do that.
00:03:20.440 | The most important was my eldest son, who is also a physician, and although I told him,
00:03:26.640 | "Hey, we need a cardiologist, a gastroenterologist," something like that in the family, instead
00:03:33.160 | he went into neurology and movement disorders.
00:03:36.780 | So he does exactly what I do, and he took this job in Florida with a longstanding friend
00:03:42.780 | of mine, and when he got there, he started calling me up and saying, "Dad, why are you
00:03:47.880 | still practicing in Dallas when you could join us here in Florida?"
00:03:53.360 | And eventually they twisted my arm and we decided to do that.
00:03:58.240 | Also I had always harbored a lifelong dream of retiring in Florida, which is kind of a
00:04:05.040 | funny story there because when I mentioned this to my wife, she said, "Well, you've never
00:04:09.480 | mentioned that to me."
00:04:11.360 | So that was something we learned about each other late in the course of our relationship.
00:04:18.240 | Most importantly, though, I do want to share with you a little bit about my spiritual development.
00:04:22.320 | I already told you I was born into a Christian family.
00:04:26.340 | My parents nurtured me and the Lord from the earliest age.
00:04:29.840 | Some of my earliest memories are sitting on the side of my bed before sleep and being
00:04:36.840 | read to by my mom and dad from the Bible in pictures in little eyes.
00:04:42.240 | And very early on, I understood the gospel as a child would understand it and received
00:04:48.680 | salvation from the Lord at that time.
00:04:51.640 | I also had the privilege of being raised in a number of different Bible-believing churches
00:04:57.080 | as I grew up.
00:04:59.680 | My dad was very interested in small group fellowship type of activities, and he really
00:05:06.240 | mentored me in how to do that.
00:05:08.880 | And so starting probably even in junior high, I began to look for opportunities to be involved
00:05:15.860 | in home fellowship groups and was given some leadership roles in that, and really that
00:05:22.280 | became one of my passions individually.
00:05:26.560 | In college, I discovered the tape ministry of John MacArthur.
00:05:30.840 | And back in those days, there were no MP3s, nothing you could download, so I had a huge
00:05:35.680 | drawer full of those tapes that I was listening through.
00:05:40.280 | And that was a huge element in my spiritual development.
00:05:44.920 | Ultimately, as I grew older, with the church that I was involved with, I had the opportunity
00:05:51.200 | to kind of head up a home fellowship ministry there at the church and was tasked with writing
00:05:58.000 | kind of an advanced Bible study series on 14 books of the Bible.
00:06:03.920 | And that just consisted of questions that kind of elucidated what the text was talking
00:06:09.880 | about and led to discussion and sharing about how the Lord was working our lives.
00:06:16.440 | Ultimately, I was asked to serve as an elder, where I did, at Countryside Bible Church,
00:06:22.240 | again in Texas.
00:06:23.240 | That's where we lived for almost those 30 years when I was in Dallas.
00:06:28.960 | And then I had the additional privilege of being asked to serve as a member of the board
00:06:33.160 | of directors of Master's Seminary and University from 2016 to 2021.
00:06:39.600 | As you can tell from those dates, towards the latter part there, we had some real difficult
00:06:45.640 | times trying to figure out how do you navigate a worldwide pandemic in a state that really
00:06:51.800 | wants to shut you down if you're a Christian.
00:06:55.080 | And so the Lord worked really amazingly in my life and I think in the lives of all of
00:06:59.920 | us as we learned how to do that.
00:07:03.280 | Little bit about my professional career.
00:07:07.600 | My primary passion from the very beginning has been the field of Parkinson's disease.
00:07:14.560 | Someone asked me earlier, "Why did you go into Parkinson's?
00:07:18.360 | What was the deal with that?"
00:07:19.360 | Interestingly, I had no one in the family, so it wasn't a personal thing.
00:07:24.080 | But as I was going through my neurology training, I was particularly drawn to this disease.
00:07:29.200 | I think mainly because of its therapeutic emphasis.
00:07:34.400 | Neurology sometimes carries kind of a bad rap that we make a lot of diagnoses, but we
00:07:40.800 | can't really help many people.
00:07:43.800 | That is becoming less and less true, but at the time I was going through it, we looked
00:07:48.520 | at Parkinson's as one of the most therapeutic of the different diseases that we saw.
00:07:53.880 | And so that drew me, I think, into the field.
00:07:57.600 | A little bit about Parkinson's, for those of you that aren't familiar with it, this
00:08:01.440 | is a degenerative disease of the brain.
00:08:04.840 | It's still of unknown cause.
00:08:07.080 | We've known about it ever since 1817, which was the first original description of the
00:08:13.120 | disease.
00:08:14.120 | But it's fascinating, if you travel to India and examine some of the cave drawings that
00:08:20.160 | date back to 5,000 years BC, you can find etchings in caves that look all the world
00:08:26.920 | like they're depicting patients with Parkinson's disease.
00:08:29.800 | So we think this has been a problem with humans since the beginning, although we've known
00:08:34.680 | very little about it until the last 200 years.
00:08:38.680 | The biggest problem with Parkinson's is that it is an inexorable brain disease.
00:08:44.920 | Once the problem begins, it progresses inexorably.
00:08:49.560 | And we now know that the primary problem is the deposition of an otherwise normal brain
00:08:55.480 | protein that begins to undergo a conformational change.
00:09:00.240 | And in oligomers, which are small clumps of that protein, they're toxic to the brain cells.
00:09:08.080 | And what they essentially do, as best we can tell, is these oligomers of alpha-synuclein
00:09:14.080 | start to punch holes in mitochondria.
00:09:17.320 | And mitochondria, as you know, are the energy pumps of every living cell.
00:09:22.360 | And if you damage those mitochondria, eventually the cell begins to die, and ultimately energy
00:09:28.240 | failure kills them.
00:09:30.960 | And so I developed very early on in my academic career an interest in figuring out a way to
00:09:37.160 | slow or stop the progression of Parkinson's disease.
00:09:40.520 | And that was really the primary effort that I employed while I was there for those 30
00:09:48.000 | years.
00:09:49.000 | And I just want to show you an example of this, just for those of you that aren't familiar
00:09:52.760 | with it.
00:09:54.440 | What this represents is a cut section of the human midbrain, which is the part of the brain
00:10:00.280 | way in the back of the head, just above the spinal cord.
00:10:04.720 | And what you can see in a normal person, and this incidentally does not involve any stains,
00:10:10.120 | this is visible to the naked eye, you see these very dark bands that are present in
00:10:16.640 | the human midbrain.
00:10:18.160 | If you look at your Parkinson's disease brain, what you can see from the back of the room
00:10:22.560 | is those black lines have disappeared.
00:10:25.940 | And the reason they've disappeared is shown here.
00:10:29.480 | This is the normal cut section through one of those black lines.
00:10:33.180 | You see all those large cell bodies of neurons.
00:10:36.940 | And in the Parkinson's disease brain, those neurons have disappeared.
00:10:41.020 | So this is disease in which the neurons that live in this area begin to degenerate.
00:10:47.840 | And this little animation here at the bottom, what I'm just showing you is that this is
00:10:52.840 | now recognized as what we call a dying back axonopathy.
00:10:58.440 | And so what happens is the distal terminals of the neurons, illustrated here, begin to
00:11:05.760 | die back from their synaptic connections in the center of the brain.
00:11:11.300 | And as a result, you have less and less dopaminergic transmission, and eventually the brain levels
00:11:17.300 | of dopamine fall to a critical level.
00:11:20.080 | And when that happens, the classic symptoms of Parkinson's begin.
00:11:24.160 | And for those of you that aren't familiar with it, the basic symptoms of Parkinson's
00:11:28.160 | are resting tremor, rigidity of your arms and legs, and then the third one is slowing
00:11:35.960 | down of movement.
00:11:37.160 | And so Parkinson's patients begin to get slow and stiff.
00:11:41.400 | And then ultimately, as the disease evolves, they also develop a balance impairment that
00:11:46.480 | can be very serious.
00:11:52.000 | Now there have been a number of drugs that we have evaluated with the goal being to slow
00:11:58.820 | down the progression of this inexorable disease.
00:12:02.040 | And many of these I was personally involved with testing.
00:12:07.700 | The first class I'll tell you about just very briefly are called the MAO-B inhibitors.
00:12:12.540 | That stands for monoamine oxidase.
00:12:15.420 | And basically, this is a normal enzyme that every brain has that breaks down dopamine
00:12:22.380 | into its constituent products.
00:12:25.140 | The problem with that breakdown is one of those end products is potentially toxic to
00:12:31.300 | the brain.
00:12:32.300 | And so we thought, well, if we give a drug that inhibits that, we'll decrease the risk
00:12:37.460 | of damaging the brain.
00:12:39.040 | So several drugs were tested that did that.
00:12:42.760 | Dopamine agonists is another example of drugs that stimulate the dopamine system.
00:12:48.380 | In animal models, they showed that they could slow the disease progression.
00:12:53.600 | Bioenergetics, I'm sure you've heard of coenzyme Q10, creatine.
00:12:57.720 | There was a lot of interest early on that if we give these drugs, they'll help support
00:13:02.600 | the brain and decrease the rate of cell loss.
00:13:07.480 | Anti-excitotoxicity drugs.
00:13:10.040 | We know that when the brain works, it releases neurochemicals, that if they overdo that,
00:13:17.120 | it can actually damage the cell.
00:13:18.760 | So he said if we give something that antagonizes that, maybe that'll help slow the progression.
00:13:25.640 | Anti-apoptotic drugs.
00:13:27.640 | Apoptosis is a process where the cells, in effect, commit suicide when their energy levels
00:13:35.440 | begin to fall.
00:13:36.720 | And we know that energy loss is a key component of Parkinson's.
00:13:40.880 | So we figured if we can inhibit that apoptotic process, that'll help and slow down the progression.
00:13:48.080 | We also know that inflammation is a huge problem in the brains of Parkinson's patients.
00:13:53.440 | They develop an increase in the microglia, which are inflammatory cells that cause damage
00:14:00.020 | to neurons.
00:14:01.800 | Antioxidants, vitamin E, a drug called Inazine.
00:14:07.280 | We thought that if we could antagonize oxidation in the brain, that surely would slow down
00:14:12.920 | the progression.
00:14:14.520 | We also explored trophic factors.
00:14:17.200 | These are drugs that mimic naturally occurring proteins in the brain that enhance and nurture
00:14:25.400 | brain cells.
00:14:26.440 | And so we said surely that would slow it down.
00:14:29.320 | And we even found from a very interesting epidemiologic study that patients who are
00:14:35.360 | taking a particular drug for blood pressure control had a much lower risk of later developing
00:14:42.040 | Parkinson's.
00:14:43.040 | So we said, well, maybe that drug would help to slow down the rate of progression.
00:14:48.560 | And the results of this were that everything we tried failed, without exception.
00:14:55.660 | And I can tell you that even as I stand before you today, over 200 years after our formal
00:15:02.100 | recognition of Parkinson's, we have nothing that slows down the progression of Parkinson's.
00:15:08.080 | I want to hasten to add, we've got excellent treatments for the symptoms.
00:15:12.840 | So this remains a highly therapeutic field for us, but we can't do anything about the
00:15:19.140 | progression of the disease, at least as we stand today.
00:15:24.320 | So how does this discovery, if you will, of my abject failure of 30 years of research
00:15:33.520 | interact with my faith?
00:15:36.000 | And here's the answer to that.
00:15:39.040 | First of all, these failures show us the sheer complexity of these neurologic diseases.
00:15:47.800 | We do not understand the brain.
00:15:50.120 | And anybody who tells you we've got the brain figured out is either misguided or lying.
00:15:58.080 | It also highlights for me the difference in intelligence between the creator and the creature.
00:16:05.360 | The God that we worship is so much greater than we are, that he has created things that
00:16:11.080 | we can't understand and that we can't fix.
00:16:13.960 | So it really is a testimony to the greatness of our creator.
00:16:18.520 | And therefore, the failure to solve human disease, ironically, strengthens my faith
00:16:24.120 | in Christ.
00:16:26.040 | This is why we need our faith, because it's real, because there really is a creator.
00:16:32.560 | And he is so magnificent that he can do these things that we can't even fathom and can't
00:16:38.600 | even appreciate.
00:16:40.480 | And unlike us, Christ is a true healer of disease.
00:16:45.520 | We doctors do the best we can to palliate suffering, to help people feel better, to
00:16:51.640 | do whatever is possible to alleviate their suffering.
00:16:55.480 | But at the end of the day, only our Lord is a healer.
00:17:00.040 | And I love this verse in Matthew 8.
00:17:02.800 | I just want to read it to you.
00:17:04.400 | "Now when evening came, they brought to him many who were demon-possessed.
00:17:09.280 | And he cast out the spirits with a word, and he healed all who were ill in order to fulfill
00:17:14.800 | what was spoken through Isaiah the prophet, saying, 'He himself took our infirmities and
00:17:20.760 | carried away our diseases.'"
00:17:23.240 | You know, there's a lot in that verse that we can unpack.
00:17:25.880 | But what I want to point you to today is one little word after the word healed.
00:17:34.600 | He healed all who were ill.
00:17:36.920 | I don't know if you've ever thought about that.
00:17:39.880 | When our Lord went from town to town in Israel, He was eradicating disease.
00:17:48.340 | Everybody who was brought to Him was being healed, not just those who had faith in Him.
00:17:53.800 | In fact, it is infrequent that Christ healed people on the basis of faith.
00:18:00.240 | Most of the time, He simply eradicated disease wherever He went.
00:18:06.160 | Absolutely amazing.
00:18:07.640 | So what is my goal then in the talk this morning?
00:18:11.640 | First of all, from neurology, I hope to impress you with just how great a creator God is.
00:18:19.320 | Secondly, from selected miracles of Christ, I want to show you how powerful our Lord is.
00:18:27.840 | I want to demonstrate the impossibility that Christ's miracles have a natural explanation.
00:18:35.200 | And I want to finally prove the point that His healings were actually acts of creation.
00:18:42.440 | That's what our Lord was doing when He healed disease, is He was recreating whatever was
00:18:48.720 | wrong in that person.
00:18:51.320 | So the big idea then for the talk this morning is that Christ's healings were acts of creation.
00:19:01.760 | And we know this from Colossians 1 verse 16, "For in Him all things were created, both
00:19:09.880 | in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or
00:19:16.840 | authorities, all things have been created through Him and for Him."
00:19:23.120 | So our Lord is the creator and His acts of healing on this planet during His first coming
00:19:30.920 | are acts of creation.
00:19:33.600 | So the miracles I want to review with you this morning in the few moments we have are
00:19:37.840 | number one, I want to talk to you about the man blind from birth, this famous account
00:19:42.880 | found in John chapter 9.
00:19:46.520 | I want to tell you about the man with the withered hand whom our Lord healed as described
00:19:51.720 | in Matthew 12 verse 9 and following.
00:19:55.280 | And I want to tell you briefly about the woman who was crippled for 18 years described in
00:20:00.780 | Luke 13.
00:20:04.280 | So let's begin with the account of blindness from birth.
00:20:08.200 | I hope you have your Bibles with you today because I want to read this text for you.
00:20:12.880 | It's absolutely incredible.
00:20:15.600 | This is John 9 verses 1 through 11.
00:20:21.200 | As He passed by, He saw a man blind from birth and His disciples asked Him saying, "Rabbi,
00:20:28.560 | who sinned, this man or his parents that he would be born blind?"
00:20:33.760 | Jesus answered, "Neither this man nor his parents sinned, but this was so that the works
00:20:39.900 | of God might be manifested in him.
00:20:42.820 | We must work the works of Him who sent Me as long as it is day.
00:20:48.900 | Night is coming when no one can work.
00:20:52.140 | While I am in the world, I am the light of the world."
00:20:57.460 | Now when He had said this, He spat on the ground, made clay of the saliva and rubbed
00:21:01.820 | the clay on His eyes and said to him, "Go wash in the pool of Siloam," which is translated
00:21:07.340 | sin.
00:21:08.340 | So He went away and washed and came back seeing.
00:21:12.380 | Therefore the neighbors and those who previously saw Him as a beggar were saying, "Is not this
00:21:16.100 | the one who used to sit and beg?"
00:21:18.760 | Others were saying, "This is He."
00:21:20.860 | Still others were saying, "No, but He is like Him."
00:21:24.500 | He kept saying, "I am the one."
00:21:27.980 | So they were saying to them, "How then were your eyes opened?"
00:21:31.380 | He answered, "The man who is called Jesus made clay and rubbed my eyes and said to me,
00:21:37.500 | 'Go to Siloam and wash.'
00:21:40.220 | So when I went away and washed, I received sight."
00:21:46.860 | Now let's talk for a minute about congenital blindness.
00:21:50.180 | I think you need to understand the significance of this problem.
00:21:56.220 | Here on the right-hand side you see an illustration of the design of the human visual pathways.
00:22:03.240 | And it's really brilliant the way this was designed.
00:22:06.140 | You have here obviously the eyes and light comes in at this angle and hits what you see
00:22:14.820 | is the blue area.
00:22:17.220 | Light coming in from the right-hand side hits the red part of the retina.
00:22:22.500 | And fascinatingly, these pathways have both an ipsilateral projection and a contralateral
00:22:30.020 | projection.
00:22:31.140 | So you see both eyes that are perceiving the right hand of the world wind up on the right
00:22:37.980 | side of the brain and the portion of the eyes that sees the left side of the world winds
00:22:44.060 | up on the left side of the brain.
00:22:45.900 | So this is the way the human visual system is designed by Christ.
00:22:50.660 | This little area here is called the lateral geniculate nucleus where the primary first
00:22:56.220 | order neurons that exist in the retina synapse with the second order neuron that projects
00:23:03.380 | into the occipital lobe of the brain.
00:23:05.640 | And it's the brain's occipital lobe that actually perceives what you're seeing.
00:23:12.060 | Now here's the kicker.
00:23:16.180 | You have at birth all of these neurons preformed during the process of genesis in the womb
00:23:25.900 | of your mother.
00:23:27.580 | But the problem is that if this retina does not see light in the first few days, weeks
00:23:36.360 | and months of life and not only not seeing light, it has to see formed images.
00:23:45.020 | What happens is the synapses that occur in the lateral geniculate nucleus don't see the
00:23:51.460 | release of neurotransmitter because you're not perceiving anything.
00:23:56.340 | And the result of that is these pathways disintegrate.
00:24:01.300 | So they never develop.
00:24:04.180 | Vision in the first year of life is critical to the actual development of the visual system.
00:24:11.580 | And so if you are blind from birth, all of these cells that normally go to the brain
00:24:17.380 | and enable you to perceive light, they die out.
00:24:21.320 | They don't persist.
00:24:22.900 | And this part of the brain literally shrinks.
00:24:25.780 | A good example of this is congenital cataracts, not a terribly uncommon condition.
00:24:31.700 | This has to be detected immediately after birth so those cataracts can be removed to
00:24:37.780 | enable the infant to see so this visual system will develop.
00:24:42.820 | So in our example here from John, the patient never developed any of these networks.
00:24:50.700 | And therefore, nothing you do to fix the eye or even the retina will solve the problem
00:24:57.020 | because the neural pathway that perceives vision has failed to develop.
00:25:02.780 | And so it can't be corrected by any means that's available to us.
00:25:07.180 | The only fix for congenital blindness is a complete recreation of the entire network
00:25:14.460 | of the visual system.
00:25:17.020 | And as we saw in our text, Christ did this effortlessly because he is the creator.
00:25:24.620 | Now in our text, we read John 9, 2 to 5.
00:25:28.660 | I just want to remind you of what this says.
00:25:34.140 | And his disciples asked him, saying, "Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that
00:25:38.660 | he would be born blind?"
00:25:40.660 | Jesus answered, "Neither this man nor his parents sinned, but this was so that the works
00:25:45.840 | of God might be manifested in him.
00:25:49.340 | We must work the works of him who sent me as long as it is day.
00:25:53.380 | Night is coming when no one can work.
00:25:55.820 | While I am in the world, I am the light of the world."
00:25:59.780 | Now this verse is fascinating to me because you notice what the disciples' initial reaction
00:26:06.060 | was.
00:26:07.060 | Well, somebody must have sinned here.
00:26:09.140 | We call this the divine retribution principle.
00:26:12.660 | This is very similar to what we see taught in the book of Job.
00:26:16.760 | And I had the privilege of teaching through the book of Job in our Sunday school class
00:26:20.900 | at Countryside for several years and was just amazed at how pervasive this view was.
00:26:29.400 | And as you can see, the disciples had it.
00:26:32.560 | But you'll note that Christ repudiated this.
00:26:35.120 | He said, "No, that's not this.
00:26:37.060 | This is not the divine retribution principle.
00:26:40.240 | This was allowed to happen just so I could do this miracle."
00:26:45.300 | Think about the sovereignty of Christ in making this situation occur so that he could demonstrate
00:26:52.820 | his creative power.
00:26:55.740 | And of course, the act of creating sight where once there was only darkness serves to picture
00:27:01.640 | in the physical world the truth that Jesus is the light of the world spiritually.
00:27:09.280 | What is common?
00:27:10.280 | This is a test question I'm going to ask you here since we're in a university.
00:27:14.120 | What is common to these two verses?
00:27:17.000 | John 8, John 9, 8-9, "Therefore the neighbors and those who previously saw him as a beggar
00:27:21.780 | were saying, 'Is not this the one who used to sit and beg?'
00:27:25.920 | Others were saying, 'This is he.'
00:27:27.280 | Still others were saying, 'No, but he is like him.'
00:27:30.180 | And he kept saying, 'I am the one.'"
00:27:32.280 | That's verse 1.
00:27:33.600 | How about this one?
00:27:34.600 | "Then the Jews did not believe it of him that he was blind and had received sight until
00:27:39.600 | they called the parents of the very one who had received sight and questioned them, saying,
00:27:44.320 | 'Is this your son who you say was born blind?'
00:27:48.240 | Then how does he now see?"
00:27:50.240 | So who can tell me the answer?
00:27:52.080 | What's similar about those two verses?
00:27:58.480 | Little louder.
00:28:00.720 | And why were they skeptical?
00:28:05.720 | Because no one has ever heard of anyone receiving sight when they were born blind.
00:28:11.680 | And why did they think that was impossible?
00:28:16.020 | Because it was impossible, exactly.
00:28:18.920 | These people were not doctors.
00:28:20.880 | This is a long time ago.
00:28:23.160 | But even they knew that if you were born blind, it was impossible to receive sight.
00:28:31.220 | It was an incurable malady.
00:28:34.760 | Well, then we come to John 9, 24 to 34.
00:28:42.360 | "Therefore, a second time they called the man who had been born blind and said to him,
00:28:47.960 | 'Give glory to God.
00:28:49.160 | We know that this man is a sinner.'
00:28:51.880 | Then he answered, 'Whether he is a sinner I do not know.
00:28:55.200 | One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.'
00:28:59.120 | So they said to him, 'What did he do to you?
00:29:02.560 | How did he open your eyes?'
00:29:04.360 | He answered them, 'I told you already, and you did not listen.
00:29:08.400 | Why do you want to listen again?
00:29:10.640 | Do you want to become his disciples too?'"
00:29:12.800 | I love this guy.
00:29:14.440 | "And they reviled him and said, 'You are his disciple, but we are disciples of Moses.
00:29:21.680 | We know that God has spoken to Moses, but as for this man, we do not know where he is
00:29:26.560 | from.'
00:29:27.920 | The man answered and said to them, 'Well, here is a marvelous thing, that you do not
00:29:32.320 | know where he is from, and he opened my eyes.
00:29:35.800 | We know that God does not listen to sinners, but if anyone is God-fearing and does his
00:29:40.960 | will, he listens to him.
00:29:43.520 | Since the beginning of time, it has never been heard that anyone opened the eyes of
00:29:47.760 | a person born blind.
00:29:50.120 | If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.'"
00:29:53.800 | What a testimony of his experience and his faith.
00:29:59.520 | "They answered and said to him, 'You were born entirely in sins, and are you teaching
00:30:06.200 | us?'
00:30:07.480 | So they put him out."
00:30:11.640 | I want you to get this.
00:30:14.560 | What infuriated the Jewish leaders even more than healing on the Sabbath, which was a major
00:30:20.200 | bone of contention they had with our Lord, was the incontributable proof in what happened
00:30:27.120 | to this man that Jesus was the Christ, the Son of God.
00:30:32.200 | He recreated this man's entire visual system, and no one can do that but God alone.
00:30:39.440 | This is what infuriated them so much.
00:30:41.520 | They wanted a way to dismiss Christ.
00:30:45.080 | They did not want to receive him, and so a miracle like this put them in a huge bind
00:30:51.600 | because no one could dispute that a supernatural act had occurred.
00:30:58.440 | Let me move on to our next one, the miracle of the withered hand.
00:31:08.680 | Let's read Matthew 12, 9-14, "And departing from there, he went into their synagogue.
00:31:19.280 | And behold, a man was there whose hand was withered.
00:31:23.080 | And they questioned Jesus, saying, 'Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath, so that they
00:31:28.040 | might accuse him?'
00:31:29.920 | And he said to them, 'What man is there among you who has a sheep, and if it falls into
00:31:34.480 | a pit on the Sabbath, will not take hold of it and lift it out?
00:31:39.520 | How much more valuable, then, is a man than a sheep?
00:31:43.480 | So then it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath.'"
00:31:48.160 | Verse 13, "Then he said to the man, 'Stretch out your hand.'
00:31:53.480 | He stretched it out, and it was restored to normal like the other."
00:31:58.440 | Again, it appears almost effortless what Christ is doing and how He is executing these healings.
00:32:06.760 | Now from a medical perspective, we can't know for certain what disease this man had.
00:32:12.320 | As I've thought about it, I think there are three major possibilities.
00:32:16.200 | The first one would be a traumatic fracture with poor healing.
00:32:20.400 | We know that if you fracture the hand badly enough and it doesn't heal correctly, it can
00:32:25.440 | be withered in a sense.
00:32:28.560 | It could also represent severe arthritis with joint deformity.
00:32:32.520 | We've all seen people who have that.
00:32:35.220 | But the third possibility, and the one I am choosing to impose on the text, is that this
00:32:41.160 | is hand dystonia.
00:32:44.360 | Hand dystonia, a very interesting problem that fell within the realm of my treatment.
00:32:50.160 | I'm going to show you a videotape of a patient I had who had this disease, just to illustrate
00:32:57.160 | what dystonia looks like in the hand.
00:33:00.300 | So you can clearly see that, in her case, it's bilateral.
00:33:04.400 | But notice that her hand is clearly withered.
00:33:08.560 | She can't manipulate her fingers properly.
00:33:11.920 | And because the dystonia has been long-lasting, it's produced permanent deformity in the position
00:33:17.980 | of her hands.
00:33:19.540 | So her hands are essentially non-usable because of the persistence of this dystonia.
00:33:31.640 | Now what is dystonia?
00:33:34.180 | This is a fascinating neurologic disease, which, to be honest with you, we don't understand
00:33:39.280 | very well.
00:33:40.280 | It is poorly understood to this day.
00:33:44.080 | Unlike Parkinson's disease, where I can show you where in the brain the problem is, I can't
00:33:49.040 | even do that with dystonia.
00:33:50.920 | We know it is something to do with brain neural networks.
00:33:56.740 | And neural networks are just what they sound like.
00:33:59.080 | They're similar to an electrical network that you would have for the electrical grid.
00:34:03.840 | But it's a much, much more complex network.
00:34:07.140 | It's a situation where neurons are synapsing with other neurons in a very complex pattern
00:34:13.720 | that results in the ability to execute a movement.
00:34:18.520 | Now in the case of dystonia, there is no known cure for this.
00:34:21.720 | So in that respect, it's similar to Parkinson's disease.
00:34:25.240 | And unfortunately, unlike Parkinson's disease, we don't have good drugs for dystonia.
00:34:31.400 | What I would typically tell my patients who came to me with dystonia when we're talking
00:34:35.400 | about oral drugs is that I've got about a 50% chance of giving you a 20% improvement.
00:34:43.900 | So it's not great.
00:34:45.240 | And we did try.
00:34:46.240 | There were a handful of drugs that we would employ.
00:34:48.800 | Every now and then we saw a patient who did well, but basically it was difficult to treat.
00:34:54.300 | Now there is a newer treatment called botulinum toxin.
00:34:58.080 | You may have heard of Botox that has revolutionized our treatment for dystonia.
00:35:04.520 | The way it works is you inject this directly into whatever muscle is contracting abnormally.
00:35:12.000 | And because botulinum toxin is a paralytic agent, it weakens that muscle.
00:35:16.920 | And so you can have less of whatever the abnormal pulling is.
00:35:20.920 | But there are two major problems with this treatment.
00:35:23.740 | The first one is there's a limit to how much of it I can give you.
00:35:27.600 | You've all heard of botulism, which is a fatal disease if you get too much toxin in your
00:35:32.360 | body.
00:35:33.360 | So we're limited to how big the muscle is that we can inject this with to achieve benefit.
00:35:40.060 | And the second problem is the muscular activity that produces dystonia is so complex that
00:35:47.680 | we really can't figure out exactly how to balance this out to achieve perfect results.
00:35:54.080 | And that's why I say it works for a short time, but it never produces normalization
00:35:59.080 | of function.
00:36:00.160 | It makes them better, but by no means perfect.
00:36:02.980 | And of course you have to repeat it.
00:36:04.800 | Every three to four months you have to repeat that injection ad infinitum as long as the
00:36:09.460 | patient lives.
00:36:11.720 | What can I tell you about this human neural network that's involved in dystonia?
00:36:17.560 | The human brain has 86 billion neurons, just for you to contemplate that.
00:36:24.760 | That correlates to 100 trillion connections among neurons.
00:36:30.520 | I hope you're beginning to sense the complexity of this system.
00:36:34.800 | It is staggering how complex the human neural network is.
00:36:40.400 | And the best science of man has no real idea how the brain works, much less how to fix
00:36:46.920 | neural network problems.
00:36:49.440 | We know it's there, we dabble in drugs, but at the end of the day, if the network is bad,
00:36:55.720 | we can't fix it.
00:36:57.240 | Well, what was Christ's solution to the withered hand?
00:37:00.400 | I love this, very brief, very to the point.
00:37:03.600 | He said to the man, "Stretch out your hand."
00:37:06.520 | He stretched it out and it was restored to normal like the other.
00:37:11.720 | I have never had a patient with dystonia that I made normal, not one in 30 years.
00:37:19.680 | Christ did it effortlessly in a moment in time.
00:37:24.320 | How do you get a malfunctioning neural network normal?
00:37:29.760 | Only one way I know of, you recreate it ex nihilo.
00:37:33.780 | And that's what our Lord did.
00:37:36.560 | Everyone witnessing this knew immediately that this was a miracle.
00:37:41.080 | In this simple command, our Lord is recreating his neural network.
00:37:46.560 | And keep in mind that what he corrected was of a staggering level of complexity, a hundred
00:37:53.640 | trillion synapses, and he fixed them all.
00:37:58.600 | Now in seeing this act of creation, our observers had only one of two options.
00:38:05.440 | They could either bow the knee to the King of Kings, they could recognize that this was
00:38:10.440 | the Messiah who had been prophesied and who they were all waiting for, or they had to
00:38:17.480 | attribute the power demonstrated to Satan and purpose to kill him.
00:38:22.320 | Those are really the only two options.
00:38:25.160 | So what was the reaction then of the Pharisees?
00:38:28.680 | Well we see that clearly in verse 14, "But going out, the Pharisees took counsel together
00:38:34.140 | against him as to how they might destroy him."
00:38:40.520 | Now I've thought a lot about this over the years as I've studied the Scripture and learned
00:38:46.320 | about our Lord and the events, and it's very difficult to understand why they did this.
00:38:55.220 | Think about this.
00:38:56.680 | Here is a religion, Judaism.
00:39:01.400 | We have the predictions all throughout the Scripture, including in Moses, that a future
00:39:07.960 | Messiah is coming who's gonna right all the wrongs and redeem the nation.
00:39:14.400 | Everybody is looking forward to this Messiah, and all of a sudden, in a point of time, he
00:39:20.480 | shows up.
00:39:21.800 | He proves himself to be the very Messiah.
00:39:25.140 | How does he do that?
00:39:26.480 | He fulfills every Scripture that was prophesied about him, and he demonstrates the power that
00:39:32.200 | only God controls.
00:39:34.600 | And yet, the people that he came to rejected him, and the Pharisees led that.
00:39:40.680 | They were the ones that were determined from the beginning to kill him.
00:39:44.280 | Why did they do that?
00:39:46.600 | I think there are two Scriptures that help us to answer that.
00:39:49.760 | The first was a parable that our Lord told in Luke 19, where he's describing the situation
00:39:57.800 | of the Jews.
00:39:59.280 | So he said, "A nobleman went to a distant country to receive a kingdom for himself and
00:40:03.520 | then return.
00:40:05.520 | And he called ten of his slaves, gave them ten minas, and said to them, 'Engage in business
00:40:10.600 | until I come back.'
00:40:12.840 | But his citizens hated him and sent a delegation after him, saying, 'We do not want this man
00:40:19.680 | to reign over us.'"
00:40:22.640 | What our Lord is doing there is he's telling a parable that is describing the condition
00:40:28.360 | of the Jewish heart.
00:40:30.020 | They simply did not want a ruler.
00:40:34.180 | And why did they not want a ruler?
00:40:36.200 | It's because they no longer were true Israelites.
00:40:40.660 | They had now a false religion, not a true religion.
00:40:45.080 | Their false religion was one based on self-righteousness, based on works.
00:40:50.600 | And so when their true Messiah came, they rejected him because they did not want to
00:40:55.840 | submit themselves to his leadership.
00:40:59.960 | Now that's a parable, and you might say, "Well, how do I know that's really what happened?"
00:41:03.640 | Well, here's the definitive answer in John 11, verse 47 and following, "Therefore the
00:41:10.360 | chief priests and the Pharisees gathered the Sanhedrin together and were saying, 'What
00:41:15.040 | are we doing?
00:41:16.540 | For this man is doing many signs.
00:41:19.320 | If we let him go on like this, all will believe in him, and the Romans will come and take
00:41:24.760 | away both our place and our nation.'"
00:41:28.400 | So here we now understand it fully.
00:41:31.600 | They wanted their place.
00:41:33.900 | And so what was their fundamental sin?
00:41:37.000 | It was the same sin that Lucifer committed.
00:41:39.520 | It was the sin of pride.
00:41:41.340 | They wanted their place.
00:41:42.980 | They wanted their nation.
00:41:44.660 | They were in charge of everything.
00:41:47.440 | They would not bow the knee to their Messiah.
00:41:51.720 | Well, let's move to our third illustration, "The Woman Crippled for Eighteen Years."
00:42:02.140 | Let's turn to Luke 13, chapter 10, verse 10 and following, "And he was teaching in one
00:42:11.560 | of the synagogues on the Sabbath.
00:42:14.700 | And behold, there was a woman who for eighteen years had a sickness caused by a spirit, and
00:42:20.400 | she was bent double and could not straighten up at all.
00:42:25.800 | But when Jesus saw her, he called her over and said to her, 'Woman, you are freed from
00:42:32.840 | your sickness.'
00:42:34.780 | And he laid his hands on her, and immediately she was made erect again and began glorifying
00:42:40.960 | God."
00:42:43.760 | So she was bent double for eighteen years.
00:42:47.480 | Now does that sound like a transient passing illness that one can recover from readily?
00:42:54.480 | I don't think so.
00:42:57.280 | Now I find it interesting, the text indicates that her malady was due to an evil spirit,
00:43:04.000 | which is fascinating.
00:43:06.000 | But in my view, it is more likely that a demon had caused her physical affliction rather
00:43:12.080 | than that this was a case of demon possession.
00:43:15.080 | And why is that?
00:43:16.360 | It's because normally when Christ confronted a demon-possessed person, his action was to
00:43:21.480 | cast out the demon.
00:43:23.240 | Here we have a sickness that was demonically induced, but it's a physical malady.
00:43:29.280 | This person has an actual physical disease.
00:43:35.320 | And of course in this text, he simply heals her by laying his hands upon her.
00:43:41.840 | The power of Christ once again demonstrated.
00:43:44.440 | So the question is, what disease is this?
00:43:47.200 | So I guess I could call this my second test question.
00:43:51.000 | Anybody know what disease causes you to be bent over double for eighteen years?
00:43:57.960 | Well first of all, I've got to show you what it looks like.
00:44:00.340 | Being bent over double means this.
00:44:03.920 | So that's the position she's in for eighteen years.
00:44:09.280 | Anybody in the audience ever heard of a disease that causes that?
00:44:14.560 | Well believe it or not, there actually is one.
00:44:17.560 | Only a neurologist would know about this, and particularly a movement disorders neurologist.
00:44:24.680 | This is a disease called Camptichormia, also known as bent spine syndrome.
00:44:34.520 | So this is a real disease.
00:44:38.940 | And because I want you to see this, we'll give you a videotape illustration of it.
00:44:46.220 | But what are the causes of Camptichormia?
00:44:48.440 | What can cause bent spine syndrome?
00:44:51.280 | Well first of all, if you look at the literature, there is a report of a very interesting scenario
00:44:58.200 | that happened in World War I soldiers.
00:45:01.940 | And in effect, what they did is they developed that bent spine posture.
00:45:06.520 | Now as you may recall, in World War I, there was a lot of trench warfare.
00:45:11.280 | And so the way that you didn't get your head blown off is when you're in the trenches,
00:45:15.800 | you would go down like that.
00:45:17.960 | Well what was weird is these people continued to do that even when they were not in the
00:45:22.960 | trench.
00:45:23.960 | So looking back on that historically, this is most likely a case of malingering, where
00:45:29.080 | basically they figured out that if I couldn't straighten my spine, I would get sent back
00:45:34.480 | to the hospital away from the front lines and get out of it.
00:45:38.840 | So that's where we first see in the literature descriptions of Camptichormia.
00:45:43.880 | However, there are some organic, bona fide neurological diseases that cause this.
00:45:50.440 | One of them is called primary axial myopathy.
00:45:53.800 | So if you think about it, the only way you can remain erect is because you have this
00:45:58.640 | band of muscles that runs along your spine.
00:46:02.640 | They're called the erector speedi muscles, and they're the ones that enable you to arch
00:46:07.720 | your spine.
00:46:09.040 | And when you're standing up straight, they hold your spine up.
00:46:12.080 | If those muscles go away, you're going to crumple forward with the action of gravity
00:46:17.040 | on your spine.
00:46:18.880 | And you can develop an atrophy of those muscles.
00:46:23.660 | Those neurons or those muscles that control the spine's erection can disappear, an atrophy.
00:46:32.280 | Totally unknown why this occurs, but it's a bona fide condition.
00:46:37.140 | And then the third one, of course, the case where I come in, is with axial dystonia.
00:46:44.180 | So this is similar to the patient I showed you with the hand dystonia, but believe it
00:46:48.820 | or not, you can also get this affecting the spine.
00:46:52.340 | And in this particular illustration, what we think happens is there are muscles on the
00:46:58.780 | front side of your body, in the abdomen, that are deep.
00:47:02.700 | They're not the superficial muscle that you can palpate.
00:47:06.860 | They're deep muscles that run along the surface of the spine anteriorly that begin to contract
00:47:13.860 | abnormally.
00:47:15.280 | And just as the lady I showed you affects her fingers due to abnormal muscle contraction,
00:47:20.580 | here we have abnormal muscle contraction of the anterior muscles of the spine that is
00:47:25.980 | causing that forward flexion.
00:47:29.260 | And again, dystonia is a neural network problem.
00:47:33.380 | Let me show you an example of this.
00:47:36.220 | This is a man, obviously, but this is the patient that our Lord healed.
00:47:41.860 | He has bent spine syndrome, camptochormia.
00:47:44.860 | He is unable to erect his spine any higher than this when walking.
00:47:51.340 | And this is one of the clues that we have that this is dystonia, is because when sitting
00:47:56.020 | still, he looks perfectly normal.
00:47:58.060 | You don't see anything wrong with his spine.
00:47:59.780 | In fact, he can even arch his spine when sitting down.
00:48:03.420 | But when he stands up and begins to walk immediately and progressively, he begins to flex more and
00:48:09.880 | more downward.
00:48:11.300 | So what's happening basically is due to an abnormality in the brain's neural network
00:48:17.280 | that controls gait, when he starts to pull up that motor program of walking, it progressively
00:48:26.780 | causes the aberrant contraction of those muscles that we don't want to contract when we're
00:48:32.780 | walking, ultimately causing him to flex forward like that.
00:48:39.140 | So that's camptochormia.
00:48:40.420 | So how do you treat camptochormia?
00:48:43.220 | Well, if it's a psychological problem, again, there are reports that this could be treated,
00:48:51.180 | managed by psychotherapy.
00:48:52.180 | Again, the main problem with those World War I soldiers is they were getting out of a dangerous
00:48:58.540 | situation.
00:49:00.020 | So that's not applicable to most people today.
00:49:03.740 | There are no treatments for axial myopathy.
00:49:07.300 | Once those muscles begin to degenerate in the spine, there's really nothing you can
00:49:12.780 | do about it.
00:49:14.340 | No one knows how to fix axial myopathy.
00:49:18.380 | Now axial dystonia in Parkinson's disease, which is my patient, there have been individual
00:49:24.160 | case reports of the drug for Parkinson's called levodopa helping.
00:49:30.360 | There have also been reports of deep brain stimulation.
00:49:33.540 | So it's a new technology now for treatment of Parkinson's where you implant wire electrodes
00:49:38.480 | into the center of the brain and basically hook them up to a spinal stimulator that stimulates
00:49:45.020 | the brain in particular areas.
00:49:47.060 | There have been isolated reports of patients improving with that.
00:49:51.460 | But none of those are longstanding permanent cures.
00:49:55.720 | They may produce temporary improvement in the bent spine, but they don't solve it.
00:50:00.660 | I also tried in a couple of my patients with this botulinum toxin thinking, "Well, maybe
00:50:05.320 | if I can find the muscle that's pulling the patient down, we can weaken that muscle and
00:50:10.560 | he'll be able to stand up straight."
00:50:11.920 | Again, the problem is the muscles were too deep.
00:50:14.800 | I couldn't get to them through the exterior and sufficiently weaken the muscles that were
00:50:20.800 | causing the problem.
00:50:23.600 | And that's the fundamental problem we have with campnicormia.
00:50:27.840 | We cannot regenerate atrophic muscle cells, nor can we correct the complex neural network
00:50:34.280 | problem underpinning dystonia.
00:50:38.560 | In spite of the advanced state of medical knowledge in the 21st century, we're helpless
00:50:43.780 | to correct this problem.
00:50:46.040 | So what was Jesus' solution?
00:50:48.620 | Well, when Jesus saw her, he called her over and said to her, "Woman, you are freed from
00:50:53.520 | your sickness."
00:50:55.000 | And he laid his hands on her, and immediately she was made erect again and began glorifying
00:51:00.680 | God.
00:51:03.240 | Notice that Christ spoke to and touched this woman, and immediately she was healed.
00:51:08.640 | We know from other miracles of Christ that he didn't need to do either of those two things.
00:51:13.320 | He had the power to recreate her neural network without uttering a word or a touch.
00:51:19.440 | What does this show us?
00:51:20.440 | It shows us the compassion that Christ had.
00:51:23.180 | He wanted the physical touch of her to reemphasize his love for her.
00:51:29.780 | Instantly her thoracic muscles were restored, her neural network was recreated, and our
00:51:36.420 | Lord healed this woman because he is compassionate and merciful.
00:51:43.100 | His act of recreation shown here was effortless and once again proving that he was God the
00:51:49.940 | creator and proving that there could not be a natural explanation for this because you
00:51:55.660 | can't fix these neural network problems.
00:52:00.040 | Now I would leave you with this query.
00:52:02.860 | What do these miracles have in common?
00:52:05.220 | Why did I pick these three particular miracles to show you today?
00:52:10.060 | Well first of all, all three addressed unsolvable neurologic problems that have no possibility
00:52:17.000 | of a human cure.
00:52:18.860 | We can't fix this.
00:52:20.660 | These miracles show that our Lord did.
00:52:24.300 | And in all three cases we see an act of creation, a brand new restoration of normal function
00:52:32.100 | in a setting of damaged neurons.
00:52:35.560 | So taken together, these miracles establish beyond any doubt that Jesus had divine supernatural
00:52:41.880 | power.
00:52:46.200 | That God, not Satan, was the source of the power is proven by the beneficial result of
00:52:52.000 | his miracles.
00:52:53.800 | He restored to health whereas demonic action always degrades the person and causes illness.
00:53:01.600 | And this is why the Pharisees claim that, "Oh well, Christ is doing this by the power
00:53:06.840 | of Satan."
00:53:07.840 | It was terribly disingenuous.
00:53:10.080 | Nobody bought that because demonic forces don't heal people.
00:53:15.360 | Demonic forces degrade people.
00:53:18.060 | But that was the only thing they could think of to try to explain away the miraculous work
00:53:23.280 | of our Lord.
00:53:25.800 | I think it's also noteworthy that all three miracles took place on the Sabbath, thus
00:53:31.800 | serving to condemn the Pharisees' hypocritical approach to a day God intended to be beneficial
00:53:38.760 | to His people.
00:53:42.320 | So what can we learn from these miracles?
00:53:44.880 | What's the take-home message that I think each of us can take from this?
00:53:50.520 | Well first, I think consideration of these miracles should humble us.
00:53:55.160 | You've probably heard that there are some doctors somewhere who develop a God complex.
00:54:01.120 | Why does this happen?
00:54:02.120 | Well, it happens because patients trust us.
00:54:05.960 | It's really amazing to be in a position where a patient will come to you suffering with
00:54:11.360 | sickness and say, "Doctor, whatever you tell me to do, I'll do it because I want to get
00:54:17.080 | better."
00:54:18.080 | That is an immense trust that they're placing in us.
00:54:22.000 | And more often than not, they adhere to what we recommend.
00:54:26.500 | And if you're an unbeliever and you're prone to pride, which all of us are, that can very
00:54:32.500 | rapidly lead to pride and escalation of your own view of yourself.
00:54:38.720 | But when we think about Christ's miracles and how much more powerful He is, that once
00:54:45.040 | again humbles us and shows us that no, we really can't do anything.
00:54:50.040 | Our efforts are pathetic and ineffectual compared to how our Lord dealt with this.
00:54:57.560 | Second, I think these miracles should strengthen our faith in Christ.
00:55:01.680 | This one's obvious.
00:55:03.360 | If Jesus could recreate neural networks effortlessly in His first coming, He can also forgive sins,
00:55:12.280 | which God alone can do, and that's our real problem, isn't it?
00:55:16.320 | Sin is our real problem.
00:55:17.880 | Our separation from Him spiritually is our real problem.
00:55:21.940 | And if He can do this, He has proven that He is God and God can forgive sins.
00:55:29.280 | And then, of course, His healing of physical dysfunction by His divine power at His first
00:55:34.720 | coming is illustrative of His power to overcome spiritual death now and to raise us physically
00:55:41.920 | from the dead at His second coming.
00:55:45.580 | We worship a God who is truly powerful, and therefore, we can trust Him that He will rescue
00:55:53.240 | us and He will raise us with Him on the last day.
00:55:58.400 | And then finally, these miracles should embolden us to share the gospel with others.
00:56:04.060 | As believers, we need to be growing in compassion toward the lost.
00:56:08.240 | This is what Christ's example to us was of a compassionate, loving Savior.
00:56:16.740 | All of His healings were motivated by compassion for suffering people, and as I said earlier,
00:56:21.460 | most of them were totally disconnected from any faith that person had.
00:56:25.880 | He simply was merciful.
00:56:27.820 | He wanted to do this because it was a reflection of Himself, His character.
00:56:34.180 | And we need to do that ourselves, and we need to have a compassion for the lost, and therefore,
00:56:40.580 | if we care about the lost, we'll share the gospel whenever we can.
00:56:47.020 | Thank you so much for your attention.
00:56:57.340 | >> Thank you.
00:56:58.340 | Thank you so much, Dr. Dewey, that was phenomenal.
00:57:02.220 | We have a few minutes.
00:57:03.220 | I know you just sat down, but does anyone have any questions?
00:57:06.500 | We have some folks joining by live stream, so if you have a question, just raise your
00:57:10.120 | hand and we'll pass a microphone around.
00:57:17.100 | We're just stunned.
00:57:18.100 | We're just trying to absorb everything.
00:57:19.820 | Okay, so we have a microphone coming up front.
00:57:23.100 | One second, it's on the way.
00:57:30.820 | >> Thank you.
00:57:31.820 | My question is with regard to the second example that you gave, the man with the withered hand,
00:57:37.180 | how it specifically talks about it being only one hand that was affected.
00:57:42.500 | Is that possible with the hand dystonia?
00:57:44.820 | >> Yes, absolutely.
00:57:46.120 | So it can be unilateral.
00:57:47.540 | The example I showed, obviously, was bilateral.
00:57:50.460 | In fact, that patient had generalized dystonia.
00:57:53.860 | So her whole body was affected, but she was the best video I had showing the hand involvement.
00:57:59.500 | But actually, more often than not, when we see focal dystonia, it affects one hand or
00:58:06.440 | one foot.
00:58:07.440 | >> Thank you.
00:58:08.440 | >> Hi, Doc.
00:58:09.440 | I was just wondering, or actually noticing that not only was the full recreation of the
00:58:22.940 | brain and all the neurons connected, but the training and understanding of how to use them
00:58:29.380 | -- we just can't take a paralytic who's never walked and make them have perfect balance
00:58:34.780 | and walk again.
00:58:35.780 | It takes years of rehab, even if everything was working.
00:58:39.980 | So it's not just -- it's the knowledge.
00:58:42.940 | You put knowledge into these people's brain, muscle memory into these people.
00:58:49.020 | >> Thank you for adding that.
00:58:50.020 | That's an excellent point.
00:59:00.420 | >> Thank you.
00:59:02.100 | My father was a neurologist, by the way, so I have a little bit of knowledge, small amount.
00:59:09.780 | Other diseases that are motor-related, like ALS, things like that, maybe just a few words
00:59:16.740 | on how those are related as well.
00:59:20.980 | >> Sure.
00:59:21.980 | Well, most of the diseases that you think of in neurology that are bad, like ALS, they're
00:59:27.700 | degenerative diseases.
00:59:29.500 | So what's happening is there is something that's going wrong in the metabolism of the
00:59:35.540 | nervous system that results in degeneration.
00:59:38.780 | There are fortunately a few neurologic diseases that aren't that way.
00:59:42.420 | Migraine would be one example, very common.
00:59:46.020 | And there are a few others that I would consider to be not as serious that don't involve degeneration.
00:59:52.020 | What's fascinating is that the two most common in the elderly population are Parkinson's
00:59:57.020 | and Alzheimer's.
00:59:58.620 | And we now know, interestingly, that both of them are due to these depositions of small
01:00:05.260 | clumps of protein that don't belong there.
01:00:09.320 | And what's fascinating is the proteins that clump are normal brain proteins.
01:00:14.780 | All of our brains are chock full of those proteins.
01:00:17.460 | We need them.
01:00:18.460 | They have specific functions that carry out things that we need to be able to do.
01:00:23.540 | But it's when they start to behave in an abnormal way and they start to precipitate into small
01:00:29.580 | clumps that they cause the pathology and ultimately cause cell death.
01:00:35.340 | And unfortunately, we don't have any treatments that stop the degenerative diseases of the
01:00:42.300 | brain.
01:00:43.300 | Hi.
01:00:44.300 | I got three.
01:00:45.300 | I'm not going to be greedy, just pick one of them.
01:00:51.180 | First in John 9, my favorite, it's like the sweetest man on earth.
01:00:56.620 | I believe he heard the disciples and Jesus talking and he realized at some point, yes,
01:01:02.660 | I was born blind for this purpose, which is just stunning.
01:01:06.580 | But the second one is a lady doctor from Argentina who, of course, can't practice here, but she
01:01:11.300 | told me her patients, she knew they had spiritual problems and she couldn't help with that.
01:01:17.140 | All she could do was tend to their body, which was disturbing if you want to talk about that.
01:01:21.540 | The third is what the chemo gave me induced Parkinson's like shakes, which is that a route
01:01:27.980 | to demystify those kinds of things and it'd be horrible to do to somebody, but we had
01:01:33.940 | to stop the chemo.
01:01:34.980 | It was also dexamethasone.
01:01:35.980 | So any of those three.
01:01:36.980 | Thank you.
01:01:37.980 | Yeah.
01:01:38.980 | So I'll take the last one first.
01:01:43.780 | Chemo is a fascinating treatment for cancer.
01:01:46.140 | We don't understand it very well, but the one thing we do know is that all chemotherapeutic
01:01:52.100 | agents work by destroying cells in your body.
01:01:56.000 | So it is not beyond speculation that in particular individuals, the chemotherapy may be mis-targeting
01:02:05.660 | the cells that are involved in the Parkinson pathway, producing that side effect.
01:02:11.340 | But I would have to say that's considered exceptionally unfrequent.
01:02:16.640 | So we don't normally see patients with Parkinsonism who have chemotherapy-induced disease.
01:02:22.100 | I wouldn't rule it out as it being a possible on an individual basis, but it's not the rule
01:02:27.300 | of thumb.
01:02:28.740 | And I think your other question about how do you deal with the spiritual problems of
01:02:32.820 | your patients if you're a doctor, that's a big one.
01:02:35.900 | I'm going to defer that to the discussion tomorrow.
01:02:38.940 | Thank you.
01:02:39.940 | Thank you.
01:02:39.940 | Thank you.
01:02:40.940 | Thank you.
01:02:40.940 | Thank you.
01:02:45.940 | [BLANK_AUDIO]