>> Well, thank you very much, Tai-Danae. It's a real pleasure to be here. I was so honored to receive the invitation to speak to this group. And I will say I appreciate all of the effort that she went to. I've never had as many helpful emails in preparation for this as I had from her.

So I appreciate that very much. I don't normally, when I give a talk, like to talk about my personal background, but I don't know most of you here, and most importantly, Tai-Danae instructed me to do this. So I will go over this very briefly, just by way of introduction.

I had the pleasure of being raised in a Christian home. Both of my parents were believers at the time of my birth, and so I had that huge advantage. But I was also, as a youngster, fascinated by the natural world. And every summer, you could find me out in the yard with a butterfly net, capturing every conceivable insect I could find and studying those.

Eventually, I grew up, went to college at Duke University with a degree in biology. Most significant thing that happened to me during that time was I met my future wife. And then I went to medical school, Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. I was actually born in Houston, so I was back home for that phase of my life.

And I actually got married to Debbie during my final year of training in medical school there in Houston. And if you've ever spent any time in Texas, you'll know, unlike Southern California, it gets very hot there. In fact, it's one of the hottest places in the country during the summer.

And so what I decided to do was move to the coldest place in the country. And I did my neurology training and ultimately a fellowship in movement disorders at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. My final year there was a combined fellowship in movement disorders where I did about three-fourths of it there in Rochester, but during the winter, I was able to rotate to their Scottsdale, Arizona operation.

And that was fulfilling a promise I made to Debbie that I would only make her spend three winters in the frozen north. Following that, my first job was actually my faculty position at University of Texas Southwestern Medical School in Dallas. I joined that as a brand new assistant professor and stayed there for almost 30 years, gradually progressing up the ranks.

And I'll tell you a little bit more in just a minute about my research interest there. And then very recently, just in January of '23, so just a year and a half ago, I retired from that position and moved to a small boutique practice on the beach in Florida.

There are a number of reasons why I decided to do that. The most important was my eldest son, who is also a physician, and although I told him, "Hey, we need a cardiologist, a gastroenterologist," something like that in the family, instead he went into neurology and movement disorders. So he does exactly what I do, and he took this job in Florida with a longstanding friend of mine, and when he got there, he started calling me up and saying, "Dad, why are you still practicing in Dallas when you could join us here in Florida?" And eventually they twisted my arm and we decided to do that.

Also I had always harbored a lifelong dream of retiring in Florida, which is kind of a funny story there because when I mentioned this to my wife, she said, "Well, you've never mentioned that to me." So that was something we learned about each other late in the course of our relationship.

Most importantly, though, I do want to share with you a little bit about my spiritual development. I already told you I was born into a Christian family. My parents nurtured me and the Lord from the earliest age. Some of my earliest memories are sitting on the side of my bed before sleep and being read to by my mom and dad from the Bible in pictures in little eyes.

And very early on, I understood the gospel as a child would understand it and received salvation from the Lord at that time. I also had the privilege of being raised in a number of different Bible-believing churches as I grew up. My dad was very interested in small group fellowship type of activities, and he really mentored me in how to do that.

And so starting probably even in junior high, I began to look for opportunities to be involved in home fellowship groups and was given some leadership roles in that, and really that became one of my passions individually. In college, I discovered the tape ministry of John MacArthur. And back in those days, there were no MP3s, nothing you could download, so I had a huge drawer full of those tapes that I was listening through.

And that was a huge element in my spiritual development. Ultimately, as I grew older, with the church that I was involved with, I had the opportunity to kind of head up a home fellowship ministry there at the church and was tasked with writing kind of an advanced Bible study series on 14 books of the Bible.

And that just consisted of questions that kind of elucidated what the text was talking about and led to discussion and sharing about how the Lord was working our lives. Ultimately, I was asked to serve as an elder, where I did, at Countryside Bible Church, again in Texas. That's where we lived for almost those 30 years when I was in Dallas.

And then I had the additional privilege of being asked to serve as a member of the board of directors of Master's Seminary and University from 2016 to 2021. As you can tell from those dates, towards the latter part there, we had some real difficult times trying to figure out how do you navigate a worldwide pandemic in a state that really wants to shut you down if you're a Christian.

And so the Lord worked really amazingly in my life and I think in the lives of all of us as we learned how to do that. Little bit about my professional career. My primary passion from the very beginning has been the field of Parkinson's disease. Someone asked me earlier, "Why did you go into Parkinson's?

What was the deal with that?" Interestingly, I had no one in the family, so it wasn't a personal thing. But as I was going through my neurology training, I was particularly drawn to this disease. I think mainly because of its therapeutic emphasis. Neurology sometimes carries kind of a bad rap that we make a lot of diagnoses, but we can't really help many people.

That is becoming less and less true, but at the time I was going through it, we looked at Parkinson's as one of the most therapeutic of the different diseases that we saw. And so that drew me, I think, into the field. A little bit about Parkinson's, for those of you that aren't familiar with it, this is a degenerative disease of the brain.

It's still of unknown cause. We've known about it ever since 1817, which was the first original description of the disease. But it's fascinating, if you travel to India and examine some of the cave drawings that date back to 5,000 years BC, you can find etchings in caves that look all the world like they're depicting patients with Parkinson's disease.

So we think this has been a problem with humans since the beginning, although we've known very little about it until the last 200 years. The biggest problem with Parkinson's is that it is an inexorable brain disease. Once the problem begins, it progresses inexorably. And we now know that the primary problem is the deposition of an otherwise normal brain protein that begins to undergo a conformational change.

And in oligomers, which are small clumps of that protein, they're toxic to the brain cells. And what they essentially do, as best we can tell, is these oligomers of alpha-synuclein start to punch holes in mitochondria. And mitochondria, as you know, are the energy pumps of every living cell. And if you damage those mitochondria, eventually the cell begins to die, and ultimately energy failure kills them.

And so I developed very early on in my academic career an interest in figuring out a way to slow or stop the progression of Parkinson's disease. And that was really the primary effort that I employed while I was there for those 30 years. And I just want to show you an example of this, just for those of you that aren't familiar with it.

What this represents is a cut section of the human midbrain, which is the part of the brain way in the back of the head, just above the spinal cord. And what you can see in a normal person, and this incidentally does not involve any stains, this is visible to the naked eye, you see these very dark bands that are present in the human midbrain.

If you look at your Parkinson's disease brain, what you can see from the back of the room is those black lines have disappeared. And the reason they've disappeared is shown here. This is the normal cut section through one of those black lines. You see all those large cell bodies of neurons.

And in the Parkinson's disease brain, those neurons have disappeared. So this is disease in which the neurons that live in this area begin to degenerate. And this little animation here at the bottom, what I'm just showing you is that this is now recognized as what we call a dying back axonopathy.

And so what happens is the distal terminals of the neurons, illustrated here, begin to die back from their synaptic connections in the center of the brain. And as a result, you have less and less dopaminergic transmission, and eventually the brain levels of dopamine fall to a critical level. And when that happens, the classic symptoms of Parkinson's begin.

And for those of you that aren't familiar with it, the basic symptoms of Parkinson's are resting tremor, rigidity of your arms and legs, and then the third one is slowing down of movement. And so Parkinson's patients begin to get slow and stiff. And then ultimately, as the disease evolves, they also develop a balance impairment that can be very serious.

Now there have been a number of drugs that we have evaluated with the goal being to slow down the progression of this inexorable disease. And many of these I was personally involved with testing. The first class I'll tell you about just very briefly are called the MAO-B inhibitors. That stands for monoamine oxidase.

And basically, this is a normal enzyme that every brain has that breaks down dopamine into its constituent products. The problem with that breakdown is one of those end products is potentially toxic to the brain. And so we thought, well, if we give a drug that inhibits that, we'll decrease the risk of damaging the brain.

So several drugs were tested that did that. Dopamine agonists is another example of drugs that stimulate the dopamine system. In animal models, they showed that they could slow the disease progression. Bioenergetics, I'm sure you've heard of coenzyme Q10, creatine. There was a lot of interest early on that if we give these drugs, they'll help support the brain and decrease the rate of cell loss.

Anti-excitotoxicity drugs. We know that when the brain works, it releases neurochemicals, that if they overdo that, it can actually damage the cell. So he said if we give something that antagonizes that, maybe that'll help slow the progression. Anti-apoptotic drugs. Apoptosis is a process where the cells, in effect, commit suicide when their energy levels begin to fall.

And we know that energy loss is a key component of Parkinson's. So we figured if we can inhibit that apoptotic process, that'll help and slow down the progression. We also know that inflammation is a huge problem in the brains of Parkinson's patients. They develop an increase in the microglia, which are inflammatory cells that cause damage to neurons.

Antioxidants, vitamin E, a drug called Inazine. We thought that if we could antagonize oxidation in the brain, that surely would slow down the progression. We also explored trophic factors. These are drugs that mimic naturally occurring proteins in the brain that enhance and nurture brain cells. And so we said surely that would slow it down.

And we even found from a very interesting epidemiologic study that patients who are taking a particular drug for blood pressure control had a much lower risk of later developing Parkinson's. So we said, well, maybe that drug would help to slow down the rate of progression. And the results of this were that everything we tried failed, without exception.

And I can tell you that even as I stand before you today, over 200 years after our formal recognition of Parkinson's, we have nothing that slows down the progression of Parkinson's. I want to hasten to add, we've got excellent treatments for the symptoms. So this remains a highly therapeutic field for us, but we can't do anything about the progression of the disease, at least as we stand today.

So how does this discovery, if you will, of my abject failure of 30 years of research interact with my faith? And here's the answer to that. First of all, these failures show us the sheer complexity of these neurologic diseases. We do not understand the brain. And anybody who tells you we've got the brain figured out is either misguided or lying.

It also highlights for me the difference in intelligence between the creator and the creature. The God that we worship is so much greater than we are, that he has created things that we can't understand and that we can't fix. So it really is a testimony to the greatness of our creator.

And therefore, the failure to solve human disease, ironically, strengthens my faith in Christ. This is why we need our faith, because it's real, because there really is a creator. And he is so magnificent that he can do these things that we can't even fathom and can't even appreciate. And unlike us, Christ is a true healer of disease.

We doctors do the best we can to palliate suffering, to help people feel better, to do whatever is possible to alleviate their suffering. But at the end of the day, only our Lord is a healer. And I love this verse in Matthew 8. I just want to read it to you.

"Now when evening came, they brought to him many who were demon-possessed. And he cast out the spirits with a word, and he healed all who were ill in order to fulfill what was spoken through Isaiah the prophet, saying, 'He himself took our infirmities and carried away our diseases.'" You know, there's a lot in that verse that we can unpack.

But what I want to point you to today is one little word after the word healed. He healed all who were ill. I don't know if you've ever thought about that. When our Lord went from town to town in Israel, He was eradicating disease. Everybody who was brought to Him was being healed, not just those who had faith in Him.

In fact, it is infrequent that Christ healed people on the basis of faith. Most of the time, He simply eradicated disease wherever He went. Absolutely amazing. So what is my goal then in the talk this morning? First of all, from neurology, I hope to impress you with just how great a creator God is.

Secondly, from selected miracles of Christ, I want to show you how powerful our Lord is. I want to demonstrate the impossibility that Christ's miracles have a natural explanation. And I want to finally prove the point that His healings were actually acts of creation. That's what our Lord was doing when He healed disease, is He was recreating whatever was wrong in that person.

So the big idea then for the talk this morning is that Christ's healings were acts of creation. And we know this from Colossians 1 verse 16, "For in Him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities, all things have been created through Him and for Him." So our Lord is the creator and His acts of healing on this planet during His first coming are acts of creation.

So the miracles I want to review with you this morning in the few moments we have are number one, I want to talk to you about the man blind from birth, this famous account found in John chapter 9. I want to tell you about the man with the withered hand whom our Lord healed as described in Matthew 12 verse 9 and following.

And I want to tell you briefly about the woman who was crippled for 18 years described in Luke 13. So let's begin with the account of blindness from birth. I hope you have your Bibles with you today because I want to read this text for you. It's absolutely incredible.

This is John 9 verses 1 through 11. As He passed by, He saw a man blind from birth and His disciples asked Him saying, "Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents that he would be born blind?" Jesus answered, "Neither this man nor his parents sinned, but this was so that the works of God might be manifested in him.

We must work the works of Him who sent Me as long as it is day. Night is coming when no one can work. While I am in the world, I am the light of the world." Now when He had said this, He spat on the ground, made clay of the saliva and rubbed the clay on His eyes and said to him, "Go wash in the pool of Siloam," which is translated sin.

So He went away and washed and came back seeing. Therefore the neighbors and those who previously saw Him as a beggar were saying, "Is not this the one who used to sit and beg?" Others were saying, "This is He." Still others were saying, "No, but He is like Him." He kept saying, "I am the one." So they were saying to them, "How then were your eyes opened?" He answered, "The man who is called Jesus made clay and rubbed my eyes and said to me, 'Go to Siloam and wash.' So when I went away and washed, I received sight." Now let's talk for a minute about congenital blindness.

I think you need to understand the significance of this problem. Here on the right-hand side you see an illustration of the design of the human visual pathways. And it's really brilliant the way this was designed. You have here obviously the eyes and light comes in at this angle and hits what you see is the blue area.

Light coming in from the right-hand side hits the red part of the retina. And fascinatingly, these pathways have both an ipsilateral projection and a contralateral projection. So you see both eyes that are perceiving the right hand of the world wind up on the right side of the brain and the portion of the eyes that sees the left side of the world winds up on the left side of the brain.

So this is the way the human visual system is designed by Christ. This little area here is called the lateral geniculate nucleus where the primary first order neurons that exist in the retina synapse with the second order neuron that projects into the occipital lobe of the brain. And it's the brain's occipital lobe that actually perceives what you're seeing.

Now here's the kicker. You have at birth all of these neurons preformed during the process of genesis in the womb of your mother. But the problem is that if this retina does not see light in the first few days, weeks and months of life and not only not seeing light, it has to see formed images.

What happens is the synapses that occur in the lateral geniculate nucleus don't see the release of neurotransmitter because you're not perceiving anything. And the result of that is these pathways disintegrate. So they never develop. Vision in the first year of life is critical to the actual development of the visual system.

And so if you are blind from birth, all of these cells that normally go to the brain and enable you to perceive light, they die out. They don't persist. And this part of the brain literally shrinks. A good example of this is congenital cataracts, not a terribly uncommon condition.

This has to be detected immediately after birth so those cataracts can be removed to enable the infant to see so this visual system will develop. So in our example here from John, the patient never developed any of these networks. And therefore, nothing you do to fix the eye or even the retina will solve the problem because the neural pathway that perceives vision has failed to develop.

And so it can't be corrected by any means that's available to us. The only fix for congenital blindness is a complete recreation of the entire network of the visual system. And as we saw in our text, Christ did this effortlessly because he is the creator. Now in our text, we read John 9, 2 to 5.

I just want to remind you of what this says. And his disciples asked him, saying, "Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he would be born blind?" Jesus answered, "Neither this man nor his parents sinned, but this was so that the works of God might be manifested in him.

We must work the works of him who sent me as long as it is day. Night is coming when no one can work. While I am in the world, I am the light of the world." Now this verse is fascinating to me because you notice what the disciples' initial reaction was.

Well, somebody must have sinned here. We call this the divine retribution principle. This is very similar to what we see taught in the book of Job. And I had the privilege of teaching through the book of Job in our Sunday school class at Countryside for several years and was just amazed at how pervasive this view was.

And as you can see, the disciples had it. But you'll note that Christ repudiated this. He said, "No, that's not this. This is not the divine retribution principle. This was allowed to happen just so I could do this miracle." Think about the sovereignty of Christ in making this situation occur so that he could demonstrate his creative power.

And of course, the act of creating sight where once there was only darkness serves to picture in the physical world the truth that Jesus is the light of the world spiritually. What is common? This is a test question I'm going to ask you here since we're in a university.

What is common to these two verses? John 8, John 9, 8-9, "Therefore the neighbors and those who previously saw him as a beggar were saying, 'Is not this the one who used to sit and beg?' Others were saying, 'This is he.' Still others were saying, 'No, but he is like him.' And he kept saying, 'I am the one.'" That's verse 1.

How about this one? "Then the Jews did not believe it of him that he was blind and had received sight until they called the parents of the very one who had received sight and questioned them, saying, 'Is this your son who you say was born blind?' Then how does he now see?" So who can tell me the answer?

What's similar about those two verses? Little louder. And why were they skeptical? Because no one has ever heard of anyone receiving sight when they were born blind. And why did they think that was impossible? Because it was impossible, exactly. These people were not doctors. This is a long time ago.

But even they knew that if you were born blind, it was impossible to receive sight. It was an incurable malady. Well, then we come to John 9, 24 to 34. "Therefore, a second time they called the man who had been born blind and said to him, 'Give glory to God.

We know that this man is a sinner.' Then he answered, 'Whether he is a sinner I do not know. One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.' So they said to him, 'What did he do to you? How did he open your eyes?' He answered them, 'I told you already, and you did not listen.

Why do you want to listen again? Do you want to become his disciples too?'" I love this guy. "And they reviled him and said, 'You are his disciple, but we are disciples of Moses. We know that God has spoken to Moses, but as for this man, we do not know where he is from.' The man answered and said to them, 'Well, here is a marvelous thing, that you do not know where he is from, and he opened my eyes.

We know that God does not listen to sinners, but if anyone is God-fearing and does his will, he listens to him. Since the beginning of time, it has never been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a person born blind. If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.'" What a testimony of his experience and his faith.

"They answered and said to him, 'You were born entirely in sins, and are you teaching us?' So they put him out." I want you to get this. What infuriated the Jewish leaders even more than healing on the Sabbath, which was a major bone of contention they had with our Lord, was the incontributable proof in what happened to this man that Jesus was the Christ, the Son of God.

He recreated this man's entire visual system, and no one can do that but God alone. This is what infuriated them so much. They wanted a way to dismiss Christ. They did not want to receive him, and so a miracle like this put them in a huge bind because no one could dispute that a supernatural act had occurred.

Let me move on to our next one, the miracle of the withered hand. Let's read Matthew 12, 9-14, "And departing from there, he went into their synagogue. And behold, a man was there whose hand was withered. And they questioned Jesus, saying, 'Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath, so that they might accuse him?' And he said to them, 'What man is there among you who has a sheep, and if it falls into a pit on the Sabbath, will not take hold of it and lift it out?

How much more valuable, then, is a man than a sheep? So then it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath.'" Verse 13, "Then he said to the man, 'Stretch out your hand.' He stretched it out, and it was restored to normal like the other." Again, it appears almost effortless what Christ is doing and how He is executing these healings.

Now from a medical perspective, we can't know for certain what disease this man had. As I've thought about it, I think there are three major possibilities. The first one would be a traumatic fracture with poor healing. We know that if you fracture the hand badly enough and it doesn't heal correctly, it can be withered in a sense.

It could also represent severe arthritis with joint deformity. We've all seen people who have that. But the third possibility, and the one I am choosing to impose on the text, is that this is hand dystonia. Hand dystonia, a very interesting problem that fell within the realm of my treatment.

I'm going to show you a videotape of a patient I had who had this disease, just to illustrate what dystonia looks like in the hand. So you can clearly see that, in her case, it's bilateral. But notice that her hand is clearly withered. She can't manipulate her fingers properly.

And because the dystonia has been long-lasting, it's produced permanent deformity in the position of her hands. So her hands are essentially non-usable because of the persistence of this dystonia. Now what is dystonia? This is a fascinating neurologic disease, which, to be honest with you, we don't understand very well.

It is poorly understood to this day. Unlike Parkinson's disease, where I can show you where in the brain the problem is, I can't even do that with dystonia. We know it is something to do with brain neural networks. And neural networks are just what they sound like. They're similar to an electrical network that you would have for the electrical grid.

But it's a much, much more complex network. It's a situation where neurons are synapsing with other neurons in a very complex pattern that results in the ability to execute a movement. Now in the case of dystonia, there is no known cure for this. So in that respect, it's similar to Parkinson's disease.

And unfortunately, unlike Parkinson's disease, we don't have good drugs for dystonia. What I would typically tell my patients who came to me with dystonia when we're talking about oral drugs is that I've got about a 50% chance of giving you a 20% improvement. So it's not great. And we did try.

There were a handful of drugs that we would employ. Every now and then we saw a patient who did well, but basically it was difficult to treat. Now there is a newer treatment called botulinum toxin. You may have heard of Botox that has revolutionized our treatment for dystonia. The way it works is you inject this directly into whatever muscle is contracting abnormally.

And because botulinum toxin is a paralytic agent, it weakens that muscle. And so you can have less of whatever the abnormal pulling is. But there are two major problems with this treatment. The first one is there's a limit to how much of it I can give you. You've all heard of botulism, which is a fatal disease if you get too much toxin in your body.

So we're limited to how big the muscle is that we can inject this with to achieve benefit. And the second problem is the muscular activity that produces dystonia is so complex that we really can't figure out exactly how to balance this out to achieve perfect results. And that's why I say it works for a short time, but it never produces normalization of function.

It makes them better, but by no means perfect. And of course you have to repeat it. Every three to four months you have to repeat that injection ad infinitum as long as the patient lives. What can I tell you about this human neural network that's involved in dystonia? The human brain has 86 billion neurons, just for you to contemplate that.

That correlates to 100 trillion connections among neurons. I hope you're beginning to sense the complexity of this system. It is staggering how complex the human neural network is. And the best science of man has no real idea how the brain works, much less how to fix neural network problems.

We know it's there, we dabble in drugs, but at the end of the day, if the network is bad, we can't fix it. Well, what was Christ's solution to the withered hand? I love this, very brief, very to the point. He said to the man, "Stretch out your hand." He stretched it out and it was restored to normal like the other.

I have never had a patient with dystonia that I made normal, not one in 30 years. Christ did it effortlessly in a moment in time. How do you get a malfunctioning neural network normal? Only one way I know of, you recreate it ex nihilo. And that's what our Lord did.

Everyone witnessing this knew immediately that this was a miracle. In this simple command, our Lord is recreating his neural network. And keep in mind that what he corrected was of a staggering level of complexity, a hundred trillion synapses, and he fixed them all. Now in seeing this act of creation, our observers had only one of two options.

They could either bow the knee to the King of Kings, they could recognize that this was the Messiah who had been prophesied and who they were all waiting for, or they had to attribute the power demonstrated to Satan and purpose to kill him. Those are really the only two options.

So what was the reaction then of the Pharisees? Well we see that clearly in verse 14, "But going out, the Pharisees took counsel together against him as to how they might destroy him." Now I've thought a lot about this over the years as I've studied the Scripture and learned about our Lord and the events, and it's very difficult to understand why they did this.

Think about this. Here is a religion, Judaism. We have the predictions all throughout the Scripture, including in Moses, that a future Messiah is coming who's gonna right all the wrongs and redeem the nation. Everybody is looking forward to this Messiah, and all of a sudden, in a point of time, he shows up.

He proves himself to be the very Messiah. How does he do that? He fulfills every Scripture that was prophesied about him, and he demonstrates the power that only God controls. And yet, the people that he came to rejected him, and the Pharisees led that. They were the ones that were determined from the beginning to kill him.

Why did they do that? I think there are two Scriptures that help us to answer that. The first was a parable that our Lord told in Luke 19, where he's describing the situation of the Jews. So he said, "A nobleman went to a distant country to receive a kingdom for himself and then return.

And he called ten of his slaves, gave them ten minas, and said to them, 'Engage in business until I come back.' But his citizens hated him and sent a delegation after him, saying, 'We do not want this man to reign over us.'" What our Lord is doing there is he's telling a parable that is describing the condition of the Jewish heart.

They simply did not want a ruler. And why did they not want a ruler? It's because they no longer were true Israelites. They had now a false religion, not a true religion. Their false religion was one based on self-righteousness, based on works. And so when their true Messiah came, they rejected him because they did not want to submit themselves to his leadership.

Now that's a parable, and you might say, "Well, how do I know that's really what happened?" Well, here's the definitive answer in John 11, verse 47 and following, "Therefore the chief priests and the Pharisees gathered the Sanhedrin together and were saying, 'What are we doing? For this man is doing many signs.

If we let him go on like this, all will believe in him, and the Romans will come and take away both our place and our nation.'" So here we now understand it fully. They wanted their place. And so what was their fundamental sin? It was the same sin that Lucifer committed.

It was the sin of pride. They wanted their place. They wanted their nation. They were in charge of everything. They would not bow the knee to their Messiah. Well, let's move to our third illustration, "The Woman Crippled for Eighteen Years." Let's turn to Luke 13, chapter 10, verse 10 and following, "And he was teaching in one of the synagogues on the Sabbath.

And behold, there was a woman who for eighteen years had a sickness caused by a spirit, and she was bent double and could not straighten up at all. But when Jesus saw her, he called her over and said to her, 'Woman, you are freed from your sickness.' And he laid his hands on her, and immediately she was made erect again and began glorifying God." So she was bent double for eighteen years.

Now does that sound like a transient passing illness that one can recover from readily? I don't think so. Now I find it interesting, the text indicates that her malady was due to an evil spirit, which is fascinating. But in my view, it is more likely that a demon had caused her physical affliction rather than that this was a case of demon possession.

And why is that? It's because normally when Christ confronted a demon-possessed person, his action was to cast out the demon. Here we have a sickness that was demonically induced, but it's a physical malady. This person has an actual physical disease. And of course in this text, he simply heals her by laying his hands upon her.

The power of Christ once again demonstrated. So the question is, what disease is this? So I guess I could call this my second test question. Anybody know what disease causes you to be bent over double for eighteen years? Well first of all, I've got to show you what it looks like.

Being bent over double means this. So that's the position she's in for eighteen years. Anybody in the audience ever heard of a disease that causes that? Well believe it or not, there actually is one. Only a neurologist would know about this, and particularly a movement disorders neurologist. This is a disease called Camptichormia, also known as bent spine syndrome.

So this is a real disease. And because I want you to see this, we'll give you a videotape illustration of it. But what are the causes of Camptichormia? What can cause bent spine syndrome? Well first of all, if you look at the literature, there is a report of a very interesting scenario that happened in World War I soldiers.

And in effect, what they did is they developed that bent spine posture. Now as you may recall, in World War I, there was a lot of trench warfare. And so the way that you didn't get your head blown off is when you're in the trenches, you would go down like that.

Well what was weird is these people continued to do that even when they were not in the trench. So looking back on that historically, this is most likely a case of malingering, where basically they figured out that if I couldn't straighten my spine, I would get sent back to the hospital away from the front lines and get out of it.

So that's where we first see in the literature descriptions of Camptichormia. However, there are some organic, bona fide neurological diseases that cause this. One of them is called primary axial myopathy. So if you think about it, the only way you can remain erect is because you have this band of muscles that runs along your spine.

They're called the erector speedi muscles, and they're the ones that enable you to arch your spine. And when you're standing up straight, they hold your spine up. If those muscles go away, you're going to crumple forward with the action of gravity on your spine. And you can develop an atrophy of those muscles.

Those neurons or those muscles that control the spine's erection can disappear, an atrophy. Totally unknown why this occurs, but it's a bona fide condition. And then the third one, of course, the case where I come in, is with axial dystonia. So this is similar to the patient I showed you with the hand dystonia, but believe it or not, you can also get this affecting the spine.

And in this particular illustration, what we think happens is there are muscles on the front side of your body, in the abdomen, that are deep. They're not the superficial muscle that you can palpate. They're deep muscles that run along the surface of the spine anteriorly that begin to contract abnormally.

And just as the lady I showed you affects her fingers due to abnormal muscle contraction, here we have abnormal muscle contraction of the anterior muscles of the spine that is causing that forward flexion. And again, dystonia is a neural network problem. Let me show you an example of this.

This is a man, obviously, but this is the patient that our Lord healed. He has bent spine syndrome, camptochormia. He is unable to erect his spine any higher than this when walking. And this is one of the clues that we have that this is dystonia, is because when sitting still, he looks perfectly normal.

You don't see anything wrong with his spine. In fact, he can even arch his spine when sitting down. But when he stands up and begins to walk immediately and progressively, he begins to flex more and more downward. So what's happening basically is due to an abnormality in the brain's neural network that controls gait, when he starts to pull up that motor program of walking, it progressively causes the aberrant contraction of those muscles that we don't want to contract when we're walking, ultimately causing him to flex forward like that.

So that's camptochormia. So how do you treat camptochormia? Well, if it's a psychological problem, again, there are reports that this could be treated, managed by psychotherapy. Again, the main problem with those World War I soldiers is they were getting out of a dangerous situation. So that's not applicable to most people today.

There are no treatments for axial myopathy. Once those muscles begin to degenerate in the spine, there's really nothing you can do about it. No one knows how to fix axial myopathy. Now axial dystonia in Parkinson's disease, which is my patient, there have been individual case reports of the drug for Parkinson's called levodopa helping.

There have also been reports of deep brain stimulation. So it's a new technology now for treatment of Parkinson's where you implant wire electrodes into the center of the brain and basically hook them up to a spinal stimulator that stimulates the brain in particular areas. There have been isolated reports of patients improving with that.

But none of those are longstanding permanent cures. They may produce temporary improvement in the bent spine, but they don't solve it. I also tried in a couple of my patients with this botulinum toxin thinking, "Well, maybe if I can find the muscle that's pulling the patient down, we can weaken that muscle and he'll be able to stand up straight." Again, the problem is the muscles were too deep.

I couldn't get to them through the exterior and sufficiently weaken the muscles that were causing the problem. And that's the fundamental problem we have with campnicormia. We cannot regenerate atrophic muscle cells, nor can we correct the complex neural network problem underpinning dystonia. In spite of the advanced state of medical knowledge in the 21st century, we're helpless to correct this problem.

So what was Jesus' solution? Well, when Jesus saw her, he called her over and said to her, "Woman, you are freed from your sickness." And he laid his hands on her, and immediately she was made erect again and began glorifying God. Notice that Christ spoke to and touched this woman, and immediately she was healed.

We know from other miracles of Christ that he didn't need to do either of those two things. He had the power to recreate her neural network without uttering a word or a touch. What does this show us? It shows us the compassion that Christ had. He wanted the physical touch of her to reemphasize his love for her.

Instantly her thoracic muscles were restored, her neural network was recreated, and our Lord healed this woman because he is compassionate and merciful. His act of recreation shown here was effortless and once again proving that he was God the creator and proving that there could not be a natural explanation for this because you can't fix these neural network problems.

Now I would leave you with this query. What do these miracles have in common? Why did I pick these three particular miracles to show you today? Well first of all, all three addressed unsolvable neurologic problems that have no possibility of a human cure. We can't fix this. These miracles show that our Lord did.

And in all three cases we see an act of creation, a brand new restoration of normal function in a setting of damaged neurons. So taken together, these miracles establish beyond any doubt that Jesus had divine supernatural power. That God, not Satan, was the source of the power is proven by the beneficial result of his miracles.

He restored to health whereas demonic action always degrades the person and causes illness. And this is why the Pharisees claim that, "Oh well, Christ is doing this by the power of Satan." It was terribly disingenuous. Nobody bought that because demonic forces don't heal people. Demonic forces degrade people. But that was the only thing they could think of to try to explain away the miraculous work of our Lord.

I think it's also noteworthy that all three miracles took place on the Sabbath, thus serving to condemn the Pharisees' hypocritical approach to a day God intended to be beneficial to His people. So what can we learn from these miracles? What's the take-home message that I think each of us can take from this?

Well first, I think consideration of these miracles should humble us. You've probably heard that there are some doctors somewhere who develop a God complex. Why does this happen? Well, it happens because patients trust us. It's really amazing to be in a position where a patient will come to you suffering with sickness and say, "Doctor, whatever you tell me to do, I'll do it because I want to get better." That is an immense trust that they're placing in us.

And more often than not, they adhere to what we recommend. And if you're an unbeliever and you're prone to pride, which all of us are, that can very rapidly lead to pride and escalation of your own view of yourself. But when we think about Christ's miracles and how much more powerful He is, that once again humbles us and shows us that no, we really can't do anything.

Our efforts are pathetic and ineffectual compared to how our Lord dealt with this. Second, I think these miracles should strengthen our faith in Christ. This one's obvious. If Jesus could recreate neural networks effortlessly in His first coming, He can also forgive sins, which God alone can do, and that's our real problem, isn't it?

Sin is our real problem. Our separation from Him spiritually is our real problem. And if He can do this, He has proven that He is God and God can forgive sins. And then, of course, His healing of physical dysfunction by His divine power at His first coming is illustrative of His power to overcome spiritual death now and to raise us physically from the dead at His second coming.

We worship a God who is truly powerful, and therefore, we can trust Him that He will rescue us and He will raise us with Him on the last day. And then finally, these miracles should embolden us to share the gospel with others. As believers, we need to be growing in compassion toward the lost.

This is what Christ's example to us was of a compassionate, loving Savior. All of His healings were motivated by compassion for suffering people, and as I said earlier, most of them were totally disconnected from any faith that person had. He simply was merciful. He wanted to do this because it was a reflection of Himself, His character.

And we need to do that ourselves, and we need to have a compassion for the lost, and therefore, if we care about the lost, we'll share the gospel whenever we can. Thank you so much for your attention. >> Thank you. Thank you so much, Dr. Dewey, that was phenomenal.

We have a few minutes. I know you just sat down, but does anyone have any questions? We have some folks joining by live stream, so if you have a question, just raise your hand and we'll pass a microphone around. We're just stunned. We're just trying to absorb everything. Okay, so we have a microphone coming up front.

One second, it's on the way. >> Thank you. My question is with regard to the second example that you gave, the man with the withered hand, how it specifically talks about it being only one hand that was affected. Is that possible with the hand dystonia? >> Yes, absolutely. So it can be unilateral.

The example I showed, obviously, was bilateral. In fact, that patient had generalized dystonia. So her whole body was affected, but she was the best video I had showing the hand involvement. But actually, more often than not, when we see focal dystonia, it affects one hand or one foot. >> Thank you.

>> Hi, Doc. I was just wondering, or actually noticing that not only was the full recreation of the brain and all the neurons connected, but the training and understanding of how to use them -- we just can't take a paralytic who's never walked and make them have perfect balance and walk again.

It takes years of rehab, even if everything was working. So it's not just -- it's the knowledge. You put knowledge into these people's brain, muscle memory into these people. >> Thank you for adding that. That's an excellent point. >> Thank you. My father was a neurologist, by the way, so I have a little bit of knowledge, small amount.

Other diseases that are motor-related, like ALS, things like that, maybe just a few words on how those are related as well. >> Sure. Well, most of the diseases that you think of in neurology that are bad, like ALS, they're degenerative diseases. So what's happening is there is something that's going wrong in the metabolism of the nervous system that results in degeneration.

There are fortunately a few neurologic diseases that aren't that way. Migraine would be one example, very common. And there are a few others that I would consider to be not as serious that don't involve degeneration. What's fascinating is that the two most common in the elderly population are Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.

And we now know, interestingly, that both of them are due to these depositions of small clumps of protein that don't belong there. And what's fascinating is the proteins that clump are normal brain proteins. All of our brains are chock full of those proteins. We need them. They have specific functions that carry out things that we need to be able to do.

But it's when they start to behave in an abnormal way and they start to precipitate into small clumps that they cause the pathology and ultimately cause cell death. And unfortunately, we don't have any treatments that stop the degenerative diseases of the brain. Hi. I got three. I'm not going to be greedy, just pick one of them.

First in John 9, my favorite, it's like the sweetest man on earth. I believe he heard the disciples and Jesus talking and he realized at some point, yes, I was born blind for this purpose, which is just stunning. But the second one is a lady doctor from Argentina who, of course, can't practice here, but she told me her patients, she knew they had spiritual problems and she couldn't help with that.

All she could do was tend to their body, which was disturbing if you want to talk about that. The third is what the chemo gave me induced Parkinson's like shakes, which is that a route to demystify those kinds of things and it'd be horrible to do to somebody, but we had to stop the chemo.

It was also dexamethasone. So any of those three. Thank you. Yeah. So I'll take the last one first. Chemo is a fascinating treatment for cancer. We don't understand it very well, but the one thing we do know is that all chemotherapeutic agents work by destroying cells in your body.

So it is not beyond speculation that in particular individuals, the chemotherapy may be mis-targeting the cells that are involved in the Parkinson pathway, producing that side effect. But I would have to say that's considered exceptionally unfrequent. So we don't normally see patients with Parkinsonism who have chemotherapy-induced disease. I wouldn't rule it out as it being a possible on an individual basis, but it's not the rule of thumb.

And I think your other question about how do you deal with the spiritual problems of your patients if you're a doctor, that's a big one. I'm going to defer that to the discussion tomorrow. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.