get real, get healed

Even though it is a “bad day,” he shows me that he can still kick a sausage-shaped punching bag that dangles above our heads from the ceiling. I am pretty sure that my leg wouldn’t reach as high if I tried.

“I can’t let this disease stop me,” he says before asking if I would like some coffee. I do, and so he brews up a fresh batch as we talk about his morning regimen. Mornings are always the worst; he wakes up stiff as a board and has almost no way to access his limbs. So before the sun comes up, he starts the deep breathing routine that Hof teaches. It usually takes Spaans the better part of half an hour of deep breathing and breath-holds before his muscles start to loosen. When he is limber enough, he takes a cold shower to shock his nerves into consciousness. Think of it this way: Parkinson’s disease is a degenerative process in which the brain slowly loses connections with the limbs it is supposed to command, and Spaans uses the Wim Hof Method to strengthen environmental signals to override his failing neurology. It isn’t a cure. It’s a management routine. In 2015 he is enjoying 11.5 hours of “good time” every day with a lower drug regimen as compared with 2011, when his daily average of “good time” dipped to less than 7 hours.

The first thing that anyone notices about Hans Emmink is that he’s a large man. He has a big barrel chest, long loping arms, and a gut that leads him comfortably. A 3-inch crocodile tooth hangs from a rope around his neck. Despite appearances, he’s also the sort of man who is more likely to embrace you in a bear hug than scowl at you from his great height. In 2012 Emmink didn’t stand nearly as tall—in fact, most of the time he was bowled over suffering from the painful ulcers that developed throughout his digestive tract. It wasn’t just pain. Every time he went to the bathroom, the bowl of the toilet filled with blood. “The first time I saw it I freaked out,” he says to me when I meet him near Hof’s training center. After the first red porcelain bowl Hans called his doctor, who ordered up a colonoscopy, a procedure that uses a snakelike camera to investigate the colon and intestines. The camera lens captured bright white ulcers every few centimeters. There were hundreds of them. It was Crohn’s disease—one of the most common autoimmune disorders in the world today. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 1.6 million Americans suffer from it. About half of the afflicted will at some point require invasive surgery in which doctors remove whole sections of the patient’s severely inflamed and damaged digestive tract. There’s no cure for Crohn’s, but as with many autoimmune disorders, doctors are often able to keep the worst symptoms at bay with heavy drug regimens—mostly steroids. Limiting or eliminating gluten from the diet also seems to help some people.

For Emmink, Crohn’s was a living nightmare. Ulcers started in his mouth and proceeded in a line through his esophagus, stomach, large and small intestines, and into his ruined colon. His joints ached so much that it was almost impossible to work. The doctor prescribed him prednisone, a common steroid, and initially the symptoms abated. He could function on a daily basis, but the relief didn’t last more than a few months. He rapidly built up resistance to the drug, and it wasn’t long before he was shitting blood again. So, like anyone with access to Google, he searched for experimental and alternative treatments for the disease—there were thousands online—but one then-recent article by Peter Pickkers at Radboud University stood out. Pickkers’s study showed that Hof was not only able to suppress his own immune system against a foreign toxin, but the following year the continuing study demonstrated that the skill wasn’t only an evolutionary quirk, but teachable. People online were musing that it might be good for any immune problem, so Emmink signed up for the first course he could find.

“It’s strange to say it, but I started feeling better from day one,” he says. The worst part of Crohn’s for Emmink was the near-constant pain, and he found that the breathing alone helped manage those symptoms. As he breathed in more oxygen he imagined that he was breathing out pain, and the mere visualization made it seem to disappear. Immediately convinced that something was happening, he took regular cold showers and meditated every morning for 20 minutes. “I could feel my body fighting back,” he says. “It was . . . remarkable.” He also stopped taking the steroids.

Fifteen months later Emmink booked another appointment with the doctor who’d found the hundreds of ulcers in the first place. This time there were none. While the doctor was amazed, he wasn’t willing to point to a health miracle. Instead, the doctor just gave a shrug and said that while sometimes these things just go into remission, it doesn’t mean the disease is gone. The doctor offered Emmink more steroids, just in case the condition returned, but Emmink declined.

“If I had stayed on the meds I would be falling off a cliff all the time. My health would be terrible and I’d be bleeding every day,” Emmink says now.

explore.wimhofmethod.com/ebook-whm/

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