This is extremely good news. Someone is finally investigating the
dog that failed to bark. There is a huge mass of data out there that
is begging to be collected and it is surely worth something. What I
do know is that the medical profession has been largely cut out of
the loop by these survivors because they all went out and shopped for
fresh ideas and successfully implemented them and saw little reason
to report back.
This nonsense had to end and this will help hugely. Key will be the
recruitment of researchers able to independently collect the reports
properly.
This is certainly an excellent beginning that sets the stage for
work.
When Cancer
Disappears: The Curious Phenomenon of Unexpected Remission
January 24, 2013
Kelly Turner, PhD,
Guest Writer
Waking Times
We’ve all heard a
story like this one. After trying all that Western medicine has to
offer, a person with Stage 4 cancer is told there is nothing more the
doctors can do and is sent home to receive hospice care. Five years
later, that person strolls into the doctor’s office feeling great,
with no further evidence of cancer.
In the medical world,
this kind of case is referred to as a spontaneous remission, which is
defined as “the disappearance, complete or incomplete, of cancer
without medical treatment or with medical treatment that is
considered inadequate to produce the resulting disappearance of
disease symptoms or tumor.”1 Many researchers, including myself,
believe that the word spontaneous is a misnomer and should be changed
to unexpected or unlikely. We feel this way because few things in
life are truly spontaneous—occurring purely by accident. It is more
likely that these remissions have a cause—or two or three—that
science has not yet identified.
Background
Regardless of what we
call them, unexpected remissions do occur, and more than
one thousand cases (across all types of cancer) have been published
in medical journals. Thousands more have most likely occurred but
not been published, because most doctors don’t take the time to
write up a report and submit it to a journal—which unfortunately is
currently the only way of tracking these kinds of cases. Based on
what has been published, unexpected remissions are estimated to occur
in one out of every sixty thousand to one hundred thousand cancer
patients; however, the true incidence rate is likely higher than that
due to under reporting.
[
once again what is badly needed is an amateur driven data repository
in which a doctor can place a quick note and access to the medical
file and patient. A form could be created for this. Then a third
party researcher can verify and collect the missing additional data
through interviewing the patient. The data needs to be personalized
with a living human being. - Arclein ]
Over the past century, there has been a steady flow of published
case reports along with flashes of increased interest in this topic.
For example, in the 1960s, the first two scientific books on
unexpected remission were published, which led to a sharp increase in
the number of case reports submitted to medical journals.3 After
awhile, however, interest in the topic lulled again until the late
1980s when the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) launched
the Spontaneous Remission Project, which culminated in the
publication of a comprehensive bibliography of documented cases.4
Since then, approximately twenty new cases of unexpected remission
are published each year, and there still has been a noticeable lack
of formal research into why these remissions might occur.
It’s understandable,
in a way. How do you begin to research something you cannot
explain? Many conventional doctors feel threatened by
these “miraculous” cures and don’t wish to talk about
them—much less research them—for fear that they will give “false
hope” to their other patients. In fact, most of the unexpected
remission survivors I have studied are thrilled to have finally found
a professional who is interested in learning how they healed. They
often lament, “My doctor didn’t even ask how I did it.”
[ By
gathering the data meticulously if you are a scientist! - Arclein ]
The Present
Research
Perhaps because I am a
qualitative researcher and not a medical doctor, I have always
been fascinated by cases of unexpected remission. When I began
studying them during my doctoral studies at the University of
California at Berkeley, I was disappointed to see how little research
had been done on this topic. The first problem I saw was that there
was no database where I could easily find and analyze these
cases. The second issue I noticed was that two groups of people
had been largely ignored in the research: the survivors themselves as
well as nonallopathic healers. It seemed odd that in an effort to
explain unexpected remissions, we weren’t asking the opinions of
the people who had actually healed. I also couldn’t understand why,
when trying to explain a remission that is by definition not a result
of allopathic treatment, we weren’t seeking out hypotheses
from nonallopathic healers.
As a result, my
dissertation research involved collecting hypotheses from these two
previously ignored groups about why unexpected remissions may occur.
More specifically, I spent ten months traveling the world in search
of fifty nonallopathic cancer healers. My research led me to
interview healers in the United States, China, Japan, New Zealand,
Thailand, India, England, Ireland, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Brazil
(translators were used when necessary). When I returned from this
amazing trip, I found twenty unpublished cases of unexpected
remission and conducted phone interviews with the survivors. I
purposely sought out unpublished cases first, in order to see if the
underreporting issues were true—which they were. I am grateful to
the American Cancer Society for providing partial funding for this
study.
My seventy hour-long
interviews resulted in more than three thousand pages of transcripts,
which I analyzed multiple times to find recurring themes. I
identified more than seventy-five “treatments” for cancer,
six of which were “very frequent” among all seventy subjects.
Underlying beliefs about cancer also emerged from the interviews, of
which three were very frequent. I am happy to share these results
here in an abbreviated form. Please remember that these are
hypotheses only, not facts.
Belief #1: Change
the Conditions under which Cancer Thrives
The majority of my
interviewees believed that cancer thrives under certain, suboptimal
conditions in the body-mind-spirit system and that to remove cancer,
those underlying conditions must change.
Healer #21 from Hawaii
explained it this way:
The most
successful recoveries seem to be strongly associated with major
mental, emotional, or physical behavioral changes among
the people with the illness. What is major for one person, of course,
may not be the same for another . . . I know of one success where a
woman left her family, took up a different religion, changed her
clothing and diet, and moved to a different country. Maybe she needed
all of those changes or maybe not, but overall it worked for her. I
know of another person, a man, who simply stopped trying to outdo his
father, and that worked for him. [
it is informative that food did not make this list and also
unexpected – arclein ]
Belief #2: Illness
= Blockage/Slowness; Health = Movement
The majority of my
interviewees also believed that any illness—including
cancer—represents a blockage or slowness somewhere in the
body-mind-spirit system, whereas health occurs when there is a state
of unhindered movement or flow.
FIELD NOTES: Healer #1
explained his theory of “bypasses,” which he described as
psychological defense mechanisms that function to create a bypass
around an energetic block. He said that this energetic block can be
located at either the spiritual, mental, emotional, or physical level
and that these bypasses become solidified over time. In his opinion,
true healing only occurs when a person (1) stops bypassing and (2)
releases the original blockage.[
I consider this to be a promising line if thinking and inquiry that
pulls a lot of threads together and shifts focus away from the
abnomality itself to look for influences. - arclein]
Belief #3: A
Body-Mind-Spirit Interaction Exists, and Energy Permeates All Three
Levels
The third belief that
the majority of my interviewees discussed was the idea that a
body-mind-spirit interaction exists and that energy permeates all
three of these levels.
According to Healer
#35, an American-born, Peruvian-trained shaman:
You have to have mind,
body, and spirit healing. . . Most of us who live in our physical
bodies, we don’t even know about spiritual or emotional bodies. So
we have to connect with all three of them. But you see, in the
mountains of the Andes, [the Andean people] are already connected.
In addition to these
three underlying beliefs about health, there were also six treatments
that the cancer survivors and healers discussed most frequently.
These included physical as well as emotional, energetic,
and spiritual “treatments.” They are listed below in
alphabetical order.
Changing One’s
Diet
The majority of my
interviewees believed it was important to change their diet to
primarily whole vegetables, fruits, grains, and beans, while
eliminating meat, sugar, dairy, and refined grains.
Unexpected Survivor
#16, who overcame liver cancer without conventional medical
treatment, explains the major changes he made in his diet:
[I healed] by just
going on a basic, good, predominantly raw, vegan diet alone and
supplementing it with lots of juices, like carrot juice, which of
course is packed with nutrients. And the reason why the juices are so
important is we have depleted basically all of our produce . . .
That’s the reason for using juices as a supplement . . . All of a
sudden the body says, Wow! It’s like watering the lawn when it’s
dry.
Experiencing a
Deepening of Spirituality
The majority of my
interviewees also discussed feeling—not just believing but actually
feeling—an internal sensation of divine, loving energy. Some even
had transcendent experiences, such as Unexpected Survivor #4, who
healed from a Stage 3 lung cancer without conventional medical
treatment:
It was a ten-day,
silent retreat, where you couldn’t speak, you couldn’t
acknowledge other people in the room, and you just meditated for like
fourteen hours a day. And I had this experience that I can’t
explain. It was like all of a sudden there was a flash, and in my
eyes I could see rivers of energy swirling around and at the same
time felt that same thing through every cell of my body. And
there’s a word for it, but I forget what the teacher said it
was—but he explained that, “You felt your soul. You felt your
true essence.” And I said, “Did I feel God?” And he kind of
smiled and said, “Some people may call it that.”
Feeling
Love/Joy/Happiness
The majority of my
interviewees also discussed the importance of increasing love and
happiness in their life in order to help regain their health.
FIELD NOTES:
[Unexpected Survivor #5, who overcame a rare lymphoma without
conventional medical treatment] said that the
energy/spiritual healer that he saw flooded his lymph system with
energy and that after the treatment he felt like “a teenager in
love.” He felt love toward everyone and everything. He
said the treatment made him realize that if he could only find a way
to feel that level of unconditional love all of the time, then he
would be healed from his cancer.
Releasing Repressed
Emotions
Because many of my
interviewees believed that illness represents a state of blockage,
they therefore believed that it was healthy to release any emotions
they had been holding onto, such as fear, anger, and grief.
Unexpected Survivor #19, who overcame pancreatic cancer
without conventional medical treatment, explains her insight
into this process:
I believe that the
energy stuck in my body that appeared to be a mass or a tumor, and
which [my physicians] called cancer, had been caused by these
patterns that I was describing to you that don’t get released, that
are continually overlaid, over and over and over, wherever they are.
So if it’s kidney cancer, it’s probably excessive fears; if it’s
lung cancer, it’s grief of some sort that hasn’t been resolved. I
mean, I think they can be very much tracked back to patterns, thought
patterns, thought forms that are not releasing, and therefore they
hold in the cell memory are not being released.
Taking Herbs or
Vitamins
Many of my
interviewees also took various forms of supplements, with the belief
that they would help to detoxify their body or boost their
immune system or both. Here is how Unexpected Survivor #8, who
overcame Stage 3 colon cancer, described it:
Dr. Turner: Of all the
things you just told me about, what do you think was the most
influential for your healing, or are they all pretty equal for you?
Unexpected Survivor
#8: I would say, for my body, that would be the Wholly
Immune [supplement] that I got . . . It has like about fifty
different things in it . . . [A friend] researched it and said, “In
that Wholly Immune, you’ve got seven cancer fighters. If you
were taking them on their own, it wouldn’t be as potent.” He said
that because they’re in combination, it acts as a cancer destroyer.
Using Intuition to
Help Make Treatment Decisions
Finally, many of my
interviewees talked about the importance of using intuition
to help make treatment-related decisions. For example,
Unexpected Survivor #7, who overcame recurrent metastatic breast
cancer after conventional medicine had failed to work, described how
a healer’s intuition matched her own:
[The Tibetan healer]
took his finger and with a pinpoint accuracy touched every spot on my
body where I had had cancer, or where I had cancer presently. It was
amazing! He could see what scans couldn’t see. I had predicted my
cancer four times. I had led [my doctors] to it with a pinpoint of
accuracy before the scans could even pick up the collection of cells.
[The Tibetan healer] could do what I could do with my own body.
In addition to the six
“treatments” listed above, which were common among both the
healers and the unexpected survivors, there were additional
treatments that were more frequent in one group than the other. For
example, the following three themes were very frequent among the
twenty unexpected survivors, but less so among the healers.
Taking Control of
Health Decisions
The vast majority of
the unexpected survivors discussed taking a more active role in
health decision-making, as opposed to passively accepting whatever
their doctors told them. Unexpected Survivor #9, who overcame
recurrent metastatic breast cancer after conventional medicine had
failed to work, describes it this way:
Once the panic and
fear had subsided after the breast cancer returned for the fifth
time, I felt as certain as I ever had been that the only
person who could save me was the scientist within . . .
For five years, I had done everything my doctors had advised and
undergone all the treatments that they had prescribed . . . [This
time] I decided that instead I would look at breast cancer in a
detached way, as a natural scientist, and try to understand the
disease as a type of natural phenomenon.
Having a Strong
Will to Live
The vast majority of
the unexpected survivors demonstrated a strong will to live.
Unexpected Survivor #15, who overcame Stage 3 breast cancer without
conventional medicine, demonstrates this willfulness:
The doctor said to me,
“After you get this surgery done and have the chemo and radiation,
we can give you five more years to live.” And I thought, I want to
live more than five years! So, when the doctor said that, I got mad .
. . So I kind of went out with an attitude of this isn’t
going to beat me. I’m going to do this.
Receiving Social
Support
Finally, the vast
majority of unexpected survivors in this study described receiving
positive social support during their cancer experience. Unexpected
Survivor #13 describes the outpouring of love that she received:
One of the things I
truly learned [when I had cancer] is that I am valued . . . I was
able to share the reality of my experience, and people resonated with
that and just stepped in to do whatever was needed. It was a huge
validation of the universe and that all life is valued. I wasn’t
valued because I’m me, my person necessarily, but because my life
has value. All life has value, and that includes mine . . .
It’s a wonderful
consequence of this disease, the outpouring of love. Well, maybe it’s
the purpose
There were two themes
that occurred more frequently among the healers than the unexpected
survivors: (1) healing, infusing, or unblocking energy and
(2) strengthening or activating the immune system. You can read more
about these, as well as further analysis of all themes, in my full
dissertation.
Future Directions
The results from this
qualitative study provide some hypotheses as to why unexpected
remission may occur. What is needed now is for researchers to study
these hypotheses in clinical trials that can test first for safety,
then for feasibility, and finally for causality. In addition,
there is an immediate need for a central database of unexpected
remission case reports, ideally one that is online.
I am currently working
on creating such a database and website, with the hope that
survivors, doctors, and healers will be able to quickly submit their
case reports so that researchers like myself can verify and analyze
them. Eventually, this de-identified (anonymous) database will also
be searchable by the public, serving not only as a portal for
researchers but also as a source of inspiration for cancer patients
who are currently battling the disease.
If you know anyone who
has healed their cancer either (1) without conventional medicine, (2)
after conventional medicine failed, or (3) who used integrative
methods to outlive a dire prognosis, please encourage them to submit
their case at www.UnexpectedRemission.org
(currently in beta). All submitted reports will be automatically
de-identified unless specifically asked not to by the survivor.
In closing, I would
like to say that studying anomalies such as unexpected remissions is
neither easy, nor uncontroversial, nor immediately fruitful. However,
I firmly believe that such research can lead us to a new paradigm of
scientific understanding, and that by rigorously investigating
unexpected remissions—as opposed to simply ignoring them—we can
make significant advances in the war on cancer.
“When Cancer
Disappears: The Curious Phenomenon of ‘Unexpected Remission’”
was first published in the December 2011 issue of Noetic Now, the
online journal of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, located at
www.noetic.org/noetic.
With permission from the publisher. © 2011
About the Author
Kelly Turner, PhD is a
researcher, lecturer, and consultant in the field of Integrative
Oncology. Her specialized research focus is the “unexpected
remission” of cancer—a remission that occurs either in the
absence of Western medicine or after Western medicine has failed to
achieve remission. Kelly is currently working on a book for cancer
patients which summarizes her research findings, as well as a website
that will continue to collect cases of unexpected remission. She also
provides one-on-one Integrative Cancer Consultations and guided
meditation instruction to cancer patients. Dr. Turner can be found
at:
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