Can it really be that 1% to 2% of all cancers, in all stages, spontaneously remiss?
A spontaneous remission of cancer is the sudden disappearance of a cancer, and all it's signs, symptoms, and markers, without any medical intervention ― and it happens― why?
Scratch head....
Spontaneous Remission
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.”
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.” 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 underreporting.
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. 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. 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.”
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 non-allopathic 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 non-allopathic 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 non-
allopathic 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, sub-optimal
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 behavioural 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.
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.
Healer #1 explained his theory of “bypasses,”
which he described as psychological defence
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.
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.
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 there-
fore 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 though, 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.
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.
HIV+ Baby Cured! Medical
Breakthrough, Miracle, Or Proof
Of Self-Healing?
By Lissa
Thursday, March 7th, 2013
to continue click here
A spontaneous remission of cancer is the sudden disappearance of a cancer, and all it's signs, symptoms, and markers, without any medical intervention ― and it happens― why?
Scratch head....
Spontaneous Remission
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.”
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.” 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 underreporting.
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. 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. 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.”
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 non-allopathic 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 non-allopathic 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 non-
allopathic 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, sub-optimal
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 behavioural 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.
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.
Healer #1 explained his theory of “bypasses,”
which he described as psychological defence
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.
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.
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 there-
fore 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 though, 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.
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.
HIV+ Baby Cured! Medical
Breakthrough, Miracle, Or Proof
Of Self-Healing?
By Lissa
Thursday, March 7th, 2013
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