"When I first read the Spontaneous Remission
Project, which consists of over 3500 case studies
in the medical literature of patients who have
been cured from seemingly “incurable” illnesses,
either without medical treatment or with
treatment deemed inadequate for cure. These
case studies, written up by doctors as
unexplainable cases, offer a scientific peek into
the mystery of medicine, the awe of medicine,
and the possibility of what some might call
(though most doctors wouldn’t dare) “miracles.”
Many of these case studies include the stories of patients who were cured from supposedly terminal
cancers- Stage 4 cancers that disappeared. When I read these case studies, the million dollar
question that popped into my curious mind was
“Are these flukesーor did these patients do
something proactive to cure themselves?”
Dr. Kelly Turner, a PhD who trained at Harvard
and UC Berkeley, had the same question, so I
tracked her down to interview her from my book
Mind Over Medicine: Scientific Proof That You
Can Heal Yourself. For her PhD thesis, Dr.
Turner traveled the world studying people who
experienced what she calls “unexpected
remissions” from Stage 4 cancer. She prefers the
term “unexpected remission” to “spontaneous
remission” because the word “spontaneous”
implies that it just happened, that it was some
sort of lucky accident, and that the patient
wasn’t involved in the cure. In addition to
interviewing the patients in order to find out
what they did to get well, Dr. Turner interviewed
their healers, usually unconventional healers,
since many of these patients had chosen to refuse
Western medical treatment.
What Dr. Turner found is that these unexpected
remission weren’t accidents. The common thread
between all of these patients stories was 6
proactive health behaviors they credit with their
cancer cures.
1. Change your diet.
The majority of Dr. Turner’s interviewees
credited diet change as a powerful tool for
self-healing. Most recommended eating a diet
consisting primarily of whole vegetables,
fruits, grains, and beans, while eliminating meat,
sugar, dairy, and refined grains. When your
body’s innate self-repair mechanisms are over-
taxed with cleaning up toxins from a poor diet,
it’s hard for them to go about the business of
fighting cancer. But when your diet is pristine,
your natural self-repair mechanisms can do what
they know how to doㅡkill cancer cells and try to
return the body to homeostasis. For great
examples of how to fight cancer with a vegan,
largely raw, chemical-free, anti-inflammatory
diet, check out Kris Carr’s Crazy Sexy Diet and
Crazy Sexy Kitchen.
2. Deepen your spirituality.
Many of Dr. Turner’s interviewees discussed
feeling an internal sensation of divine, loving
energy of a spiritual nature. One study showed
that engaging in spiritual community by
attending religious services can extend your life
by up to 14 years, so it’s unsurprising that
connecting with the Divineㅡ whether within
yourself or in spiritual community with others
who share your faithㅡwould activate your
body’s self-repair mechanisms so your body
can heal itself.
3. Feeling love/joy/happiness.
Many of those Dr. Turner interviewed credited
their cancer cure with increasing love and
happiness in their lives. Studies show that happy
people live up to 10 years longer than unhappy
people and optimists have a 77% lower risk of
heart disease when compared to pessimists, most
likely because feelings of joy, love, connection,
optimism, and happiness flip off harmful stress
responses and activate healing relaxation
responses in the body, filling the body with
healing hormones like oxytocin, dopamine,
nitric oxide, and endorphins which bathe every
cell in the bodyㅡincluding the cancer cellsㅡ
and activate the body’s natural cancer-fighting
abilities.
4. Releasing repressed emotions.
Many of Dr. Turner’s interviewees believed that it
was healing from them to release any negative
emotions they had been harboring, such as fear,
anger, grief, or resentment. We know that
repressed emotions, whether they exist in the
conscious or subconscious mind, act as triggers to
the amygdala in your limbic brain, since the
amygdala inaccurately perceives these negative
thoughts as a threat to your safety. Every time
you feel fear, anger, grief, resentment,
loneliness, pessimism, depression, or anxiety,
these negative thoughts activate the “fight-or-
flight” stress response that fills the body with
poisonous stress hormones and deactivates the
body’s natural healing processes. Dealing with
your negative emotions in healthy waysㅡvia
psychotherapy, somatic work, EFT, the Hoffman
Process, or any number of other modalities, can
calm your amygdala, return your nervous system
to its homeostatic relaxed state, and boost your
body’s self-repair mechanisms.
5. Taking herbs or vitamins.
Dr. Turner’s interviewees took various forms of
herbs, vitamins, and supplements- there wasn’t
any one magic supplement that beat out the rest-
with the belief that they would help to detoxify
the body and/or boost the immune system.
Whether these herbs, vitamins, and supplements
actually helped cure the cancerㅡor whether they
effectively helped flip on the body’s natural self-
repair via the placebo effectㅡhas yet to be
determined. And it shouldn’t matter. We know
that 18-80% of the time, patients taking sugar
pills with no inactive ingredients get betterㅡ
because they believe they are getting the real
treatment. In other words, if you believe some
herb, tea, tonic, vitamin, or nutritional
supplement holds the key to your cure, by all
means, take it.
6. Using intuition to help make treatment decisions.
Those who Dr. Turner interviewed talked about
the importance of following their intuition with
regard to treatment-related decisions, which
makes sense physiologically. When rats with a
certain type of cancer are exposed to shocks,
studies show that the rats who learn to escape
the shocks die of cancer 30% of the time,
compared to a 73% death rate when the rats
become passive and just lay down and accept
their fate.
In other words, your body is your business.
Whether or not you’re pursuing conventional
cancer treatment or trying alternatives like the
people in Dr. Turner’s study, you can’t just hand
the fate of your body over to someone else the
way you would hand your car over to a doctor.
You know your body better than any doctor does,
and following your intuition (Step 3 in the 6
Steps To Healing Yourself that I teach in Mind
Over Medicine) is key when it comes to fighting
any illness, especially cancer. If you or someone
you love has cancer, the very act of taking charge
of your health not only ensures that you get the
best care; it also gives you a survival advantage
and makes it more likely that you will become
one of the medical miracles.
Remember, these healthy behaviors aren’t just
about helping you experience an unexpected
remission. They’re about prevention. After all,
this is your LIFE we’re talking about."
Project, which consists of over 3500 case studies
in the medical literature of patients who have
been cured from seemingly “incurable” illnesses,
either without medical treatment or with
treatment deemed inadequate for cure. These
case studies, written up by doctors as
unexplainable cases, offer a scientific peek into
the mystery of medicine, the awe of medicine,
and the possibility of what some might call
(though most doctors wouldn’t dare) “miracles.”
Many of these case studies include the stories of patients who were cured from supposedly terminal
cancers- Stage 4 cancers that disappeared. When I read these case studies, the million dollar
question that popped into my curious mind was
“Are these flukesーor did these patients do
something proactive to cure themselves?”
Dr. Kelly Turner, a PhD who trained at Harvard
and UC Berkeley, had the same question, so I
tracked her down to interview her from my book
Mind Over Medicine: Scientific Proof That You
Can Heal Yourself. For her PhD thesis, Dr.
Turner traveled the world studying people who
experienced what she calls “unexpected
remissions” from Stage 4 cancer. She prefers the
term “unexpected remission” to “spontaneous
remission” because the word “spontaneous”
implies that it just happened, that it was some
sort of lucky accident, and that the patient
wasn’t involved in the cure. In addition to
interviewing the patients in order to find out
what they did to get well, Dr. Turner interviewed
their healers, usually unconventional healers,
since many of these patients had chosen to refuse
Western medical treatment.
What Dr. Turner found is that these unexpected
remission weren’t accidents. The common thread
between all of these patients stories was 6
proactive health behaviors they credit with their
cancer cures.
1. Change your diet.
The majority of Dr. Turner’s interviewees
credited diet change as a powerful tool for
self-healing. Most recommended eating a diet
consisting primarily of whole vegetables,
fruits, grains, and beans, while eliminating meat,
sugar, dairy, and refined grains. When your
body’s innate self-repair mechanisms are over-
taxed with cleaning up toxins from a poor diet,
it’s hard for them to go about the business of
fighting cancer. But when your diet is pristine,
your natural self-repair mechanisms can do what
they know how to doㅡkill cancer cells and try to
return the body to homeostasis. For great
examples of how to fight cancer with a vegan,
largely raw, chemical-free, anti-inflammatory
diet, check out Kris Carr’s Crazy Sexy Diet and
Crazy Sexy Kitchen.
2. Deepen your spirituality.
Many of Dr. Turner’s interviewees discussed
feeling an internal sensation of divine, loving
energy of a spiritual nature. One study showed
that engaging in spiritual community by
attending religious services can extend your life
by up to 14 years, so it’s unsurprising that
connecting with the Divineㅡ whether within
yourself or in spiritual community with others
who share your faithㅡwould activate your
body’s self-repair mechanisms so your body
can heal itself.
3. Feeling love/joy/happiness.
Many of those Dr. Turner interviewed credited
their cancer cure with increasing love and
happiness in their lives. Studies show that happy
people live up to 10 years longer than unhappy
people and optimists have a 77% lower risk of
heart disease when compared to pessimists, most
likely because feelings of joy, love, connection,
optimism, and happiness flip off harmful stress
responses and activate healing relaxation
responses in the body, filling the body with
healing hormones like oxytocin, dopamine,
nitric oxide, and endorphins which bathe every
cell in the bodyㅡincluding the cancer cellsㅡ
and activate the body’s natural cancer-fighting
abilities.
4. Releasing repressed emotions.
Many of Dr. Turner’s interviewees believed that it
was healing from them to release any negative
emotions they had been harboring, such as fear,
anger, grief, or resentment. We know that
repressed emotions, whether they exist in the
conscious or subconscious mind, act as triggers to
the amygdala in your limbic brain, since the
amygdala inaccurately perceives these negative
thoughts as a threat to your safety. Every time
you feel fear, anger, grief, resentment,
loneliness, pessimism, depression, or anxiety,
these negative thoughts activate the “fight-or-
flight” stress response that fills the body with
poisonous stress hormones and deactivates the
body’s natural healing processes. Dealing with
your negative emotions in healthy waysㅡvia
psychotherapy, somatic work, EFT, the Hoffman
Process, or any number of other modalities, can
calm your amygdala, return your nervous system
to its homeostatic relaxed state, and boost your
body’s self-repair mechanisms.
5. Taking herbs or vitamins.
Dr. Turner’s interviewees took various forms of
herbs, vitamins, and supplements- there wasn’t
any one magic supplement that beat out the rest-
with the belief that they would help to detoxify
the body and/or boost the immune system.
Whether these herbs, vitamins, and supplements
actually helped cure the cancerㅡor whether they
effectively helped flip on the body’s natural self-
repair via the placebo effectㅡhas yet to be
determined. And it shouldn’t matter. We know
that 18-80% of the time, patients taking sugar
pills with no inactive ingredients get betterㅡ
because they believe they are getting the real
treatment. In other words, if you believe some
herb, tea, tonic, vitamin, or nutritional
supplement holds the key to your cure, by all
means, take it.
6. Using intuition to help make treatment decisions.
Those who Dr. Turner interviewed talked about
the importance of following their intuition with
regard to treatment-related decisions, which
makes sense physiologically. When rats with a
certain type of cancer are exposed to shocks,
studies show that the rats who learn to escape
the shocks die of cancer 30% of the time,
compared to a 73% death rate when the rats
become passive and just lay down and accept
their fate.
In other words, your body is your business.
Whether or not you’re pursuing conventional
cancer treatment or trying alternatives like the
people in Dr. Turner’s study, you can’t just hand
the fate of your body over to someone else the
way you would hand your car over to a doctor.
You know your body better than any doctor does,
and following your intuition (Step 3 in the 6
Steps To Healing Yourself that I teach in Mind
Over Medicine) is key when it comes to fighting
any illness, especially cancer. If you or someone
you love has cancer, the very act of taking charge
of your health not only ensures that you get the
best care; it also gives you a survival advantage
and makes it more likely that you will become
one of the medical miracles.
Remember, these healthy behaviors aren’t just
about helping you experience an unexpected
remission. They’re about prevention. After all,
this is your LIFE we’re talking about."
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