Sunday, December 31, 2017

When I first read the Spontaneous Remission Project

"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."

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