“He who has health, has hope. And he who has hope has everything. ”
What makes someone go into spontaneous remission from cancer? Every day, people around the world are achieving remission and healing their bodies from seemingly “incurable” conditions. How do some people beat cancer against all odds?
When you or someone you love is diagnosed with cancer, your first instinct is to dive headfirst into your treatment options. However, once you are diagnosed, you are typically advised to start aggressive treatment in the form of chemotherapy—as soon as possible. Knowing cancer is in your body and possibly spreading often leaves cancer patients with little time or options to research alternative healing methods or more holistic treatment approaches. Many times, it is only after traditional or conventional medicine fails does one start to explore alternative ways to heal their bodies.
You may have heard a similar story: A person with advanced cancer tries all conventional treatment options including chemotherapy, radiation and surgery but nothing works. They are sent home to enter hospice yet five years later, they walk into their doctor’s office healthy and cancer free? How is this possible?
When it comes to the medical anomaly of radical remission, studying cases of extraordinary healing can give us valuable insights into the body’s capacity for self-healing and rapid transformation. Receiving a diagnosis or cancer or any incurable disease or condition is life-changing. How do you hang on to hope, when your health is in jeopardy and your future is now viewed in terms of a probability?
Our thoughts, beliefs, and emotions have a huge impact on our health and ability to heal. The latest scientific research in epigenetics reveals that we are not victims of unchangeable genes, nor should we blindly accept a frightening prognosis. The truth is we have more control over our health than we have been taught to believe.
The Radical Remission Project was born out of Dr. Kelly Turner, Ph.D.’s dissertation research on radical remission from cancer. Her specialized research focus is on remission that occurs either in the absence of conventional medicine or after conventional medicine has failed. As Dr. Turner began to research the phenomenon of radical remission while studying at the University of California at Berkeley, she realized that the opinions of two groups of people were typically missing from the thousands of radical remission cases published in medical journals‒the survivors and alternative healers. Because Western doctors do not currently have an explanation for why radical remissions occur, Dr. Turner sought out to investigate. Her research involved a year-long trip around the world where she traveled to 10 different countries interviewing radical remission survivors and alternative healers about their techniques for healing cancer. Since then, in her research, Dr. Turner has analyzed thousands of cases of radical remission. The findings of her research are summarized in the New York Times Bestseller Radical Remission and highlighted in the documentary Heal.
In her research, Dr. Turner identified more than seventy-five physical, emotional and spiritual factors that contribute to radical remission. However, she was ultimately able to boil her research down to these Nine Common Factors of Radical Remission:
1. Taking control of your health. Recent studies show that feeling helpless weakens your immune system and can decrease survival time in cancer patients. If that’s true, that what would taking control of your health do? Most of us only have a basic understanding of how to care for our bodies and when they break down or when we become sick we run to medical professionals to heal us; yet doctors typically prescribe pills that mask the symptoms without resolving the underlying problem, or they may fix the problem yet in turn create some negative side effects. Radical remission survivors approach healing from a different perspective. They take an active role in their health —willing to make difficult and sometimes radical changes to improve their health.
2. Radically changing your diet. It’s been said that you are what you eat and research consistently shows radical dietary changes can help heal cancer. Among, radical remission survivors, Dr. Turner found the same four dietary changes:
• Greatly reducing or eliminating sugar, meat, dairy and refined foods
• Greatly increasing vegetable and fruit intake
• Eating organic foods
• Drinking filtered water
Cancer cells consume sugar much faster than normal, healthy cells. While research is still not clear that a high-sugar diet causes cancer, once cancer cells are in your body, they consume anywhere from 10 to 50 times more glucose (sugar) than normal cells. It makes sense for cancer patients to avoid feeding their cancer cells by cutting as much refined sugar from their diets.
3. Following your intuition. Intuitive decisions are not ones we think through carefully with reason, they happen suddenly arising from an instinctual, bodily response. Scientists recently discovered our gut is full of over 100 million neurons allowing it think and feel similar to our mind, and it can also function independently from our brains. This helps explain how people get a “gut feeling” about things. Radical remission survivors believe the body has an inherent knowledge about what it needs to heal. They know listening to your body and trusting in your intuition can guide you to make the changes your body is asking for, so you can regain your health. Research has found that our instinctual bodies often know the answer before our analytical mind does. Studies have also shown that when it comes to making major life decisions, trusting your intuition typically results in better outcomes than following your logical, thinking brain. Dr. Turner found throughout her research that radical remission survivors learned how to harness the power of their intuition because they believe their intuitive flashes of knowing often provide important life-saving information.
4. Using herbs and supplements. It is widely believed that to get rid of cancer you must change the condition in which it thrives. The main difference between chemotherapy and vitamin/herbal supplements is that most chemotherapy treatments are designed to kill cancer cells; whereas most supplements are designed to strengthen your immune system so it can remove the cancer cells.
While supplements can help you regain balance and health, there is no magic bullet. Dr. Turner found most radical remission survivors supplemented with digestive enzymes like probiotics and prebiotics, detoxified with ant-fungals, anti-virals and anti-parasitics and boosted their immune system with vitamin C, aloe vera, vitamin D and B12.
5. Releasing suppressed emotions. Suppressed emotions are any emotions you are hanging on to from your past: positive, negative, consciously or unconsciously. Alternative healers and radical remission survivors believe that illness is a blockage within our body-mind-spirit system. They believe that health is achieved when there is an unrestrictive movement on all three levels. Sometimes because your immune system is weakened, cancer cells are not always removed from the body as they should be. Over time, these cancer cells build up to form a tumor. From an alternative healing perspective, this blockage needs to be addressed to prevent the cancer cells from building up again. Researchers know that chronic stress weakens the immune system and the immune system plays a vital role in detecting and removing cancer cells from the body. Among all suppressed emotions, fear is the most common. ‘Fear of death’ is something we all must face, but cancer patients are forced to examine their own mortality the moment they hear, “You have cancer.” Countless research studies have shown that fear keeps the body stuck in fight-or-flight mode which prevents the body from moving into rest-and-repair mode— literally shutting down the immune system.
6. Increasing Positive Emotions. Radical remission survivors try to experience love, happiness and joy on a daily basis. While many think it may be difficult to bring happiness into your life in the midst of a traumatic cancer journey; Dr. Turner suggests making it a point to purposely do things each day that bring you some happiness or joy for at least five minutes a day. Starting your day with gratitude, watching funny videos, a positive affirmation or quote can help fuel your immune system. Making a habit to visualize a positive outcome is also important too. Using guided imagery and picturing your tumors shrinking with each treatment can be incredibly powerful ways to lower your anxiety and help your body heal.
7. Embracing social support. Receiving love is never more important than when we are sick. Research has shown that the feeling of being loved releases a powerful mix of hormones to our bodies that makes us feel better emotionally, strengthens our immune system and actually helps our bodies heal. Nearly all radical remission survivors Dr. Turner interviewed believed the love they received from others when they were sick helped their bodies heal. An especially important component to the healing for most cancer survivors was physical touch. Hugging, putting an arm around someone’s shoulder or a pain-relieving massage was an essential part of their healing process.
8. Deepening your spiritual connection. Most radical remission survivors and alternative healers describe spiritual energy as something that is intensely felt both physically as well as emotionally. It is often described as a warm, blissful energy that radiates downward from head to toe, imbuing the body with a sense of unconditional love. Yoga, running, massage or other spiritual practices can all help you experience this spiritual energy. According to Dr. Turner’s research, the manner in which you connect to this energy does not matter, but daily connection or practice is necessary to receive the healing benefits. Regardless of which method you choose prayer, meditation, yoga or running, the first step is learning to quiet your mind. Learning how to distance yourself from your thoughts, helps your thoughts calm down and eventually dissipate. Some people find exercising before mediating helps them get into this spiritual flow faster. Research has also shown that meditation helps boost your immune system. One study recently found the more you meditate the more antibodies your body produces. Meditation and mindfulness are powerful ways to combat chronic disease and research has shown daily practice helps suppress genes that have been linked to the development of common cancers.
9. Having a strong reason for living. According to Dr. Turner’s research, having a strong reason for living boils down to a core conviction or desire to keep living. This core confidence comes by focusing on the fact that you want to keep living rather than the fact you may die sooner than you hoped. From an alternative healing perspective, the mind leads the body and having a strong reason for living invites “chi” into the body. Like breathing, alternative healers believe we invite the breath of life into our bodies when we are excited about living, however, when we are not excited about living we eventually do not bring enough chi into our bodies to keep us alive. For many radical remission survivors, being excited about living means they have to get in (or back in) touch with their calling or true passions. Getting diagnosed with cancer often forces people to examine what they would like to change in order to make their remaining time on this planet meaningful and enjoyable as possible. The common thread among most radical remission survivors is the desire to live life for as long as possible‒not to avoid death at all costs which is an important difference. Radical remission survivors have looked death in the face and accepted its inevitability. But they also realize that no one‒no even their doctors‒know for sure when they are going to die. Radical remission survivors choose not to focus on their death but instead they concentrate their energy on all the things they want to do while they are still alive. Focusing on your reason for living provides a welcome distraction from any fears of death you may have and research has shown it can actually help you live longer.
Scientists know that cancer can be caused by toxins, viruses, bacteria, genetic mutation and cell breakdown. According to Dr. Turner, what makes cancer more difficult to treat is that the state of an individual’s mind-body-spirit system plays a pivotal role in how the body responds and ultimately heals from this complex disease. It’s important to note that the Nine Factors of Radical Remission are not listed in any specific ranking order. Some survivors tended to focus on factor more than others, but in various degrees these nine factors were common among all radical remission survivors.
The most positive part of Dr. Turner’s research is that none of these factors are rare, difficult to access or extremely expensive. They simply require a little effort. Most interestingly, only two of the nine factors Dr. Turner identified are physical; the majority of the factors deal with the spiritual or emotional aspects of healing which demonstrates the powerful effect our thoughts, beliefs and feelings may have on our overall health.
For many cancer patients, including myself, some of the scariest moments of your journey are the initial diagnosis and then the uncertainty of achieving long-term remission. In my view, remission in many ways, can be harder than active treatment because you are often told that there isn’t much to do but watch and wait to see if your cancer will return which can be very disempowering. Reading the inspiring radical remission case studies of people of all ages around the world curing themselves from advanced stage cancer without using chemotherapy, radiation or surgery, demonstrates our body’s incredible healing capacity. When used as an alternative to Western medicine or in combination, the Nine Factors of Radical Remission provide the hope that no matter where we are in our treatment journey, we can shift the odds of remission in our favor.
***It is important to note the nine key factors described in Dr. Turner’s work are hypotheses for why radical remissions may occur— they are not yet proven facts. While there are cases of radical remission documented for almost every type of cancer, these incredible transformations point to the differences between curing and healing. Curing is sometimes possible but healing is always possible because true healing means bringing more purpose, healthy behaviors and happiness in your life regardless of how much time you have to live.
Visit Dr. Turner’s website to search thousands of real cases of Radical Remission from cancer . You can filter by diagnosis type and submit your own healing story.
Sources:
Turner, K. A. (2015). Radical remission: Surviving cancer against all odds. New York, NY: Harper One.
The Radical Remission Project. https://radicalremission.com/
Heal a documentary by Kelly Noonan Gores. http://www.healdocumentary.com/about.html
How The Mind Can Boost Immunity, Multiply Health, & Conquer Disease. https://eocinstitute.org/meditation/boosting-your-immune-system-with-meditation/
Epigenetics: How It Works And What It Means for Cancer Research. https://blog.dana-farber.org/insight/2018/01/epigenetics-cancer-research/