Spontaneous Remissions - Cancer Compass an Alternate Route

A cancer analogy: Imagine going downstairs and finding that your basement is covered in mold. You could put on a mask and spray bleach all over everything. The bleach will kill the mold, but it will probably damage your furniture and your storage boxes as well – in just the same way that the chemotherapy would do to your body. But in the end the original problem remains; you still have a damp, dark basement, and without any ventilation or sunlight that mold will grow back.” Dr Kelly Turner

What is spontaneous remission?

Spontaneous remission also called spontaneous healing, or spontaneous regression, and it is the unexpected improvement or cure from a disease that appears to be progressing in its severity. These terms are commonly used for unexpected transient or final improvements in a cancerous condition.

Doctors often refer to healing from cancer outside of the realm of conventional modalities as a “spontaneous remission.”

But after studying this phenomena over the past 10 years and looking at over 1,000 case studies, Dr Kelly Turner, PhD, concludes that there is nothing spontaneous about these stories. Dr Turner writes. “When I began studying spontaneous remissions 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 the 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 nonallopathic healers.”

Dr Turner defines the term radical remission as any healing that is statistically unexpected– and those statistics will vary depending on the cancer type, stage, and medical treatment that was received. More specifically:

A cancer that goes away without the use of conventional treatments at all, or
A patient tries conventional treatments, but the cancer does not go into remission so they switch to using an alternative method of healing which does lead to remission, or
A patient uses conventional and alternative methods simultaneously in order to outlive a statistically dire prognosis (i.e., a cancer with a less than 25% chance of five year survival)

Dr Turner has personally interviewed over 250 survivors while researching her book Radical Remission: Surviving Cancer Against All Odds, and found that many of the them began researching various alternative modalities at their own initiative and then employed what they had learned into their healing protocols. She was able to isolate nine key factors that many of them had in common.

They radically changed their diet by eliminating sugar, meat, and dairy and significantly increased their servings of fruits and vegetables. Many of them began juicing as a way to increase those servings. Additionally, many of them drank filtered water to avoid chlorine, fluoride, and other contaminants.
They took control of their health by playing an active role in the decision making process and were not passive about their care.
They followed their intuition and found solutions that felt appropriate to their situations. Dr Turner writes that the survivors that she studied held the belief that the body has an innate, intuitive knowledge about what it needs in order to heal.
They used herbs to detoxify the body and boost the immune system, and took supplements to fill in any nutritional gaps in their diets. She said there wasn’t any one magic supplement or herb to recommend but that the people that she studied researched and found what worked best for them.
They employed stress relieving techniques and released their suppressed emotions of fear, anger, grief, and resentment which can weaken the immune system.
They increased their positive emotions to build up the immune response.
They embraced social support, letting their needs be known so that other people could assist them.
They deepened their spiritual connections.
They had strong reasons for living.

Additionally, Dr Turner writes that she has asked every oncologist that she has ever met if they have ever personally witnessed an unexplained remission within their practice. She says that every one of them have responded with a “yes.” But when asked if they had followed up with the patient or documented the situation further, they all answered “no.” She says, “In the absence of this documentation we can never truly know how often radical remissions are occurring, or the methods that patients are using in order to heal.”