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balto
839 Posts |
 Posted - 11/22/2013 : 21:40:40
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July 10, 2013 – For Kelly Turner, a researcher and lecturer in the field of integrative oncology, the realization that spontaneous remission of cancer was even a possibility blew her mind. For the rest of the world, perhaps particularly those who have been diagnosed with cancer, having a better understanding of this largely misunderstood phenomenon could literally save their lives.
This first installment of a two-part column looks at the inspiration behind Dr. Turner’s upcoming book, Radical Remission: Surviving Cancer Against All Odds, the nature and implications of her research, and the reception she’s received from her peers. Next week, part two will examine her most startling discovery and take a deep dive into the role of spirituality in the treatment of this disease.
It all began when Turner was just eight years old. Her uncle, who lived nearby and was the same age as her father, died of leukemia. Just six years later, a classmate and dear friend was diagnosed with stomach cancer and passed on shortly thereafter.
Fast forward another nine years and Turner found herself working on her master’s degree and counseling cancer patients at the University of California, San Francisco’s Comprehensive Cancer Center. It was then that she picked up a copy of Spontaneous Healing, a book by integrative medicine guru, Dr. Andrew Weil.
“I remember reading it on my lunch break and I got to the point in his book where he brings up a spontaneous remission case from cancer and I just froze,” she said during a recent interview. “It’s still hard for me to believe that I hadn’t heard of these cases before. Maybe I had and I’d never taken them seriously, but to see one in print in front of me, it just stopped me in my tracks, and I said, ‘Even if this just happened once, it should have been national news.’”
That same day she went home and stayed up until midnight reading anything she could find on the Internet about spontaneous remission, including a comprehensive study done by the Institute of Noetic Sciences in nearby Petaluma documenting over a thousand cases of spontaneous remission from malignant cancer.
“I remember just being angry,” she said. “I was like, what the heck? I’m finding cases from 1790 and I had not heard about this? That’s when I decided to continue on for my PhD and just study this really intensely.”
One of the first things Turner noticed was that few if any of the medical studies she read made any mention of the people who actually experienced the spontaneous remission.
“I would read case after case after case in the medical journals and after every one I would write on the bottom, ‘What does the patient think healed him or her?’ No one in these medical reports was asking that,” she said. She also noticed that no one seemed interested in the non-allopathic, non-western healers involved.
This prompted Turner, as part of her doctoral dissertation, to take a ten-month tour of the world to interview 50 alternative cancer healers in 11 different countries including the United States, China, Japan, New Zealand, Thailand, India, England, Ireland, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Brazil. By the time she returned, she had also uncovered 20 new cases of spontaneous remission and conducted interviews with the survivors. This included individuals who had either been diagnosed with cancer and chose to receive no conventional medical treatment, or cancer patients who had given conventional medicine a try and then gave it up for something else. Since then, Turner added a third category to include those who combined multiple methods of treatment.
One of the first things she discovered during her research was that she needed to come up with a better definition of spontaneous remission.
“The issue that I have with the word ‘spontaneous’ is that, by definition, it means ‘without a cause.’ Like it just happens out of the blue, unpredictably,” said Turner. “To use the word ‘spontaneous’ really takes away from what I have found in my research, which is that many of these people worked very hard to get better. They didn’t just sit there and twiddle their thumbs and poof, one day their cancer was gone.”
Using the word “unexpected” instead of “spontaneous” was not much better, since most of the cases she was studying were anything but unexpected by the individuals involved.
“Many of these people believed from the very beginning that they were going to beat this,” Turner said, “that they were going to live and they were going to heal.”
Many years and many focus groups later, Turner has finally settled on “radical remission.”
“I think ‘radical’ indicates two things,” she said. “It indicates that this is a radical occurrence. This is out of the ordinary. Number two is that it involves radical changes, which is really the heart of my research – that these people made radical changes to their lives.”
Broadly speaking, these radical changes included one or more of the following: change of diet; experiencing a deeper spirituality; feeling love, joy, or happiness; releasing repressed emotions; taking herbs or vitamins; using intuition to help make treatment decisions; taking control of health decisions; having a strong will to live; and receiving social support.
What surprised Turner most was that of these nine “treatments,” as she describes them, seven had to do with emotional and spiritual, as opposed to physical, factors.
“I was not expecting it to be one way or the other,” she said. “I just wanted to hear whatever [the survivors] had to say, so to hear so much come up regarding psycho-emotional-spiritual stuff was very surprising to me. What it tells me is that the mind/brain is running the whole show.”
Next week’s column will more deeply explore this “psycho-emotional-spiritual stuff,” a subject that is perhaps at the root of some of the resistance Turner encounters when presenting her findings to doctors who are prone to questioning whether the individuals involved actually had cancer to begin with.
“It’s understandable, because they were trained in a very reductionistic model,” she said, “where the only thing that matters is the biological [aspect].”
Even so, Turner finds increasing interest from oncologists who have themselves witnessed cases of spontaneous or, to use her word, radical remission.
“Whenever I go to medical conferences I say, ‘How many of you have had a case like this in the history of your practice?,’ and a bunch of hands go up,” she said. “Then I say, ‘How many of you who just raised your hands took the time to write an article and submit it for publication?,’ and then all the hands drop.”
It is possible that this failure to report what until recently was thought to be little more than an anomaly could change as the next generation of doctors becomes better acquainted with the practicalities of the so-called mind-body connection.
“The new wave of doctors are much more open to this idea that the body works as an integrated system as opposed to, ‘This is how the heart works, and this is how the liver works, and they don’t talk to each other,’” said Turner. “The idea that we’re really this integrated system that’s really, really talking to all levels at all times – that’s the new medicine and the new understanding.”
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No, I don't know everything. I'm just here to share my experience. |
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balto
839 Posts |
Posted - 11/22/2013 : 21:44:23
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July 15, 2013 – When Kelly Turner began researching spontaneous remission as part of her doctoral dissertation, she did her best to keep an open mind. This led her to the realization that the avenues for treating and even curing cancer are a lot more diverse than one might expect, including a number of thought-based approaches that put the patient squarely in the driver seat of his or her own health.
Part one of this two-part column explored the inspiration behind Dr. Turner’s upcoming book, Radical Remission: Surviving Cancer Against All Odds, the nature and implications of her research, and the reception she’s received from her peers. This last installment will examine what she considers her most important discovery and will take a closer look at the role of spirituality in the treatment of this disease.
“My research is qualitative research, so I go in with no hypothesis,” said Turner during a recent interview. “I go in willing to hear anything. So, if every single one of my subjects had said, ‘I had shark cartilage and that’s what healed me,’ that’s what I would have written down.”
Although none of the initial 20 or subsequent 80 (and counting) cancer survivors she interviewed about their remission said anything about shark cartilage, they did bring up a number of other factors that they believe relate to their cure, most of which had to do with their state of mind. Of the nine most commonly mentioned “treatments,” as Turner calls them, seven dealt with emotional and spiritual issues.
“I was fully expecting a lot more physical stuff to come up, but it didn’t,” she said.
This is not to say that the physical condition of these individuals was not addressed. It was, either through non-conventional means from the start or, after having tried a conventional medical approach, through other alternatives such as meditation or reconnecting with loved ones. However, it is the overall manner in which this was done that presented Turner with her most startling revelation: Ultimately it wasn’t about adopting a western-based approach to destroying cancer cells but, rather, adopting certain thoughts and behaviors geared toward “cleaning up the body.”
“According to my research, there are many ways to clean up a body,” she said. “You can do it with diet. You can do it with meditation. You can do it with supplements. You can do it with forgiveness.”
For conventional medical researchers, this presents a bit of a problem, since not every cancer remission is affected in the same manner. This is not the case, however, for Turner.
“I think that’s a narrow view of looking at it,” she said. “I think because I’m not a medical doctor – and I’m glad I’m not, because it allowed me to go into this without any of my knowledge needing to be broken down – I just went in as someone who cares about cancer patients, and so I didn’t have to have all of my training be taken away in order to hear what these people were saying.”
What they said, either directly or indirectly, is that there is an undeniable connection between mind and body, perhaps most noticeably when fear is involved.
“As soon as we go into fear, our bodies are not healing,” said Turner. “It is one or the other. We’re either in fight or flight or we’re in rest and repose. The problem with cancer is that there’s so much fear around that word that most cancer patients instantly go into fear and stay there. It’s hard for your body to heal when you’re in fight or flight mode. It just is.”
Experiencing what she calls a “deepening spirituality” is one of the ways that Turner’s subjects overcame this fear.
One individual she interviewed, who had brain cancer, was told he had about two months to live after having tried everything that conventional medicine had to offer. Even though he had never been religious or even particularly spiritual, he decided on a whim to visit a spiritual healer in Brazil.
“He ended up staying there for two years and basically meditated for three days a week, eight hours a day,” said Turner. “He’d never meditated before, but two years later, his MRI was completely clean and he’s been cancer free ever since.”
Of course, this approach to health and healing isn’t new, only the language to describe it is. Since the days of Abraham and Moses, Jesus and St. Paul – clear up until the present day – people have been discovering that even a slight shift in thought from a limited, matter-based view of things to a more divinely inspired one has the effect of making the body better.
While there are some who see this kind of thing as little more than positive thinking, Turner sees it more complexly, noting that an individual’s conscious thought (what we hear ourselves thinking in our head) and his or her underlying belief need to be in sync in order for the mind to have an effect on the body, regardless of the approach.
“If you’re swallowing [a placebo] and you don’t know it’s a sugar pill and you think it’s medicine, your conscious thought, or your superficial thought, is, ‘This is medicine and this is going to heal me,’ and your deeper belief agrees with that,” she said. “Your deeper belief is, ‘Medicine is good and medicine leads to healing.’”
“You could say the same thing about prayer,” she continued. “If you’re saying, ‘I am praying for God to heal me,’ and deep down you have a very firm, unwavering belief that divine energy can have a very powerful healing effect on the body – when those things are in alignment, the chances of there being a positive effect on the body are much higher.”
Turner’s contributions to the study of spontaneous remission are likely to go well beyond her initial book. In fact, she’s already set out to redefine the phenomenon altogether.
“To use the word ‘spontaneous’ really takes away from what I have found in my research,” she said, “which is, many of these people worked very hard to get better. They didn’t just sit there and twiddle their thumbs and poof, one day their cancer was gone.”
The better term, according to Turner, is “radical remission.”
“I think ‘radical’ indicates two things,” she said. “It indicates that this is a radical occurrence. This is out of the ordinary. Number two is that it involves radical changes, which is really the heart of my research – that these people made radical changes to their lives.”
Turner is also building a free online database at radicalremission.com where individuals can share anonymously their own stories of radical remission. Eventually this will become a searchable repository for doctors and patients alike.
But perhaps her greatest contribution will be the degree to which she pierces the specter of cancer itself – for others, certainly, but also for herself.
“Since I was a girl I was very afraid of this disease,” said Turner. “Just to have my own fear go away as a result of my research has been a relief for me, and if my research can help other cancer patients get a little less fearful, then I think that’s something positive to give them.”
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No, I don't know everything. I'm just here to share my experience. |
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RageSootheRatio
Canada
430 Posts |
Posted - 11/23/2013 : 10:27:34
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thanks, Balto ... v much appreciated.
I think this is a key concept in her work and a key concept in beating TMS:
quote:
While there are some who see this kind of thing as little more than positive thinking, Turner sees it more complexly, noting that an individual’s conscious thought (what we hear ourselves thinking in our head) and his or her underlying belief need to be in sync in order for the mind to have an effect on the body, regardless of the approach.
We can self-talk/affirm a thought til we are blue in the face (for example, "I must not be fearful" / "I feel calm / confident." etc) but if that is out of sync with what we truly believe then I don't believe it will help. I have always believed that healing has to go deeper than just self-talk or conscious thinking.
~RSR |
Edited by - RageSootheRatio on 11/23/2013 12:38:23 |
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Cancer researcher redefines 'spontaneous remission
