DEDICATION To all people who have ever heard the words “You have cancer,” and to their loved ones who have supported them on their journeys. CONTENTS Dedication Introduction 1 Radically Changing Your Diet 2 Taking Control of Your Health 3 Following Your Intuition 4 Using Herbs and Supplements 5 Releasing Suppressed Emotions 6 Increasing Positive Emotions 7 Embracing Social Support 8 Deepening Your Spiritual Connection 9 Having Strong Reasons for Living Conclusion Acknowledgments Further Reading Notes Index About the Author Back Ad Copyright About the Publisher INTRODUCTION anomaly noun: Something that deviates from what is standard, normal, or expected. You have probably heard a story like this: A person with advanced cancer tries all that conventional medicine has to offer, including chemotherapy and surgery, but nothing works. She is sent home to die but five years later strolls into her doctor’s office, healthy and cancer-free. When I first heard a story like this, I was counseling cancer patients at a large cancer research hospital in San Francisco. During my lunch break, I was reading Dr. Andrew Weil’s book Spontaneous Healing when I came across a case of what I call Radical Remission. I froze, confused and stunned. Had this actually happened? Did this person really overcome advanced cancer without using conventional medicine? If so, why had it not been on the front page of every newspaper? Even if it had happened only once, it was still an incredible event. After all, this person had somehow stumbled onto a cure for his cancer. The men and women I was counseling would have given anything to know this survivor’s secret—and so would I. Intrigued, I instantly began trying to find other cases of Radical Remission. What I found shocked me. There were over a thousand cases in print, all quietly published in medical journals, and yet here I was, working at a major cancer research institution, and this was the first time I had ever heard of one. The more I dug into this topic, the more frustrated I became. It turned out that no one was seriously investigating these cases, nor were they making any attempt to track them. What’s worse, most of the Radical Remission survivors I began talking to said that their doctors, while happy for them, often had no interest in hearing about what they had done to get better. The final straw for me, though, was when a few of the radical survivors told me that their doctors had actually asked them not to tell any of the other patients in the waiting room about their amazing recoveries. The reason? So as not to raise “false hope.” While it is certainly understandable that these doctors would not want to mislead their patients into thinking another person’s healing methods might work for them, it is quite another thing to silence completely these true stories of healing. A few weeks later, a counseling client of mine broke down in tears while receiving her chemotherapy. She was thirty-one years old, with young toddler twins, and had recently been diagnosed with aggressive stage 3 (out of a possible 4) breast cancer. Through her sobs, she pleaded with me: “What can I do to get better? Just tell me what to do. I’ll do anything. I don’t want my children growing up without a mother.” I watched her sitting there, exhausted and bald- headed, with her only hope of recovery dripping slowly into her veins. And then I thought of those thousand-plus cases of incredible, radical recovery, which no one was investigating. Taking a deep breath, I looked into her eyes and said, “I don’t know. But I’m going to try to find out for you.” That was the moment I decided to continue on for my Ph.D. and dedicate my life to finding, analyzing, and—yes—talking about cases of Radical Remission. After all, if we are trying to “win the war on cancer,” doesn’t it make sense to talk to those who have already won? In fact, shouldn’t we be subjecting these amazing survivors to numerous scientific tests and asking them every question we can think of in an attempt to find out their secrets? Just because we cannot immediately explain why something happened, that does not mean we should ignore it—or worse, tell others to keep quiet about it. The example I always use is Alexander Fleming, a scientist who chose not to ignore an anomaly. As the story goes, in 1928 Fleming came back from vacation to find mold growing in many of his petri dishes, which was not surprising to him given his long absence. He began sterilizing the dishes, figuring that he simply needed to start his experiment over. Thankfully, though, he decided to pause and take a closer look, and this is when he noticed that all the bacteria in one particular dish were dead. Instead of ignoring this anomalous dish and dismissing it as a fluke, Fleming chose to investigate the matter further—and doing so led him to the discovery of penicillin. This book shares the results of my ongoing research into the Radical Remission of cancer. It is the outcome of my decision not to ignore these anomalous cases but rather do as Alexander Fleming did: take a closer look. However, I will first give you a bit of my own background, so you can better understand where I am coming from and what inspired me to dedicate my life to this topic. MY STORY My experience with cancer began when my uncle was diagnosed with leukemia when I was three. His disease was a long, drawn-out process that lasted five years, casting a shadow over our family gatherings and making all of us young cousins incredibly afraid of that mysterious illness called “cancer.” He eventually died when I was eight, leaving my nine-year-old cousin fatherless. That’s when I learned that daddies could die of cancer. A few years later, when I was only fourteen, a close friend of mine was diagnosed with stomach cancer just after our eighth grade graduation. In shock, our small Wisconsin town instantly rallied around him, boosting him up with numerous pancake breakfast fund-raisers and hospital visits. Some of my friends were hopeful, but I could not ignore that feeling of dread deep inside my stomach. After all, I had seen this before. Following two long and side-effect- filled years, my friend died at the age of sixteen. Our entire community attended his funeral, and over the next few years, my other friends and I would go to his grave site regularly to leave flowers. His death taught me that absolutely anyone could die of cancer, at any time. While earning my undergraduate degree at Harvard University, I was introduced to complementary medicine, yoga, and meditation for the first time. These strange practices and ideas made me start to question my previously held beliefs about the mind and body being separate, and I slowly began to practice yoga. Four wonderful years later, my first job after Harvard was to coauthor a book on global warming, and I suddenly found myself sitting behind a computer all day with none of the social interaction I had enjoyed during college. When a friend suggested that I address my isolation by volunteering, the first idea that popped into my head was to help cancer patients, no doubt because of my early experiences with it. I still remember my first day volunteering in the pediatric wing at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. All I did was play Monopoly with some children who were receiving intravenous chemotherapy, but the depth of meaning I felt by helping them forget about their disease for a few hours was truly life-changing. I knew I had found my calling, and after a few more weeks of volunteering, I was already researching graduate school programs. I attended the University of California at Berkeley for my master’s degree in oncology social work, with a specialized focus in counseling cancer patients. While attending graduate school, my interest in complementary medicine deepened, leading me to read many books on the subject and complete an intensive yoga teacher’s training course. I spent my days counseling cancer patients and my evenings studying and practicing yoga. At that time, my husband was earning his degree in Traditional Chinese Medicine (acupuncture, herbs, etc.) and also studying an esoteric form of energy healing, so I was surrounded by examples of complementary medicine. It was during this time that I read Andrew Weil’s book, which changed the course of my life by introducing me to what Weil calls “spontaneous healing” and convincing me to continue toward my Ph.D., so I could study this fascinating topic in depth. From that point on, I have devoted my life to discovering what people do to overcome cancer against all odds. WHAT IS RADICAL REMISSION? In order to understand what Radical Remission is, it is helpful first to think about what is considered “standard” or “non-radical” remission. A doctor expects cancer to go into remission if it is caught early enough and is one of today’s more “treatable” cancers. For example, if a woman is diagnosed with stage 1 breast cancer, she will be expected—statistically speaking—to be cancer-free for at least five years, as long as she completes the recommended medical treatment of surgery, chemotherapy, and/or radiation. However, if that same woman is diagnosed with stage 1 pancreatic cancer, there is only a 14 percent chance that she will be alive in five years, even if she completes all the recommended medical treatment.1 This is because conventional medicine does not currently have treatments for pancreatic cancer that are as effective as those it has for breast cancer. I define Radical Remission as any cancer remission that is statistically unexpected, and those statistics vary depending on the cancer type, stage, and medical treatment received. To be more specific, a Radical Remission occurs whenever: • a person’s cancer goes away without using any conventional medicine; or • a cancer patient tries conventional medicine, but the cancer does not go into remission, so he or she switches to alternative methods of healing, which do lead to a remission; or • a cancer patient uses conventional medicine and alternative healing methods at the same time in order to outlive a statistically dire prognosis (i.e., any cancer with a less than 25 percent chance of five-year survival). Although unexpected remissions are rare, thousands of people have experienced them. I ask all oncologists I meet if they have ever seen a case of Radical Remission in their practice; so far, each one has answered yes. I then ask if they took the time to publish the case, or cases, in an academic journal; so far, each one has answered no. Because of this, we will not know how often Radical Remissions truly happen until we create a systematic way of tracking them. To help accomplish that goal, this book’s website—RadicalRemission.com—allows cancer survivors, doctors, healers, and readers like you to submit quickly and easily your cases of Radical Remission, which can then be counted, analyzed, and tracked by researchers. This database is also freely searchable by the general public, so cancer patients and their loved ones can read how other people with similar diagnoses managed to heal against all odds. ABOUT THIS BOOK When I first began studying Radical Remission, I was surprised to find that two groups of people had been largely ignored in the thousand-plus cases published in medical journals. The first group was the radical survivors themselves. I found it shocking that the vast majority of academic articles did not mention what the patients thought might have led to their remissions. I read article after article by doctors who carefully listed all the biochemical changes the Radical Remission survivors experienced, but none of the authors reported directly asking the survivors why they thought they had healed. I found this very odd, given the fact that the survivors may have done something—even unwittingly—that helped to heal their cancer. Therefore, for my dissertation research, I decided to find and interview twenty people who had experienced Radical Remission and ask them: “Why do you think you healed?” The second ignored group in the research was the alternative healers. Because most Radical Remissions occur, by definition, in the absence of conventional Western medicine, I was surprised no one had studied how non-Western or alternative healers treat cancer. Many of the radical survivors I was hearing about at this time had sought out healers from all corners of the world; therefore, I traveled throughout the globe and interviewed fifty non-Western, alternative healers about their approaches to cancer. I spent ten months tracking down and interviewing alternative cancer healers in the jungles, mountains, and cities of ten different countries, including the United States (Hawaii), China, Japan, New Zealand, Thailand, India, England, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Brazil. It was a life- changing research trip that led me to meet many fascinating healers, and this book summarizes all that they shared with me. Since that initial dissertation research, I have continued to find more cases and have now conducted over a hundred direct interviews and analyzed over a thousand written cases of Radical Remission. After analyzing all these cases carefully and repeatedly using qualitative research methods, I identified more than seventy-five different factors that may hypothetically play a role in Radical Remission, including physical, emotional, and spiritual factors. However, when I tabulated the frequency of each factor, I saw that nine of those seventy-five factors kept coming up again and again in almost every interview. In other words, very few of the people I interviewed mentioned, for example, the seventy-third factor, which is taking shark cartilage supplements, but almost every person mentioned doing the same nine things in order to help heal their cancer. These nine key factors for Radical Remission are: • Radically changing your diet • Taking control of your health • Following your intuition • Using herbs and supplements • Releasing suppressed emotions • Increasing positive emotions • Embracing social support • Deepening your spiritual connection • Having strong reasons for living It is important to note that these are not listed in any kind of ranking order. There is no clear “winner” among these factors. Rather, all nine were mentioned just as frequently in my interviews, even though—as you will see in this book— some people tended to focus more on one factor than the others. Please keep in mind that the majority of the Radical Remission cancer survivors I study did all nine of these factors, at least to some degree, in their efforts to heal their cancer. For the sake of organization, I have arranged this book into nine chapters that describe each of these factors in depth. In each chapter, we will first explore the main points of a factor, including taking a look at the latest scientific research on that topic. Then we will explore a complete Radical Remission healing story that highlights that factor. Finally, each chapter concludes with a simple list of action steps that, if you wish, you can take right now in order to start bringing these key factors for Radical Remission into your life. BEFORE WE BEGIN Before I share these key healing factors with you, I would like to clarify a few things. First, I would like to state clearly that I am not at all opposed to conventional cancer treatment, including surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation. Just as I believe that most people need shoes to run a marathon, yet a select few have found a way to run twenty-six miles barefoot and healthfully, I similarly believe that most people will need conventional medicine to outrun cancer, while a select few have found ways to overcome it using other means. As a cancer researcher, I am simply dedicated to learning more about the latter group’s “training regimen,” in an attempt to find out how they achieved such an odds- defying feat. Second, it is not at all my intention to raise false hope by writing this book. Remember the doctor who did not want his other patients to hear about Radical Remissions? I sympathize with him, because facing a waiting room full of people who have little statistical hope of survival is certainly a daunting task. However, keeping silent about Radical Remission cases has led to something far worse, in my opinion, than false hope: no one is seriously investigating or learning from these cases of remarkable recovery. In my very first research class at UC Berkeley, I learned that it is a researcher’s scientific obligation to examine any anomalous cases that do not fit into his or her hypothesis. After examining those anomalies, a researcher has only two choices: she can either explain to the public why those strange cases do not fit into her hypothetical model or she can come up with a new hypothesis that includes those cases. Either way, there is absolutely no scenario in which it is okay to ignore cases that do not fit into your hypothesis. In addition to it being scientifically irresponsible to ignore flat-out the people who have cured their cancers using unconventional means (especially when our shared and common goal is to find a cure for cancer), I would like to discuss the term “false hope.” Giving false hope means making people hopeful about something that is untrue or false. Radical Remission cases may not be explainable—at the moment—but they are true. These people did cure their cancer in statistically unexpected ways. That is the key difference to understand, so we can get over the fear of raising false hope and begin the process of scientifically examining these cases for potential clues on curing cancer. The nine key factors described in this book are hypotheses for why Radical Remission may occur; they are not yet proven facts. Unfortunately, it will take decades of quantitative, randomized trials before we can say for sure whether or not these nine factors definitively improve your chances of surviving cancer. I did not want to wait decades before sharing these important hypotheses with you. Instead, I wanted to share the results of my qualitative research so we can begin a much-needed discussion about why these cases are being ignored and what they might be able to teach us. The only possibility for raising false hope would be if I were to tell you that you will absolutely cure your cancer if you follow these nine factors. I am not saying that. I am simply saying that, based on my research, these are the nine most common hypotheses for why Radical Remission may occur. Now that I have made it clear that it is not my intention to raise false hope, let me tell you what I do hope for. First, it is my sincerest hope that other researchers will begin testing these hypotheses for Radical Remission as soon as possible. I also hope that cancer patients and their loved ones will be inspired by this book of true healing stories, just as I was when I discovered my first case of Radical Remission—that they will be comforted by the fact that some people really do recover from cancer against all odds. In addition, I hope this book will motivate people to continue searching for additional ways to optimize their health, whether they are looking to prevent cancer, are in the midst of receiving conventional cancer treatment, or are looking for other options because that treatment has done all it can. Most important, though, I hope this book will be the start of a much-needed discussion about Radical Remissions, so we can stop ignoring them and start learning from them. WHEN IT COMES to cases of Radical Remission, we may not yet be able to understand why these people healed from cancer or why their techniques worked for them but do not always work for others. However, I firmly believe that if we put intense effort into studying these cases—instead of just ignoring them because we cannot explain them—then two possible outcomes will occur: at the very least, we will learn something about the body’s ability to heal itself, and at the very most, we will find a cure for cancer. Neither of these outcomes can occur, however, if we continue to ignore cases of Radical Remission. After all, where would we be if Alexander Fleming had ignored the mold in that one petri dish? As history has shown us, studying anomalies is not an unproductive use of time. On the contrary, studying anomalies has historically led to tremendous breakthroughs—and that’s where real hope lies. CHAPTER 1 RADICALLY CHANGING YOUR DIET Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food. —HIPPOCRATES Hippocrates, the Greek physician who is heralded as the founder of modern medicine, strongly believed that food has the power to adjust, rebalance, and heal the body. Imagine, then, his disappointment if he were to find out that today’s M.D.’s receive a total of only one week of nutrition education during their four years at medical school.1 Even at my own recent physical exam, I had to explain to the doctor that, as a vegetarian, I receive plenty of calcium from eating leafy greens (her only suggestion was milk) and plenty of iron from eating beans and seaweed (her only suggestion was red meat). In general, it is not that doctors disbelieve in the healing power of food, but rather that they simply never learned about it. If doctors were to study nutrition in greater depth, they would find that we are indeed what we eat, because the cells of our food get broken down and transformed into the cells of our bodies. In addition, what we eat and drink directly affects our vessels and tissues, making them more or less inflamed depending on what we put into our bodies. To understand this concept, imagine giving a cup of coffee to a five-year-old. After about ten minutes, you would have no doubt that what we eat and drink directly affects our health. Our health—and indeed our entire lives—can be seen as the sum of all our moment-to-moment decisions. This includes how we choose to eat and drink, think and feel, act and react, and move and rest on any given day. What makes food so powerful is that it is a very conscious decision. Will I choose a sugary