To ask if you believe radical remission is possible?

[Edenspirits73]

I’ve just read this book https://www.amazon.co.uk/Radical-Remission-Surviving-Cancer-Against/dp/0062268740

It’s written by an American researcher, lecturer and oncologist and charts her experiences of gathering cases of radical remission from all over the world. It’s presented in quite a scientific way & she charts the 9 things that all the people who went into radical remission & had in common. It’s fascinating too.

Ironically it was recommended to me when my dad was dying of bowel cancer - end stage for him.

It’s a real book of hope (but not false hope) as it charts a largely unreported area of health - and an idea that people survive and thrive even end stage 4 cancer.

So am I being unreasonable to believe? Obviously these are real case studies too as she felt it was a totally unreported area of medicine but it feels like believing that you can heal from cancer is not a mainstream belief at all - it’s almost contraversial and held up as false hope I think.

Intererested in thoughts!

I remember when my son was on life support after being hit by a car in 2022 and my mother in law and sister in law kept reminding each other "oh don't forget to text Jane and tell her to pray" and "oh we must text so and so and get them to pray" lol I get that it can bring comfort in what was a horrific time for all of us but I just wanted to tell them to bloody grow up lol anyway my son died the next day and the bitch in me wanted to say "oh that bloody Jesus wasn't listening was he or he was listening and decided not to save my son" but I didn't because I would have got back "oh it's gods will" lol gods will is pretty much the same thing as god not existing then isn't it lol. At least god answered their prayers and got my niece into the school she wanted to go to so it's not all bad 🤨 I'm sorry but I find it ridiculous that full grown adults believe in something that there is absolutely no evidence for

Oh come on OP
In big letters in the middle of the book are the words 'surviving cancer'

Everything about it is intended to draw the eye to those two words. It doesn't matter that there are other words around them. Its designed to make people think 'aha a book about how to survive cancer'.

As others have said if she really thinks this needs more research - why not do that research? Properly, a proper peer reviewed study.

@Edenspirits73 there has been a gentleman on the news in the last few days. He had cancer and was given just two weeks to live. He didn’t die, and then there was no evidence of said cancer. However, he still isn’t feeling very well and is very upset about the whole thing, so not so great.

People are 'screaming' at you because you've posted something without bothering to dig a little into what it is you're promoting. You claimed the author was an oncologist, and she's not.

I watched my brother die in January from cancer. He didn't die because he had 'bad feelings'. It was metastatic bowel cancer.

You've hit a nerve for people here. This author is a charlatan making money from people who are desperate. By suggesting people read the book you're lending some kind of legitimacy to the lies she's spreading.

I doubt anyone doing serious and credible research into this field and publishing it in a respected peer-reviewed academic journal would be professionally discredited.

What she has done is collect a few stories from people who have experienced radical remission and publish them together in a book. Claiming it has any more credibility than that is misleading.

Bollocks! This book is all about making money

@Edenspirits73

• 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”
^^^

Well it certainly can't hurt to do there things.

When my dad was dying of prostate cancer I got him this cancer fighting tea-it brought his PSA down, well something did anyway-which was the only time that happened (when he wasn't on any treatment) and was unexpected. Could've been total coincidence but I will be trying it if I ever get cancer. Unfortunately I couldn't force him to keep drinking it and he only tried it a few times so we never got to find out whether it would've helped any more.

Hi @Edenspirits73

I must confess, I haven't read this book, but I will do with interest, so thank you for sharing.

I've read/listened to quite a bit on reversing health with diet and lifestyle (not spontaneous remission though) including Chris Wark, Dr Brooke Goldner, and Gerson, and Dr Krista Funk (an oncologist), and the China Study.

I don't think any of it is patient blaming, I think it's empowering. Even if it's too late for some, it gives us the chance to do everything we can - educate ourselves on foods that promote cancer and foods that can apparently cause cancer cells to commit suicide. Our thoughts, how we deal with stress etc are so important. I understand not wanting to give people false hope but I think if we are made aware of this, then it at least gives people a chance to do as much as they possibly can be doing, if they wish to. If it helps people cope better then surely that's good? And if it can prevent or delay illness, then surely that's good too? Surely, prevention is better than cure?

I get the resistance to the word "fight". I think it can make someone feel if only they'd fought harder ... Another way of looking at it is that our bodies are fighting for us every day - they are trying really hard to keep us alive. So when people talk about fighting an illness, it's like we are wanting to fight our poor bodies who are just doing their best for us.

I prefer the word helping. It's just adopting things that may help our bodies do the job that they are trying to do - help us survive. It's much kinder xxx

I 100% believe in this. I studied medical anthropology and so many things are possible that most people think are absolutely impossible, if we just learn to understand our minds and bodies and the connection between them and how they work. We can heal our bodies and we can thrive.

Good grief

What?

Your evidence for this is?

What a nasty viewpoint. You're saying she brought it on herself because of her personality???

This woman is an actor and screenwriter on the side...

She's done no clinical research, nothing peer reviewed and basically self published 2 books. I wouldn't be believing anything she says, she's peddling false hope to a lot of desperate people and making money off it.

😆

Keeping yourself as healthy as possible alongside conventional medicine can't hurt but be realistic, drs are pretty experienced at prognosis. It's easy to prove your case if you're cherry picking situations that align with your thinking. We are all individuals and the very nature of cancer means it is a very individual experience. More promising is the new cancer vaccines currently in trials, listened to a podcast this week

As someone who had cancer at 38 (I have Chek2 gene mutation) and gone through 3 major surgeries, chemo and radiation. I count myself lucky to still be here. I know people who are no longer here, and they did everything they could to be healthy. I'm extremely cynical about books like this. I've had people tell me I wouldn't get cancer if I was healthy. I've told them in no certain terms to feck off as I was living a healthier lifestyle than they were.

This all ties in to something called German New medicine, about a doctor in Germany who started noticing cancer beginning a couple of years after some kind of trauma. He even went as far as to link the type of cancer with the type of trauma. There’s enough anecdotal evidence out there to suggest trauma therapy should be part of cancer treatment.

Just to say that I read a book written by a disciple of German New Medicine without knowing the origins. The originator of the approach, Dr Hamer, was charged with malpractice & had his medical licence revoked in the 1980’s because of his dangerous approach. He diagnosed a 6 year old girl with having ‘conflicts’ rather than cancer & she very nearly died but after a court ordered intervention she went on to make a full recovery after having conventional medical treatment. The roots of German New Medicine are also antisemitic as Dr Hamer believed that mainstream cancer medicine was a Jewish conspiracy to decimate non Jews. Basically the whole approach is bonkers!

Surely, apart from the questionable nature of producing coaching scheme enabling people to coach others on radical remission, the issue here is the totally ineffectual statistical analysis.

Let's look at the list of things:

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

So what she is saying is that in the people she interviewed all of whom had spontaneous remission these were the most common things.

But if you wanted to do a proper analysis you would analyse people who also hadn't had spontaneous remission. So you would end up with 4 groups:

1. Spontaneous remission, traditional medicine + other stuff
2. Spontaneous remission, no traditional medicine + other stuff
3. No spontaneous remission, traditional medicine + other stuff
4. No spontaneous remission , no traditional medicine + other stuff

Then you would need to see what the "other stuff" was because let's say people are equally likely to have "changed their diet" (though actually they would need to have changed their diet in the same ways as frankly that could mean basically anything) in the various groups, that wouldn't show any correlation with spontaneous remission. Same for "deepening their faith".

So, to me, this feels disingenuous because if you haven't examined the counterpart - i.e. the people who have died or similar, then your analysis has essentially no scientific or statistical basis.

I do believe spontaneous remission can happen. One of the most interesting areas of scientific research in relation to cancer is how we can treat cancer with our own immune system. Your cells are constantly experiencing DNA lesions, and they fix the absolute vast majority of them. Then in those that aren't fixed, the vast majority of cells correctly initiate apoptosis (cell killing themselves because they can tell things have gone wrong). Then in those that don't do THAT the vast majority are spotted by your immune system and killed off by that instead.

So immunotherapy, where we use treatments to enable your own immune system to recognise and kill off cancer cells feels like the most exciting future area of cancer research to me.

www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-cancer/treatment/immunotherapy

My assumption is that where spontaneous remission does occur it has occurred either due to initial misdiagnosis or because your immune system has, probably by chance, become able to recognise the cancer as a foreign body and has therefore attacked and killed it. Doesn't mean that deepening your faith or consuming some herbs will have anything to do with it.

I am very sorry for your beloved son’s death, @Ihopeithinkiknow

Lost my dm in similar circumstances when she was in her forties
Her diet was awful.
Smoked a bit.
Slightly overweight
Drunk slightly more than was healthy
Burnt the candle both ends.
Lack of regular exercise.
We all know stress causes heart attacks and stomach ulcers- there is definitely a connection between illness and emotions.
I'd rather like to think I had some 'type' of control , responsibility to my health, than it be random.
I'd never 'blame' anyone for personally having an illness- but from where I'm sitting there is a connection- stress is not an easy thing to deal with or switch off.

Yep

That's amazing
Lovely post
And just goes to show how stress effects you
The body is an amazing piece of machinery
When we lost mum these radical ideas were never discussed- as it was very taboo - and judging by reactions on here still fairly is.
Therapy was seen as admitting you were 'mental'- the stigma is slowly fading now.
This shit actually works - and NO-ONE is blaming people for dying.
But like in the introduction in the book - posted here - penicillin was accidentally discovered- so isn't it worth studying these ideas?
I mean none of the 9 suggestions are going to make you feel worse ?

I then read the couple of pages of chapter 1 on 'radically change your diet' and she is just one of the ten a penny 'give up sugar' charlatans making the lives of cancer patients miserable.

I've seen far too many patients who should be eating protein, fat and carbs who are emaciated because they have decided to eat a diet of organic vegetables instead.

This sort of advice is cruel.

^^^^^^

That doesn't make sense

Sugar is cakes, marzipan, biscuits, alcohol, sugar in coffee/tea/cola

Which i avoid Like the plague

Protein - meat / fish / eggs

Fat - butter

Carbs - Rice / potatoes

All of which I eat copious amount.

I'm slim though and it is more difficult to keep my weight up so do eat crips