Vanishing Cancer - Spontaneous Remission Syndrome

I was hoping for this to happen to Max but in hindsight, I made so many mistakes for years which in turn diminished the probability of "Spontaneous Remission".  Everything I do every day for Neo, Fluffy, and Garph is just to improve that probability and in turn, improving the probability of reducing their sufferings during their old age. 

Once again, this is a quintessential characteristic of complex systems; something we don't understand, and after reaching a point of non-equilibrium, spontaneous order (in this case different order) kicks in. 

Dr. Jeffrey Rediger has a gem of a piece on this topic: 

Why does it happen? The standard response in medicine is that we have no idea. And further, we have little interest in finding out. Spontaneous remission is a random stroke of luck — some would say “a miracle.” But overall these cases are considered too random, too rare, to offer us anything of scientific or medical value. We dismiss them as flukes and outliers; we don’t include them in our research. And we certainly don’t talk about them with patients. We don’t want to give people “false hope.”

And yet when I asked my audience at the conference — a roomful of physicians from all over the country — how many of them had ever seen a spontaneous remission in their career, almost every hand went up. I then asked how many of them had written up the incident for the medical literature or otherwise reported it. The hands dropped.

Spontaneous remission isn’t as rare as we thought — we just aren’t talking about it. Nor, I believe, is it random. And the hope it offers is anything but “false.”

I began studying spontaneous remission almost two decades ago at the urging of a friend who told me she was seeing real recoveries at a spiritual healing center. I brushed it off, assuming that any supposed “miracle” healing could be explained in any number of ways — misdiagnosis, wishful thinking, a disease that was going to resolve anyway. But more reports flowed my way, cases with hard evidence of diagnosis and recovery that I could not dismiss. Like the story of Mirae Bunnell.

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Survivors of incurable diseases made radical changes to their lives. They changed the way they ate, focusing on high-nutrient diets free of sugar and processed foods. They leaned into daily habits and exercise routines that made them feel good. They ditched careers or relationships that were limiting or toxic. They addressed their stress response, ending the damaging cycle of chronic fight-or-flight that keeps our bodies awash in corrosive stress hormones. When faced with a terminal diagnosis — an “end date” — they asked themselves the question: what do I want to do with the time I have left? And then they did it. Finally, they examined their own deep-seated beliefs about who they were — a process I can only describe as “healing your identity.”

What does that mean — to heal your identity?

It means that you need to see and focus on what is right and good about you. You need to actively eliminate false, negative beliefs about yourself that leave you questioning your value. One of the most common things that people have said to me over the years is that it took an illness for them to wake up and realize that they needed to stop taking care of others or responding to the perceived expectations of others instead of also doing what it takes to create life and well-being within them.

What makes you come alive? What gives you a life worth living? As my friend Gabor Mate, physician and trauma expert, says: If you don’t know how to say no, your body will eventually say no for you. It might feel selfish at first, but it’s not. If you make the hard choices to create a life that puts a light in your eyes and creates authentic well-being within you, you will absolutely change your relationship with others and your relationship with yourself. When that occurs, it is sometimes astonishing what becomes possible in a mind and body.

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Of course, there is still much we don’t know about spontaneous remission. But what we don’t know shouldn’t hold us back from acting on what we do know.

Mirae Bunnell sends a thank-you note to her doctors every year on Thanksgiving — the anniversary of the day that the pathology report came back telling them she was cancer-free. Her doctors are delighted to receive her cards. They pin them up on the office wall, saying, “We never get thank you notes!”

When Mirae repeated this at a family gathering, her brother-in-law pointed something out. “That’s because nobody lives,” he said.

But Mirae did. And so have many others who are coming forward now to tell their stories. If we want to open up new avenues to health and healing, it’s imperative that we listen.

I wish... Max's story was very similar to Mirae's story. But yet, I am so grateful that I got more time with him than it seemed when he was first diagnosed. 

It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it.

― Seneca, On the Shortness of Life