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Editor, The Journal of Integrative Medicine
Formerly, Associate Professor of Pathology (adj.), College of Physicians
and Surgeons of Columbia University, NY
Formerly, President of Staff and Chief Pathologist, Holy Name Hospital, Teaneck, NJ
Fellow, Royal College of Surgeons of England - Diplomate,
American Board of Anatomic and Clinical Pathology
Diplomate, American Boards of Environmental Medicine
Past President Capital University of Integrative Medicine

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From the book: RDA: Rats, Drugs and Assumptions

SPONTANEOUS REMISSION OF CANCER

 In medical terminology, spontaneous remission of cancer refers to exceptional and unexplained partial or complete disappearance of cancer without medical intervention. This phenomenon fascinates me for five reasons:

First, Nature admits to no exceptions. What we consider exceptions in biology are part of the natural order of things. Healing, I write earlier is as integral to life as is injury. There is nothing exceptional about a cancer cell reverting back to a "normal" noncancerous behavior. None of us would have been alive if it didn't occur.

Second, spontaneous remission of cancer is Nature's expression of her willingness to yield its secrets of cancer healing—of how a cancer cell can change its EM dynamics back to a state of health. The notion of spontaneous remission as an happening without cause is frivolous—the cause is not hard to know if we turn from a disease model of thinking to a serious study of the EM basis of health—dis-ease—disease dynamics.
 
Third, spontaneous remission of cancer offers a solid base of hope—both for the patient who suffers from cancer and for his physician. It is not an uncommon occurrence. Even if it happened only once, it still firmly establishes the possibility.
  
Fourth, spontaneous remission of cancer opens the door to all nondrug, restorative therapies that are known to facilitate the healing response in the human body.
  
Fifth, on the negative side, few things make mainstream physicians in the cancer community so uncomfortable as the subject of spontaneous remissions of cancers. They consider it an annoying distraction from their daily business of pouring drugs into patients who suffer from cancer.
 
In this context, it is interesting to note that the National Cancer Institute held a conference on the subject of spontaneous remission at Johns Hopkins Medical School in 1974. The NCI didn't think the subject was serious enough to require any follow-up conferences—probably because it found no drugs that could facilitate spontaneous healing. In 1976, the Institute published a monograph covering the proceedings of that conference. That monograph is out of print—why throw good money after the bad!
 
How rare are spontaneous remissions when defined as tumor regression without chemotherapy? The answer depends on who you ask. Physicians who specialize in nondrug, natural cancer therapies will cite a very large number of cases to support their view that cancer remission without chemotherapy or radiotherapy is not uncommon. Most oncologists will dismiss such claims as blatant lies.
 
Spontaneous Remission: An Annotated Bibliography published by the Institute of Noetic Sciences, Sausalito, CA (1993), lists 1,051 case reports published in peer-reviewed medical literature. What percentage of the actual cases does this number represent? It's anybody's guess. Spontaneous remission is not at all an uncommon event in the experience of pathologists, and I know that it is a rare pathologist who prepares a formal report for publication of such cases. That volume includes a graph showing a steep rise in the frequency of medical reports of spontaneous remissions during the last four decades. Notwithstanding, this number represents a very small percentage of the true number.
 
Patients whose advanced cancers spontaneously regress challenge the deepest beliefs of most oncologists and radiotherapists, though they will probably vehemently contest this statement. Usually they dismiss this subject as insignificant and irrelevant to their work, and mutter something about the immune system. On occasions, some of them find this idea useful. Many patients refuse chemotherapy recommended by oncologists, and later the patients return months or years to tell them of their success with nondrug therapies. When confronted with that awkward situation, the idea of spontaneous remission comes handy—it explains away case histories that do not fit into their chemotherapy model.
 
What is spontaneous remission of cancer? It is a war against cancer that the body's own EM dynamics, antioxidant defenses and DNA repair enzyme systems win—it's that simple! The subject of spontaneous remission is of great interest to me and my colleagues in empirical medicine, because it gives us clues to what therapies we might choose to facilitate the physiologic healing processes that normally control cancer—disallow deviant behavior of cancer cells and coax the errant cells back to a healthful mode. This is the core philosophic principle of empirical medicine when it offers its nondrug therapies for the management of cancer.

Everyone knows or has heard of people who were expected to die of cancer in several months or a few years but who defied the medical prognosis and underwent spontaneous remissions. I know of hundreds of patients who had limited cancers that could be surgically removed, and so had little reason to die of the tumor. Yet, they succumbed quickly. I also know of many patients who lived for decades with cancers that had been originally pronounced terminal. What can one make of such cases?