Do You Have Your Own Cure For Cancer?

The spontaneous remission or cure for cancer mentioned above became an informative example only because the woman to whom it happened was under a doctor's care, making it a documented example. But what about people whose symptoms never became ominous enough to send them to a doctor?

I got a lucky break with some insight on this question at the most unlikely time. On vacation in the Swiss Alps, my wife and I found ourselves in the company of four biologists. One was involved in direct human research while the others were more involved with lab work and teaching.

On a quiet afternoon after a morning's hike high up in the Alps, I started a conversation by telling my new friend that I believed there were many more spontaneous remissions than ever get recorded. Her answer was more direct and eye-opening than I expected.

"We know there are," she said, "because we find cancers that have metastasized, but the original cancer is gone."

Metastatic cancers have markers that tell researches whether they were born independently or were an aftereffect of a primary cancer. What my friend and her colleagues found is that the primary cancers had somehow healed themselves and were no longer in the patient's body. And they had never been detected as the secondary cancers were.

What makes spontaneous healing now seem so much more common is that, when cancers do not metastasize, we may not know anything about them. We have cancer and heal it without ever being aware. How often, we don't know, but the instance is certainly higher than the conventional estimate of 1 in 400.

Which brings us back to the fascinating question of what happens with spontaneous healing? Obviously, we don't know that either, but there are interesting candidates.

A prime candidate for a cure for cancer may be an as yet unidentified system that reacts to cancers with the same dedication our immune systems show in taking on other illnesses. 

While this may seem a little farfetched, that can be explained by how little we know about the human microbiome, the mass of bacterial, human and other cells that make up what we like to call you and me. The fifty trillion cells that make up a human being (over 90% being nonhuman, by the way) do things and participate in making us whole in ways we are only beginning to discover.

We have long known that bacteria play key roles in digestion and in creating our immune systems, but we're only beginning to see how some actually regulate and control the actions of others, maybe to prevent infections before any immune response in necessary. The possibilities are endless.

The short version of how immune systems work is that they detect an invader, usually a virus or a bacteria, and mount a response to limit and eventually kill or drive it away. Often, when we see this powerful response, as in the case of the common cold, as an illness itself while it's really a highly effective cure swinging into action.

Is it possible a similar response to cancers is ready to mount when cells go awry? Of course, it's possible. But maybe their actions are not as overt as a runny nose or a cough. If the curative system response to cancer doesn't came with observable effects, we'd probably never go out looking for it. The result, routine spontaneous remissions that go unnoticed. 

Unfortunately, a large number of New Age readers have learned about epigenetics from would-be scientific rock star, Bruce Lipton. While he gives readers a basic explanation of epigenetics, he saturates it in self-serving rationales about his own role and goes even further into loopy discussions of psychology for which he is ill-equipped to take part.

Put simply, epigenetics is a set of actions "above genetics," or outside the code installed in all our cells. These actions alter or influence how DNA carries out its business of replicating and renewing cells. 

What Lipton proposes is that conscious or unconscious intention can cause this process to result in healing and prevention of many diseases, including cancer. Researchers are eagerly pursuing that possibility, with far more scientific rigor than Lipton troubles himself with. It's one of the newest areas of scientific research and also one of its most promising. 

Until confirmed with results that can be documented, no one can say whether epigenetics is the unidentified operation that makes visualizing health effective for some, and for me, we won't have an acceptable answer until we also know why it doesn't work for others.

Even so, we have a promising new candidate for your own personal cure for cancer.  

Have You Discovered A Cure For Cancer?
A related discussion about a cure for cancer as spontaneous healing or remission.