RespiteMatch.com Health Blog

ORLANDO, Fla. (Ivanhoe Broadcast News) — Now, you see it … Now, you don’t. For centuries, so-called “medical miracles” have fascinated the greatest minds in medicine. Magicians can make objects disappear, but can our bodies make tumors go away?

Alice Epstein says hers did. Epstein’s doctor said she had only a couple of months to live after her kidney cancer spread to both lungs. “By the time the tests came back, there was really no hope,” she says.

Epstein had surgery to remove the tumor in her kidney but didn’t have any treatment for the other lesions. She says they just disappeared! Her doctor gave back her X-rays and admitted he didn’t know why or how it happened … That was 20 years ago.

“Now, there will be people who won’t believe the sort of thing I’m saying, but we believed in the psychological approach. But it was more than psychology. I meditated twice a day. I calmed myself down. I really became a different person,” Epstein says.

But can cancer just go away without treatment? Researcher Caryle Hirshberg, M.S., of the Institute of Noetic Sciences in Petaluma, Calif., says yes. And it even has a clinical name — spontaneous remission.

Hirshberg has studied the phenomenon for 25 years and compiled the world’s largest database of reported cases from 800 journals. “Cancer can bypass the body’s surveillance system,” she tells Ivanhoe. “It tricks the system.”

Some patients develop a fever and an infection right before spontaneous remission. Doctors believe this triggers a powerful immune response that also destroys tumors.

More research on the subject could help doctors find cures to different diseases. “We look at people when they’re sick, and we try to make them better, but we don’t look at the group of people that get better and figure out why,” Hirshberg says. Researchers used to believe these remissions occurred in about one in every 100,000 cases, but her research shows they may be much more common, about 10-fold.

Stephen Barrett, M.D., a psychiatrist with QuackWatch.org, admits spontaneous remissions do happen, but says they are still rare. “Most people who recover from cancer do so as a result of standard medical treatment,” he tells Ivanhoe.

Epstein says her recovery was the real deal, and she’s written a book about her experience. And she says that “miracle” is why she’s here today.

This article was reported by Ivanhoe.com, who offers Medical Alerts by e-mail every day of the week. To subscribe, go to: http://www.ivanhoe.com/newsalert/.

If you would like more information, please contact:

Caryle Hirshberg, M.S.
Institute of Noetic Sciences
Petaluma, CA
caryle1946@sbcglobal.net

Stephen Barrett, M.D.
http://www.quackwatch.org