During this week, October 3-7 2022, there is a repeat free airing of the Radical Remission Docuseries https://www.discover.hayhouse.com/radicalremission/, created by researcher and author, Kelly Turner, PhD.
I commented daily on each episode as it was launched back in March 2020 in order to elaborate on my personal experience and hard-won convictions regarding cancer and cancer treatment and they are all still available here on my blog, Reflections. All of the episodes will be available for the duration so perhaps my commentary will give you a sense of which you want to dip into. I am sure that after this timeframe the documentary will be available through Hay House in other forms.
One of the reasons for writing my play, Breastless, was to share the perspective that healing from cancer takes many forms. Even the writing of it played an important role in my healing of breast cancer.
I use story to reflect on these matters and to encourage others to ask themselves what they would do, what they believe and how they might help others. Kelly Turner uses her 15yrs of research into hundreds of cases of remission from life-threatening disease.
This documentary leads us through the 10 elements that people who put themselves into remission had in common. It includes interviews with some ordinary people doing extraordinary things. Out of the ordinary, because their stories do not fit into our modern-day assumption that the scientific Western medical model has all the answers. These people all heal themselves as they embrace a wide range of approaches, including mainstream and “alternative” methods.
For many years there has been a move amongst practitioners to avoid having their work described as “alternative” and instead use the word “complementary”, but I would even like to call into question that term too. To complement means to use Western medicine as the mainstay of treatment and to add into it other modalities to enhance it. What would happen if instead we started to view Western medicine, with all its brilliance and applications, as a complement to our own internal healing abilities; as just one of a broad spectrum of choices with which we can boost our own healing potential?
I would like to help shift our bias away from solely relying on Western Medicine, and instead see each person getting encouragement to first look within themselves for clues to solutions. Then, from that empowered place, seeking professionals whose perspective and approach feel in alignment with the person’s desires and needs. This would constitute taking responsibility for our own health and healing, as opposed to relying solely on an expert to tell us what we need based on the parameters of their specific training.
I am not wanting to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but equally I would like an end to obscuring the issue with words like “complementary” to appease the medical gods of the past 200 years. It is time for a revolution; turning things around. It is time for some evolution in our thinking and actions. And it is time for the resolution of us individuals who experience health differently to speak up and be counted.
I am grateful to Dr Turner for doing her part.
SECOND EPISODE: Radically Changing Your Diet
“The Check Engine light was on and I just kept putting tape over it and kept going.”. Alison Gannett was soon to be diagnosed with a fast growing brain tumour which Western medicine had no cure for and statistics maintained would kill her within 6.8 months.
What a brilliant analogy. How many of us are carrying on regardless, thinking the headache, the gut pain, that heart murmur, those bladder infections and slow memory loss is normal and “just a sign of ageing”. This particular woman was a top athlete, champion skier, lived on a farm where they grew and ate all their own organic food. Self-sufficient “except coffee, chocolate and salt”. Surely she’s the last person who should be getting cancer?
But according to Dr Nasha Winters ND, her Naturopathic Oncologist, she was doing what was “right”, but it wasn’t right for her physiology.
What she discovered was that she was eating the wrong foods for her system. She was a self-confessed “carboholic” and all the energy drinks and energy bars she had used to fuel her sports career lifestyle had put her system under enormous strain. “All of it took an immense toll on my life”.
When I got my own cancer diagnosis I was inundated with well-meaning advice on what to eat, what to avoid, how to do juicing because it had saved loved-ones. None of it felt right to me, but I couldn’t say why. Then I met Dr Jody, Doctor of Chinese Medicine, and she would tell me that MY body and energy didn’t need to be taxed by raw food digestion, that I needed to eat roasted root vegetables, warming broths, not too much fruit or salads that my body would just have to work hard to digest. When I heard that I, and my gut, knew it to be true. I can’t tell you how.
As Christiane Northrup MD says part way through this episode: “When you get into the area of diet, now you’re into religion! Every diet is healthy for some people. There is no one right diet for everybody.”
And researcher, Kelly Turner, found that such a disappointment. “I so wish there would have been one diet that all of these radical remission survivors were on. It would have made my research a lot easier. But they’re all on different diets!”
One thing they all have in common though is more vegetables. (No surprise to any of us!)
Alison Gannett is now 6.5 YEARS since diagnosis and all her symptoms have reversed. “I don’t think I was ever healthy before and now I am. That is the gift that is cancer. It has taught me so much.”
Please don’t wait for a chronic disease process to wake you up to eating well. Consider one small change to get you started and you might find you feel so much better that you’ll continue and enjoy it!
Good Luck