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.
EPISODE NINE: Following your Intuition
What is intuition anyway?
Cynthia Li MD admits to having been very reluctant to entertain intuition as a factor in her healing from Hashimoto’s thyroiditis. She was highly skeptical of it, but that got broken open by her disease;
“Intuition was not something that I had sought out to develop. I didn’t even know it was something you could develop. But desperation opens your mind like nothing else.”
Nancy Battilega, on the other hand, had complete faith in her abilities. She was diagnosed with breast cancer and scheduled for a mastectomy, but she pleaded with her surgeon to give her 6 months to try alternatives, upon which she was told “Oh, there are no alternatives”. But she remained undaunted. She embraced Healing Touch and chose to follow the various nudges in her life.
Dr Christina Northrup maintains that though intuition is called the sixth sense, it really should be called the first sense. “We are born with it. It is a sense of knowing something without having an intellectual reason to know it. It is just knowing something as it is.”
Nancy talks of how the number 13 kept appearing in her dreams and after the six months were up she stipulated she was going to leave it for a full 13 months and have a scan after that.
Much to her surgeon’s surprise, she was given completely cancer free!
Here is her explanation of how it happened. “Our cells and our bodies speak to us. If we are open to that, and I think energy work helps you to be open to that, then you’re listening and paying attention to what your body needs. We are so wondrously made that if we just give ourselves the support that we need, then we can heal from anything.”
She was seeing the cancer as a messenger that she need to transform something in her life.
But too often we simply don’t trust ourselves. We are too busy trying to be who we think we should be, not embracing who we truly are but who we desperately want to be to fit in or to get approval or a myriad of other reasons.
Trusting your intuition does not simply require spiritual faith. If you require scientific proof, there is abundant research in this field.
Researcher and author, Dawson Church, describes research into heart rate variability and the heart/brain response.” These studies found that the heart responds to a highly emotive visual image a nanosecond before the brain responds. “Now logically the brain should respond first through the eyes, then through the optic nerve, then through the visual cortex and that should have then informed the heart and the rest of the body. They found to their amazement that the heart responded first. So it looks like the heart knows before the brain knows. So intuitively our gut feelings, our body sensations, are giving us information that is far beyond the capacity of our logical mind to explain.”
Christiane Northrup also refers to scientific research that has found high numbers of neurotransmitters in our gut; an explanation for what we call “gut instincts”.
Cynthia Li ends by saying; “As a doctor I had really been trained how to rule things out and then you’re still stuck with not knowing. Then I thought, if I could really develop my intuition to start ruling things in, start honing my focus, that would be useful tool.” And she began practising the moving meditation, Qi Gong, and seeking the help of a medical intuitive. Her method for finding solutions to her many medical issues shifted from being transactional; A or B or C, to “a place of transformation. I now use science just as much as I use intuition and it has really changed my practice of medicine as well. I am taking what I have learned and passing it on to my patients.”
The best doctoring there is,
Emma