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Spontaneous Remission - do we know enough to encourage it in other cases?

By Harriet Denz Penhey

Republish: EasyPublish™ Published: 25Aug2009 Word count: 678 Viewed: 268 time(s) Get Free Content For Your Site

Spontaneous remission and the placebo effect are the often used explanations to explain medically unexpected recovery. However those who wish to explain away such totally unlikely recoveries as spontaneous remission completely miss the point. If just one person lives a good quality of life despite a terminal diagnosis then we should be learning from those people, not sticking another label on them as a pretend way of explaining what happened.

Walter, a life-long 40 cigarettes a day smoker and factory worker, had lung cancer with multiple lymphatic secondaries and was expected to live only a few weeks when he was diagnosed. Two years later to the total amazement of his oncologist and other medical carers he had a good quality of life; his lungs were clear and he had only one quarter inch metastasis to be seen - despite the fact that he was continuing to smoke.

June had bone cancer at 21, lung secondaries off and on for twenty years from 28 to 48 years and then two decades of good health.

Bill, an outback farmer, had cancer of the colon with liver secondaries and lived a further 20 years before he died of heart failure at the age of 80.

The definition of spontaneous remission in Wikipedia is "an unexpected improvement or cure from disease which is usually taking a different course."

Medicine largely states that the cause or mechanisms for remission are unknown although hormonal changes and, or an improved immune response might play a part. The researchers are exploring more and more minute cellular and intracellular interactions in the hope of understanding what is going on.

However an alternative, and much more accessible approach for the people who are ill and their carers is the more behavioral approaches of other researchers. These researchers explore what a person who is ill (or who wants to stay well) can do which might help over and above what medicine can offer in the way of drugs.

Some researchers have done studies which have looked at resolving personal problems and issues and discovered that such resolution does improve the immune system. Others have looked at the impact of social support and found that certain types of social support helps to increase longevity.

Others again have considered health from a more holistic perspective and wondered about the totality of components. One study published in the March 2008 Qualitative Health Research journal was one of just a small handful of studies which have attempted to identify just what a group of survivors all had in common.

Survivors had a huge amount in common and the closer they were to the cumulative ideal the fewer medical problems they had down the track. These were people who were intensely connected to life through relationships and who worked at improving these relationships while they were ill.

The first and most important relationship was their connection to what the survivors agreed was their "experiential inner wisdom". Some of them called this God. Others denied it had anything to do with religion because this was "real", not like their experience of the church. This wasn't to do with reading the bible or church attendance. Neither was this "psychological" - the psychological relationship with themselves was different and extra. Experiential inner wisdom was a way of knowing from within the depth of their being

The second most important relationship was their connection to the land and nature. Indigenous peoples around the world have always known this. The other three relationships were with their psychological self, with their families and with their social settings.

All survivors had very strong similarities as to what was important and how they lived their lives. Regardless of gender, age, social and educational background they all showed these characteristic ways of living during the time they had left - and the time for most of them stretched for decades. Exploring these characteristics in depth is an ongoing work for science, and also for every one of us who wants to live an excellent quality of life until we are ready to go at the end of a long and satisfying life.

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