Radical Remission - when someone heals against all odds without the help of conventional medicine or when conventional medicine has failed.
Is that really possible?
You bet!
Join me as I take TWO episodes to talk with Dr. Kelly Turner, PhD about her research with radical remission survivors around the globe. Dr. Turner has spent years studying survivors of typically fatal diseases and how they were able to overcome the odds and heal themselves. Her work is nothing short of fascinating and packed full of Radical Hope!
Connect with Dr. Kelly Turner on her Radical Remission website:
https://radicalremission.com/
Suggested Resources:
Your donations power our podcast's mission to support cancer patients with hope, insights, and resources. Every contribution fuels our ability to uplift and empower. Join us in making a lasting impact. Donate now! 🌟
Radical Remission - when someone heals against all odds without the help of conventional medicine or when conventional medicine has failed.
Is that really possible?
You bet!
Join me as I take TWO episodes to talk with Dr. Kelly Turner, PhD about her research with radical remission survivors around the globe. Dr. Turner has spent years studying survivors of typically fatal diseases and how they were able to overcome the odds and heal themselves. Her work is nothing short of fascinating and packed full of Radical Hope!
Connect with Dr. Kelly Turner on her Radical Remission website:
https://radicalremission.com/
Suggested Resources:
Your donations power our podcast's mission to support cancer patients with hope, insights, and resources. Every contribution fuels our ability to uplift and empower. Join us in making a lasting impact. Donate now! 🌟
Hi, I'm Ivelisse Page, and thanks for listening to the Believe Big podcast, the show where we take deep dive into your healing with health experts, integrative practitioners, biblical faith leaders and cancer thrivers from around the globe. Welcome to today's episode on the Believe Big podcast. My name is Ivelisse Page and today's episode is on a topic that every cancer patient needs to hear. It will not only empower you, but bring you much hope. I'm excited for you to hear from my friend, Dr. Kelly Turner, who is the New York Times best selling author of Radical Remission and Radical Hope, now in 22 languages, which summarizes her research into radical remissions, when someone heals from cancer or another serious illness in a statistically unlikely way, such as without conventional medicine or after conventional medicine has failed. Over the past 15 years, she has conducted research in 10 different countries and analyzed over 1500 cases of radical remission. She is a frequent guest on the Dr. Oz Show and holds a BA from Harvard University and a PhD from the University of California Berkeley. Kelly also created and directed a docu-series that explores each of the 10 healing factors from her research and features many of the radical remission survivors from the books. She's also the founder of the Radical Remission Project website, which continues to collect new cases of radical remission and offers online courses, in-person workshops and one-on-one health coaching. Welcome Dr. Turner to the show.
Dr. Kelly Turner:Thanks for having me, Ivelisse it's so nice to see you again. It's been a lot of years since I saw you in Baltimore with Believe Big.
Ivelisse Page:Yes, you as well. Our listeners are always interested in discovering what our guest's favorite health tip is. Can you share yours with us?
Dr. Kelly Turner:Sure. I have so many, but if I had to choose one, it would be when in doubt, go for a walk. It used to be when in doubt, take a nap, but it's not always easy to fall asleep when you have troubles on your mind. I see my kids and my cats just take a nap at the blink of an eye. But I think for adults where we're worried about something, it's not always easy to just slip into sleep, but it is always possible to take a walk. So when in doubt, take a walk.
Ivelisse Page:I love that. And they even say, take a break from your workday. It's so healthy for you just to take a walk, as you're saying. They said sitting is the new smoking so it's incredible that you can do something as simple as going for a walk to clear your mind, your heart, and to get some really good exercise for your body. So that's a great tip. Many of the physicians and the researchers that I meet that specialize in oncology have a reason for pursuing this path of medicine and research. What made you decide to do your research on radical remission patients?
Dr. Kelly Turner:Like most people I've been touched by cancer. The first two people who I knew died of cancer, one of them was my friend who died when he was 16. We were both 16. He was diagnosed when we were both 14 with stomach cancer. So cancer has always been to me, this thing that just comes out of the blue and can kill you, without any real forewarning. And he went through everything his doctors recommended surgery, chemo, radiation, and unfortunately, we had to bury him at 16 and that was really hard on our small community. It really left an impact. And so when I left Harvard and was trying to figure out where do I wanna go in my life? I really wanted to find a way to give back to cancer patients in some way. And that's what led me to counseling cancer patients. And that's what I was doing. That's where it was gonna end. That's where it was supposed to end. But then of course, I came across a case of spontaneous remission, which I call radical remission and I just couldn't let them go. I read the one case. And then later that night I went home on PubMed and I found that there were over 1000 of these cases published in medical journals. And I hadn't heard of them. The doctors writing up these case reports didn't know how these people got well, and meanwhile, all the people I was counseling were dying. So I just had this moment where I said there are over a thousand people who've turned around cancer when they were expected to die. The doctors don't know why they got well and no one is studying them. And I said I really wanna study them. It would be hopeful. It would be a lot less depressing than working with these people who keep on passing away and maybe we can learn something that will be helpful. So that's what started the PhD journey at UC Berkeley into researching these cases that unfortunately no one was really digging into.
Ivelisse Page:I'm so glad you did.
Dr. Kelly Turner:It's like yours.
Ivelisse Page:It's interesting that you say that because in my charts at Hopkins it says spontaneously remissioned and it doesn't say all the things that I did to help my body heal. So I like you, found it fascinating that when they don't understand it, they'll just say spontaneously remissioned. I just love your books because you give hope and information backed by research and it's easily digestible and actionable. I say this all the time, it's one of my favorite resources we give to patients at Believe Big. In the book you share you researched hundreds of cases of spontaneous remission patients, and that you found over 75 different factors that may have played a role, but 10 factors that every person interviewed mentioned doing and being healed of their cancer. Interestingly, I found that only three of the 10 are physical factor, and I wanted to just go briefly through them on this podcast so that everyone could hear what they were. And the first one is, one that most people probably are familiar with is to radically change your diet. And I know how huge that is. And in what ways specifically, did you find in your research that radically changing their diet made significant differences?
Dr. Kelly Turner:I think anytime you radically change, what's going into your body. You're gonna change what's happening inside your body. So it's just common sense. And if you are dealing with something, an illness, whether it be cancer or MS or ALS or anything that's considered difficult to treat or not necessarily easily curable, you want to do what you can to help the inside of your body be as healthy as it can possibly be. So it just makes common sense to try to put either something healthier or just something different into your body and see if that can change things up for your immune system. I'm not a medical doctor, so I actually don't give medical advice, but I am a PhD cancer researcher, so I can tell you what radical remission survivors do. And for them, they do all radically change their diet in some way, but that's almost where the similarities end, cuz some of them go really deep into juicing and other people really deep into paleo or ketogenic or vegan or raw or you name it. There's 50 different diets that they're on. But if you zoom back a bit, they're all greatly increasing their vegetables and fruits, greatly increasing vegetables. And they're reducing or sometimes eliminating things like meat, wheat, sweets, and dairy. And when you make a big shift in your diet like this, not saying it's easy to do, but it improves your digestion, it improves your mood, it improves your circulation. And 70% of our immune system comes from our gut. 70% of the immune system resides in the 18 feet of intestines that we have, which are really the barrier between the outside world and the inside world of our bodies. So making sure that those 18 feet of intestines are working optimally and soaking in really nutrient rich cancer fighting foods, I think is one of the smartest things you can do if you're on a healing journey.
Ivelisse Page:I completely agree. And I love that you said that about how they're all different and that's one of the things that our patient advocates, the doctors and the oncology nutritionist that work with the patients at Believe Big, say everyone needs to have an individualized approach. Everyone has different sensitivites. So what one patient may need to eliminate and add, it could be completely different than what another patient needs, but like you said, everyone can benefit from increasing their amount of vegetables and reducing the amount of dairy and meat potentially in their diet, depending on where they are on their journey. Share what you've discovered about sugar. I know everyone knows that sugar is bad, but about how the cancer cells are affected by sugar.
Dr. Kelly Turner:Well, to understand a little bit about that, you just need to go back to your P E T scan. A typical P E T scan you ingest or you're injected with glucose. You're injected with a dye of concentrated saturated glucose. And then you have to wait a half an hour. Then they put you in the scan machine. And what they're looking for is where is that glucose, that sugar being metabolized the fastest and that's what the scan is looking for. So they dye the glucose so that the scan can pick up these hotspots. And these hotspots are where cancer cells are metabolizing sugar. This doesn't necessarily say that sugar causes cancer. We can't make that claim, but we can say once you have cancer cells in your body, they do metabolize glucose at a much, much higher rate than a healthy cell. And so it just makes common sense that you're gonna want to reduce the amount of refined sugars that you eat and get your sugars from things like fruits. Some cancer patients, such as this woman, Allison, that's featured in the upcoming docu-series for her, with her particular body and what her body needed at that time, and also her particular cancer, which was the type of brain tumor. She and her integrative doctor decided that the best diet for her would be the ketogenic diet. And for her, it's not a meat heavy ketogenic diet. It's actually a very vegetable heavy ketogenic diet. But for those of your listeners who don't know what that means, the ketogenic diet means putting your body into ketosis as opposed to glycolysis, right? So you're burning fat instead of burning sugar. And in order to do that and stay in ketosis you either need to fast because fasting naturally puts your body into ketosis. Or when you're not fasting you need to be consuming very little glucose, which means very few carbohydrates of any kind, and then plenty of leafy, dark green vegetables and some healthy fats. And that's what Allison did. And she was given six and a half months to live with her very aggressive brain tumor. And here she is, eight years later alive and well and still very much adhering to a ketogenic diet again, because that's what's right for her.
Ivelisse Page:Yes.
Dr. Kelly Turner:But just on the flip side, also in the diet episode of the docu-series, we highlight Bailey O'Brien whom I know.
Ivelisse Page:Love her.
Dr. Kelly Turner:I love her too. She healed herself from stage four melanoma at a very young age, she was 21 at the time. And she did that through the Gerson diet, which is probably the exact opposite of a ketogenic diet. But it was what was right for her body and her cancer at that time. The Gerson diet involves lots of juicing with apples and carrots, a vegetarian diet and also a daily coffee enema. The diets range and they depend on what you need. But when you radically change what goes into your body, you can radically change what your immune system does with cancer cells.
Ivelisse Page:Those are great examples. And I'm so glad that you also mentioned about the brain cancer patient in the docu-series, who even eight years later continues on the ketogenic diet. And that's one thing that we try and encourage individuals to know it's that it's not a one and done, it's a lifestyle change. And those who are successful from recurrence as many times are the ones that also continue to focus on their health, continue to focus on their diet and the things that got them well in the first place. Sometimes people get a false sense of I rang the bell I'm done, and now I can go back to my old life. And, that's a big mistake in my eyes. I feel like it's so important to continue that journey of health, continue to be seen by those integrative practitioners that can monitor your blood work and your health so that you are getting exactly what you need at every season of your life. And I know Bailey does that to the day. She continues to focus on what she eats. Thank you for sharing that.
Dr. Kelly Turner:Yeah, you're welcome. And you couldn't be closer to the truth of radical mission survivors, which is these 10 lifestyle change factors, right? These 10 common things that I've found in my research that they all share, they don't stop doing them the minute they get in remission. They keep doing them for the rest of their lives. Now that's not to say they don't ease back on the strictness of the diet. Some people do a very strict diet for a year or two, and then they start easing up on it a little bit. Maybe they bring back in a little bit of wine, they bring back in some cheese but they do it at a very moderated pace and many of the general trends of their diet change or all of their lifestyle changes, they do stick with. And that's important because if you think of it as like something about my prior life allowed cancer to grow. I'm not saying people necessarily cause their cancer because we know for a fact, so many chemicals are actually the cause of cancer. We live in a chemical environment. That means it's all the more important to keep our lifestyle as healthy as possible so that we can process those chemicals. So, absolutely, radical remission survivors do not stop doing these 10 lifestyle changes once they get that bill of remission.
Ivelisse Page:That's excellent. So number two, taking control of your health. I love this one because in your book, you share that the in quotes,"annoying patients who do not automatically do what the doctor tells them" are the survivors, so share with us about this.
Dr. Kelly Turner:Well I have a question for you. Ivelisse were you an annoying patient at Johns Hopkins?
Ivelisse Page:I was.
Dr. Kelly Turner:I bet. And it makes sense, right? Because the common thread of radical mission survivors is taking control of your health. What I now call, empowerment, cuz it's not actually possible to take full control over anything in life, but if you feel empowered and you don't feel helpless, you are going to be a vocal patient, just plain and simple. You're not going to be passive and quiet and just nod your head and be a yes man. You're gonna be someone who asks questions, who wants detailed explanations for why things are happening, and what to expect from them. You're gonna be someone who goes on Google and researches or better yet goes on pubmed.gov and researches. For your listeners PubMed is your tax dollars at work paying for essentially the Google search engine of medical articles. And these are articles that your doctor will trust. So if you bring in something from Google, from someone's health blog, they are gonna be pretty annoyed with you, but if you bring them, five studies on the benefits of acupuncture for your particular type of cancer, downloaded and printed from PubMed, they're gonna say,"oh, hey, interesting I trust this cuz these are peer reviewed medical journals". So absolutely taking control of your health is a common thread among radical remission survivors. And they become the squeaky wheels. They become the annoying patients who don't just say, yes, they want to ask questions. They wanna understand what's happening. And that doesn't mean they disagree with their doctors. It doesn't mean they say no to what their doctors are suggesting. It just means they might need a weekend or a week or so to think about it and to digest it or research it so that they get to a point where they feel empowered, where they can say yes. I agree to this. It's a big difference between being told what to do or being given an option, taking some time to research it and think it over. And then you getting to a place where you say yes, I wanna do this. I wanna do this for my next step in my health journey.
Ivelisse Page:It's a partnership. And so I feel that the more you can ask the better. We have a Frequently Asked Questions for Oncologists that patients can download on our website that is really helpful. And it's actually the questions that I brought in to my doctor all those years ago. It's so important to find an oncologist who will listen to you and answer your questions. It shouldn't be my way or the highway. It's really a partnership. And ultimately, you're the CEO of your health. And so you are the one that should ultimately decide what is best for you. Yes, we need to listen to the wisdom of our doctors, but we also need to listen to ourselves and have those questions answered so that we can make sure it's the best for us.
Dr. Kelly Turner:And it reminds me of one of the radical remission survivors I studied who healed from something other than cancer. Because people can have statistically unlikely remissions from all kinds of illnesses. And one of those people is a woman named Palmer Kippalah who healed herself from multiple sclerosis. And we actually feature her in the empowerment episode of the docu-series because she had no choice but to empower herself. She was diagnosed with MS in 84 and she wasn't given any option. They said you're going to end up in a wheelchair. Steroids might delay it by a few years, but you're going to end up in a wheelchair. Cuz she was diagnosed at the age of 18. So it was a devastating diagnosis for her back in 1984. And because the doctors weren't giving her any options, any medication in those early years, she had no choice, but to empower herself. So she went to the library. She read the books on nutrition. She read the books on stress reduction and eventually she got to a point where her MS was somewhat under control, but it would often flare up, especially when she was stressed. And she started to wonder this vegetarian diet that I've been on for 15 years, thinking that it's healthy, I wonder if I need to change that. And her doctor said no, no diet has nothing to do with it. She did a little more research and decided to cut out gluten for herself just as an experiment. Within one week of cutting out the gluten, her MS symptoms disappeared and they never came back.
Ivelisse Page:Wow.
Dr. Kelly Turner:Yeah. And she went to her doctor like four weeks later and she's I'm well, like I took out the gluten and now I feel great, and what do you think? And he said to her, oh, it's a fad and you need to go on these crazy steroids right now. She ended up following up with him a few years later. And he had his tail between his legs. And he said, I'm sorry, I was wrong. Gluten sensitivity is showing to be inflammatory for multiple schlerosis patients. And she said, yep, and I've been off gluten and I haven't had any symptoms since. And so that's an example. Talk about an annoying patient, right? She came in with a solution that had worked for her and he just dismissed it because he couldn't understand from his training how that could possibly be true. Then when the science caught up to her and he had enough published journal articles in front of him saying, oh, some people are truly gluten sensitive and their systems get hugely inflamed from gluten. Then he was able to say, oh, okay, I see you now and now I understand you and I'm sorry. And so it's a beautiful, happy ending of them coming back together and repairing that relationship. But it is a reminder of what, the doctors, aren't always the ones who have the answers, and sometimes you do need to work with your nutritionist or your integrative health practitioner to add things in like a gluten-free diet or mistletoe treatments, which I know Believe Big is such a wonderful supporter of, and a believer in. So yes, empowering yourself and finding what's gonna work for you at this time is something that we're all just gonna have to do if we want to recover from something that our doctors don't always have the answers to.
Ivelisse Page:So that leads me to number three, which is, follow your intuition. This is another area where we in modern society have lost touch with our instincts. And you share in your book that we used to be hunters and gatherers, people who could sense when a storm was coming, or feel fear, feel danger nearby. So talk about why this factor is important when dealing with a cancer diagnosis.
Dr. Kelly Turner:I will have to say, I didn't expect this to be a common factor. And I was worried when it kept coming up over and over again, simply because I didn't know how my professors at UC Berkeley were going to respond to the idea of following your intuition as a common factor in healing. But I'm so glad you bring up the hunter gatherer brain. Because when I looked into the science behind intuition, that's where it led me. We have the oldest part of our brain in the very back of our brain. It's right above the spinal cord. It's called the cerebellum. It's colloquially known as the reptilian brain. And it just means it's the oldest part of our brain. It is in charge of survival. And when our survival is threatened, that is the part of the brain that takes all the blood, and takes over. So the blood literally drains away out of your frontal cortex and all of the activity starts happening from the back of your brain. And this is why we make decisions when our lives are threatened, that we don't understand rationally. A mother who runs into the middle of the street to snatch her child from being hit by a car. If you interview her afterwards, she'll say, I didn't even know what was happening. I was just suddenly doing it. I just acted. I didn't think I just acted. And that's because her cerebellum took over, right? This is the part of your brain related to survival. It's also the part of your brain that talks to you very directly and it doesn't lay out steps one after the other, the way your frontal cortex does. It's also the part of your brain. That's in direct contact with the a hundred million neurons in your gut. So when you say, I have a bad feeling in my stomach about this, you really do have a bad feeling. There's a hundred million brain cells in the lining of your intestinal tract that has direct contact with the back of your brain. And it's, that's why people call the gut the second brain and they are in direct connection with each other. So it is important to listen to that strong, inner voice that takes over and says, call your best friend from college. And you're like, what? Your frontal cortex kicks in and says that doesn't make any sense. I haven't talked to her in 20 years, but if you just listen to that voice, sometimes as long as it's not dangerous, don't listen to a voice that says, jump off a bridge, but if you can pick up the phone and call your old roommate, the people that I study when they follow through with that intuition and make that call turns out that roommate is now an oncologist and has some wonderful ideas for them, right? So you never know where that strong, inner voice is gonna lead you. And I'm not saying you follow it blindly cause radical remission survivors don't do that, but they do start listening to it and they don't dismiss it. They don't dismiss the gut feelings and they don't dismiss that inner voice that starts whispering or in some cases shouting at them.
Ivelisse Page:That was me when I was trying to decide when they were telling me that I needed to do chemotherapy and in my gut, and as a person of faith I sometimes feel like that's the Holy Spirit guiding me and telling me that, it was gonna hurt me more than it would help me. I couldn't explain why, like you're saying, all I knew is that I had this feeling that it would hurt me more than it would help me. And I didn't know the science behind it at that time, but interesting, years later when I was going to my integrative doctor and we're doing all these different blood tests, they discovered that I have the MTHFR gene and that people who have this gene they say that have a difficult time processing out chemicals and things like that. I just found it fascinating that everyone makes the decisions that are best for them, but like you're saying really focus in and listen and say, okay, what is gonna be best for me? And don't say, I'm not a doctor, I shouldn't make this decision or, I'm not old enough, or I don't know enough. You need to listen to your body to know what is best for you. I love that you included that as part of the 10.
Dr. Kelly Turner:Yes. I didn't include it. Radical remission survivors just told me that's what they were doing. So I had to include it. It's a fact that radical remission survivors hear that intuitive voice and they let it take a seat at the decision making table.
Ivelisse Page:I love that. So number four, using herbs and supplements, this is one that I believe was one of those key factors in my healing with mistletoe therapy and, no matter which path a patient takes. Can you share the reasons why using herbs and supplements are important during a cancering process, or, that you found the radical remission patients shared with you?
Dr. Kelly Turner:Absolutely. Radical remission survivors are all taking some form of supplement, right? Plant medicine, whether it's in the form of an IV drip or a subcutaneous mistletoe injection, or, they're boiling herbs for two hours on their stove. They're taking some form of plant medicine and the reasons they are doing it is one of three reasons. And sometimes it's all three of these. It's either to detoxify something from their body. So take something outta their body that shouldn't be there, maybe that's mold, maybe that's heavy metals, for example. To bring something into their body that should be there, but it's not. So to boost your body with something that it's lacking, that could be something like vitamin D or vitamin B12. And the third reason to take a supplement is to help you absorb your food, help you digest your food. So these are things like digestive enzymes, pancreatic enzymes, prebiotics, probiotics. So when you think of it that way supplements are not the only answer. They're one of 10. They're very important, I believe. But if you don't do the other nine changes I doubt that you will turn around stage four cancer and plenty of radical remission survivors and their healers agree with me. And they say, if you're taking 50 of the best supplements and spending a fortune on them and you haven't changed your diet and you haven't changed your stress levels, that's just a waste of money. You might as well just flush that money right down the drain. So supplements are incredibly important, but they have to be done in conjunction with the other nine factors, because if you're still eating burgers and fries all day, and now you're taking mistletoe injections, you're probably not gonna get the results that Ivelisse has, that you have.
Ivelisse Page:It's so true. When you're trying to lose weight, let's say you can work out every single day, but if you're going to McDonald's every day, you're not gonna lose the weight that you need. So it's counteracting the benefits of one for the other. I always say it's like a trivial pursuit piece that you're healing and there's all these little wedges that need to be put into place that is best for you. And just having an integrative practitioner that works alongside of be a part of your care team is so important because they help you to figure out what are those important wedges that you need for your health and for your healing.
Dr. Kelly Turner:And I'm so glad you brought up the idea of the integrative practitioner because of the 10 lifestyle change factors that radical remission survivors do, this is the only one that you really need to do along with a professional. You can work on releasing suppressed emotions. You can follow your own intuition. You can eat more vegetables all by yourself, but you should not be taking herbs and supplements unless you're under the guidance of a health professional. And that could be a Tibetan herbalist, that could be a nutritionist or a dietician or an integrated functional medicine doctor, but someone who understands which plant medicine you need and at which dose. For example, in our docu-series the herbs and supplements episode, which you're in by the way, the great little piece about Believe Big mistletoe trial, which I'd love you to talk about, we cover these three different survivors. One of them is a gentleman named Bob who is still alive and well now 12 years later from stage four pancreatic cancer diagnosis. Typically a very quickly fatal diagnosis. He ended up getting the Whipple surgery which is the traditional surgery that you get with pancreatic cancer and then he refused the chemo and radiation. He decided that for him, that wasn't the right choice. And I personally am not against chemo, surgery, or radiation. I just study people who heal without it, because I believe they have something to teach us. So Bob made the choice not to do that. And his doctor said you're gonna die in 12 months if you don't get chemo. Instead he did his research, he and his wife together, and they found a really qualified integrative practitioner who was eight states away from him. And he ended up going to see her once in person, and then the rest has been over the phone and zoom. He sends in his blood and his hair analysis for her so that she can constantly change his supplements, but he takes over a hundred pills a day from her. He's taking 16 pancreatic enzymes, every four hours around the clock, including like waking up in the middle of the night to take them. So he's on a very intensive supplement regimen, more intense than most of the radical remission survivors that I study. But by following that intensive supplement regimen, he's been able to overcome a very intense prognosis, which was you're gonna be dead in a year. So absolutely supplements can be incredibly powerful, but they have to be done under the guidance of a doctor who's following you and prescribing you exactly the doses that you need at that particular time.
Ivelisse Page:A lot of people ask me, they have a colon cancer diagnosis and what did you take? I wanna take the same thing. And I never share it, because outside of the mistletoe, and some basic things, because again, everyone is an individual and you may have the exact same type of cancer, same stage, but what you need is gonna be different than what I need. And that is when, like you're saying those integrated practitioners can really deep dive into your personal health to see, okay, what's gonna be best for you. And the other thing about that amazing story that you're featuring with a pancreatic cancer patient is it's incredible to me that he did all of this and he's still doing that, but I'm sure that he's having a great quality of life. Not only quantity of life. Sometimes the treatments can be so harsh that your quality of life is so diminished. And so I'm sure that with what he's doing, not only is he had an extension of life, but a great quality as well.
Dr. Kelly Turner:Absolutely. And if you happen to tune into that episode, which is episode eight in the docu-series, you'll see at the end that he says I'm healthier now at 70 than I was at 17. He said, I can do more pushups now at 70 than I could when I was 17.
Ivelisse Page:That's amazing. Number five, releasing suppressed emotions, all of the factors were a part of my story, but this one was another large piece of the puzzle. What are suppressed emotions for those who may not be familiar with touching into this factor?
Dr. Kelly Turner:I toyed with the idea of calling it releasing stress, but that didn't seem to capture the depth of this factor based on the people that I was studying. A suppressed emotion is any emotion that you're holding onto, whether it's from the past, the present or even the future. So if you're holding onto an emotion from the past, that could be regret, grief, anger, resentment. It could also be happiness from the past, which is nostalgia. And then that makes you want the past more than the present. In the terms of your present emotions that you could be holding onto in your body, you could be holding onto stress and worry and anxiety or fear. You could have sadness in the present. And then in the future, if you're worried about the future, then you're holding onto fear about the future or maybe sadness about the future. So really any emotion that you're just holding onto and that's in your system is considered a suppressed emotion. And according to radical remission survivors, it's incredibly important for their health to release those and to allow emotions, all emotions, positive, negative, neutral, to move through the system. The goal for a radical remission survivor is to get to a point where all of the emotions from the past, present, and future have been released out. You're an empty vessel and every day, because we're human, new emotions are gonna come in. Something's gonna remind you of the past that resentment will come back. You let yourself feel it, and then you let it go. Or something reminds you about your cancer diagnosis. You start worrying about the future. You let yourself feel that fear maybe for a day, maybe for a week, maybe for a month. And then you let it move through you. And that's where I see radical remission survivors getting to, they don't avoid quote unquote, negative emotions. That's why I don't call them negative emotions because radical remission survivors don't consider any emotion to be negative. They're all just emotions that should be felt fully and then released. A good example of this from the docu-series is the gentleman named Yoganan, who's not featured in either of my books. So in the docu-series I tried to do a mix of featuring people from Radical Remission, my first book and Radical Hope, my second book, and then also new people to give people a wide range of exposure. So this gentleman Yoganan, who submitted his case to our site is a survivor of multiple myeloma, which is another incredibly hard to treat at least with current conventional medicine treatments, blood cancer. So he was given three months to live and he was in his early forties. He tried chemo for a few days. It made him so ill he said, I gotta stop this. And so he made the decision to stop it. It was palliative chemo. The doctors weren't even saying it would cure him, they just said it might give him a few more months anyway. He ended up making the choice to go to an integrative clinic in Mexico that offered a wide range of integrative medicine treatments. He was doing IV vitamin C infusions and lots of different treatments down there, but he also had a lot of time on his hands. He was down there for four weeks. And during that time he followed his intuition and he said, I have so much hurt and anger from my past. This is a black gentleman who grew up in a low income neighborhood of Los Angeles in the eighties. So he was surrounded by gang violence and police brutality. The work of forgiveness, especially when it feels like society and family have hurt you so deeply it can be really hard to get to that. He was born into a family where his father left them. His mother struggled with trying to support him and his sisters. So he had a lot of anger and trauma and resentment from this very difficult childhood. And he used those four weeks in Mexico to release those emotions from his body to get to a place of forgiveness, to get to a place of peace. And that's not easy work. That's like an advanced degree in forgiveness but he was able to get there and he did that beautiful release work and that combined with the other nine factors thankfully led to his remission. Now it's five years later. The work of releasing all that stuff that we're holding onto really, I can't stress it enough, it's incredibly powerful. And some people are like, okay yeah, it's good to release stress. It's good to release trauma. But what I like to remind them as a researcher is let's talk about the biochemistry of this for a minute. When you move out of the fear response, when you move out of fight or flight, maybe for the first time in your whole life, you get to a place of loving peace and loving kindness. You are taking your system out of fight or flight. So you're moving from the sympathetic nervous system to the parasympathetic nervous system. Which means you are turning on your body's healing response. By releasing those emotions and moving into the parasympathetic response, you are increasing oxytocin, serotonin, endorphins. The list goes on and on, and then people would say, okay so what, so you feel better, right? No. Oxytocin has been shown in multiple clinical trials to reduce the number of breast and ovarian cancer cells in Petri dishes. So you are reducing cancer cells by moving out of fight or flight and interested in repair. So anything you can do to get yourself out of fight or flight out of that, stress, anger, fear, resentment, regret, and into I'm grateful. I'm at peace. I forgive. I'm feeling love. You are helping your body fight cancer at a cellular level. I think it's just important for people to understand this is not something that's nice to do. This is something that's incredibly powerful for your immune system and its ability to fight cancer cells.
Ivelisse Page:I couldn't agree more with you. And we had Dr. Barry on the podcast a few episodes back and he was the Chaplain at the Cancer Treatment Centers of America, and he wrote a book called The Forgiveness Project. And if anyone is interested in taking a deeper dive into that aspect of just learning: how do I actually release that, how do I actually process through that? It's a great resource for anyone to learn more about that. In your book you said"it's not that we should never feel fear, anger, grief or stress, but rather we should try not to hold on to any particular emotion, be it positive or negative for too long. Emotion should flow through the body like waves crashing on the beach, in and then out." That's such a great visual. These are the emotions I'm feeling right now. Like you said, hold onto it. Okay. Let me process this and then releasing them, not holding on. That is fantastic. So Dr. Turner we always try and keep our podcasts to about 30 minutes or so, but I do not wanna miss hearing about these next five factors. And so what we're gonna do with your episode is we are going to end today's, and then do a part two next week and allow people to hear the other five that I believe are just so vital and needs to be shared. So thank you so much for joining us today. And those who are listening do not fret. You will hear the next five in next week's episode, but thank you so much for joining us today.
Dr. Kelly Turner:Thanks for having me, Ivelisse I'm so happy to be here today.
Ivelisse Page:If you enjoyed this episode and you'd like to help support our podcast, please subscribe and share it with others. Be sure to visit believebig.org to access the show notes and discover our bonus content. Thanks again, and keep Believing Big!