“Radical Remission” summary — Kelly A. Turner

Introduction

You face a terrifying reality when diagnosed with advanced cancer and given a terminal prognosis. Standard treatments often fail you, leaving you feeling helpless within a medical system that treats you like a passive recipient.

Kelly A. Turner discovered a hidden phenomenon called Radical Remission, which occurs when you heal from cancer without conventional medicine or after treatments stop working. Through global research involving patients and healers, the author uncovered nine key factors that drive these healing anomalies.

Radical Remission survivors heal from advanced cancer by combining physical changes like a plant-rich diet and supplements with deep emotional and spiritual transformation.

You can explore these life-changing questions by examining the core healing strategies:

What specific dietary changes do survivors make?
How do you take active control of your health decisions?
Why are emotional and spiritual shifts crucial for physical recovery?

1. Radically Changing Your Diet

You can help your body heal from cancer by transforming what you eat. The author analyzed hundreds of cases and found that survivors make four consistent dietary changes.

Most Radical Remission survivors make four consistent dietary changes to help their bodies heal from cancer.

Greatly reducing or eliminating sugar, meat, dairy, and refined foods
Greatly increasing vegetable and fruit intake
Eating organic foods
Drinking filtered water

Dietary Changes and Cancer Cells

Cancer cells consume glucose at a much higher rate than normal cells. Dr. Otto Warburg discovered in the 1920s that cancer cells get their energy by breaking down unusually large amounts of glucose. They respire without oxygen, requiring 10 to 50 times more glucose compared to normal cells. The average American consumes 22 teaspoons of sugar daily, far above the recommended maximum intake of 6 to 9 teaspoons. Refined foods and high-glycemic carbohydrates spike blood insulin levels, which are also linked to cancer.

Ron was diagnosed with prostate cancer with a Gleason score of 6 and a PSA level of 5.2. By eliminating sugar and white foods, his PSA dropped to 1.3 in less than a year. He avoided surgery and remained cancer-free for over seven years.

Eliminating dairy removes growth hormones, antibiotics, and the protein casein. Cow's milk contains casein, which laboratory studies show can turn cancer cells on or off. Regular meat consumption is linked to numerous cancers and should be drastically reduced or eliminated during recovery. Eating organic foods and practicing brief fasts help detoxify the body from pesticides and other chemicals. Organic food is 30 percent less likely to contain pesticides. Furthermore, 24 hours of fasting can initiate internal detoxification and increase immune cells.

Action Steps for an Anticancer Diet

Switching to pure water helps flush out toxins and keeps cells hydrated. Water makes up about 70 percent of the human body, and you can survive for only 4 days without it. Healers recommend 8 glasses of natural spring water or filtered tap water per day to avoid contaminants. Eating a wide variety of colored vegetables and fruits provides essential nutrients and prevents cancer. Combining 5 servings of fruits and vegetables daily with exercise reduces breast cancer mortality by 50 percent.

Transitioning to an anticancer diet can be done gradually through manageable baby steps to avoid emotional stress and feelings of deprivation. You can use an elimination diet lasting 2 weeks.

Reduce slowly by starting with one less sweet, one less portion of meat, one less serving of dairy, and one less refined food per day.
Eat at least one vegetable or fruit with every meal, building up until half of every meal is veggies and fruits.
Prioritize organic foods starting with meat, dairy, and pesticide-absorbing produce like apples, celery, tomatoes, and mushrooms.
Start the morning with a glass of filtered water with lemon juice.

2. Taking Control of Your Health

Unlike the traditional medical model where patients passively submit to doctors, Radical Remission survivors act as active drivers of their own health. True and deep healing must ultimately come from inside the patient rather than from outside doctors or healers.

Taking control of health is essential for the healing process and relies on shifting from a passive role to an active driver of health.

Sun Hee Lee took an active role when diagnosed with stage 4 ovarian cancer by blending conventional treatments with Gerson therapy and a macrobiotic diet. Traditional Chinese Medicine practitioners argue that patients must perform internal maintenance and insight practices to recognize how they have ignored their lives. Elyn Jacobs was diagnosed with stage 1 breast cancer at age forty-five, changed her diet, addressed her stress, used supplements, and left her stressful job as a bond trader to support her immune system. Seven years later, she remained cancer-free with an active immune system.

Patients who take control of their healing often encounter external criticism from medical staff or internal self-doubt and fear. Janice was diagnosed with stage 4 cervical cancer in 1985 and faced hospital staff trying to convince her she would die for two hours a day for two months, but she refused to accept it and pursued complementary treatments. Almost thirty years later, Janice remained healthy. Scientific and observational studies suggest that feeling helpless weakens the immune system, whereas taking control correlates strongly with survival and extended life in cancer patients.

Shin Terayama worked twelve to fifteen hours a day as a company president in Japan until developing advanced renal cell cancer that spread to his lung and rectum. Sent home on hospice care with three months to live, he initiated a water fast, practiced morning breathing and toning, and sent unconditional love to his cancer. Five hundred friends and colleagues visited him in the hospital. He woke up early every morning forty-two minutes before the sunrise, when trees start emitting oxygen and birds begin singing, and sang tones to clear his seven chakras. Two months after starting morning breathing, he experienced a kundalini awakening, and twenty-five years passed since he was sent home on hospice care.

Action Steps for Taking Control

You can actively secure control over your health by becoming the lead decision-maker, learning medical research, and finding an accountability partner.

Find a general practitioner who does not get annoyed when you ask questions or bring in your own research, then expand your search to other health practitioners like acupuncturists, naturopaths, psychologists, nutritionists, energy healers, and massage therapists.
Learn how to research by reading at least one health-related article per week and familiarizing yourself with PubMed at Pubmed.gov to understand peer-reviewed medical abstracts.
Take out a sheet of paper, write down physical, mental/emotional, and spiritual headings, analyze areas needing improvement, and circle items that bring the biggest improvement in health and happiness to tackle first.
Find an accountability partner who will not be critical to hold you accountable for the changes you hope to make, and offer to do the same in return.

3. Following Your Intuition

Following intuition is one of the key factors of Radical Remission identified among cancer survivors.

Modern reliance on external sources causes humans to lose touch with their instincts. Survivors learn to listen to their inner guidance to steer away from danger. The body possesses an innate knowledge of what it needs to heal.

Scientific research confirms that humans have two operating systems, and the gut acts as an independent second brain.

System one is fast and instinctual, housing intuition. Over a hundred million neurons allow the digestive tract to feel and think independently. Trusting intuition leads to better outcomes for complex life decisions. Car buyers who made quick intuitive decisions were satisfied 60 percent of the time, compared to only 25 percent among buyers who analyzed all information.

Accessing Inner Guidance

There is no single correct way to access intuition. Intuition can manifest as internal voices, physical gut feelings, dreams, or meditations. Gemma Bond was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2011 and told by her intuition that her neglected emotional health was the root cause. Six months after focusing on emotional well-being, her tumor markers returned to the normal range.

Susan Koehler was diagnosed with late-stage pancreatic cancer with metastases to the lungs in 2007 at age fifty-four. After hearing a voice say not that way during her diagnosis, Susan rejected conventional chemotherapy and used her intuition to guide her recovery. She has outlived her initial prognosis of one or two years by over five years.

Action Steps to Access Intuition

You can strengthen your connection to intuition through daily relaxation and specific mental techniques.

Set aside a time to relax daily while you purposefully let your thinking mind turn off by listening to calming music and daydreaming without watching TV or reading.
Choose a technique to get in touch with the limbic part of your brain, such as downloading or borrowing guided imagery CDs by practitioners like Belleruth Naparstek and Martin Rossman.
Practice meditation, starting with guided meditation CDs and eventually weaning off them to meditate silently.
Use journaling with prompts such as what is the one thing that, if it were to change in my life, would change everything for the better, or what are the root causes of this problem.
Access intuition via dreams by getting into a relaxed state, writing an important question on a piece of paper next to your bed before sleep, and immediately writing down dream memories upon waking without analyzing them initially.

4. Using Herbs and Supplements

Conventional medicine views cancer as a hostile invader requiring destructive interventions. Alternative healing views it as something the body can overcome if its internal system is optimized.

Radical Remission survivors primarily take vitamin and herbal supplements to strengthen their immune system and to clear the body of accumulated toxins.

Supplements help the immune system detect and remove cancer cells. They assist in purging modern environmental toxins including pesticides, heavy metals, chemicals, and parasites that cause biological dysregulation.

Ann Fonfa kept her breast cancer in growth check for five years using diet, exercise, stress management, and vitamins. Her tumors did not completely stop until she added Chinese herbal teas prescribed by Dr. George Wong. Ann has been cancer-free for over fourteen years.

Immune Support and Detoxification

Modern agricultural practices have severely reduced the vitamin and mineral content of food. Today's fruits and vegetables contain up to 40 percent fewer vitamins and minerals compared to fifty years ago.

A JAMA study tracked 14,600 men over fourteen years to measure daily multivitamin use and cancer risk reduction. Supplements can serve as the vital missing link when a diet hits a plateau.

Jenny was fifty-one wonderful years of life old when she discovered she had advanced splenic marginal zone lymphoma. Her enlarged spleen was sixteen centimeters wide and held approximately eight pounds of cancer. She spent five thousand dollars of personal savings for each of her second and third medical opinions. Jenny took approximately forty pills a day throughout the day, including systemic enzymes, digestive enzymes, mushroom mixes, and specialized herbal formulas. Seven months later, follow-up tests showed no evidence of cancer.

Supplement Action Steps

Supplements used by survivors generally fall into distinct categories targeting digestion, bodily detoxification, and immune system enhancement.

Digestive Enzymes. These help your digestive system break down food. Specific examples include proteolytic enzymes and pancreatic enzymes.
Prebiotics and Probiotics. Probiotics are the beneficial or good bacteria that live in your digestive tract and help you digest your food and strengthen your immune system. Many people are deficient in probiotics due to our culture's frequent use of antibiotics, which indiscriminately kill all bacteria in your digestive tract, both the good and the bad. Probiotics feed on prebiotics, which is why it is helpful to take both types of supplements.
Antifungals. These help reduce Candida and other fungi that are often overgrown in most Americans' digestive tracts. Examples of natural antifungals include olive leaf extract, horsetail plant, and stinging nettle.
Antiparasitics. These help reduce parasites that can take root in your digestive tract and interfere with your digestion and immune system. Examples of antiparasitics include black walnut hull, wormwood, and goldenseal.
Antibacterials and Antivirals. These help eliminate any underlying bacterial or viral infections in your body. Examples include garlic, oil of oregano, and pau d'arco.
Liver Detoxifiers. The liver is your primary detoxification organ, and supplements can make its job easier, especially when it comes to removing heavy metals. Examples include milk thistle, dandelion root, and licorice root.
Immune System Boosters. Many herbs and vitamins help boost the immune system. Popular ones among Radical Remission survivors are aloe vera, vitamin C, certain mushrooms, fish oil, and trace minerals.
Vitamins and Hormones. Many survivors supplement with vitamin B12, vitamin D, and melatonin until their blood levels of these vitamins and hormones return to within a normal range. You can ask your doctor to test your current levels of these with a simple blood test, and the results will tell you whether or not you need to take supplements.

Supplements should be viewed as temporary support tools rather than permanent substitutes for healthy lifestyle habits.

5. Releasing Suppressed Emotions

Most frequent factors of Radical Remission are emotional or spiritual rather than physical.

While diet changes and herbs are physical factors, the majority of the top nine factors reported by survivors involve mental, emotional, and spiritual healing to clear out past suppressed emotions. Illness is perceived by survivors as an energetic or physical blockage that must be identified and released.

Adam was diagnosed with a grade 3 oligodendroglioma brain tumor and refused standard chemotherapy and radiation. He focused instead on diet, supplements, and release work to let go of past resentment toward his father, leading to a cancer-free life four years later. The median survival rate for a grade 3 oligodendroglioma is 3 and a half years.

Suppressed emotions include any conscious or unconscious, positive or negative emotions held on to from the past. Negative emotions like stress, fear, trauma, and anger are most common. Positive emotions tied to the past can also turn into nostalgia, keeping you focused on old memories rather than present reality.

Emily was diagnosed with stage 4 cervical cancer. She used energy medicine, Reiki, yoga, and prayer to heal from the grief of her recent brutal divorce, resulting in the complete disappearance of her metastases within two weeks. The second chakra energy center is located near the cervix.

Illness as Blockage and Stress

Holding on to stress weakens the immune system and increases vulnerability to disease. Stress alters neuropeptide production in cells, releasing stress hormones like cortisol, epinephrine, and adrenaline that weaken immunity. Relaxation releases positive neuropeptides like serotonin, dopamine, and relaxin.

In a landmark 1991 New England Journal of Medicine study, 420 men and women given the common cold virus reported their initial stress levels. Subjects who reported higher initial stress developed full colds, whereas less stressed subjects successfully fought it off. Suppressing emotions can damage cellular mitochondria by lowering core body temperature and blood circulation. Integrative oncologist Dr. Tsuneo Kobayashi hypothesizes that cancer is the end result of alexithymia, where unexpressed emotions lower blood pressure and core temperature. This disables mitochondria from properly using oxygen for energy and executing apoptosis, also known as programmed cell death.

Fear locks the body in fight-or-flight mode, shutting down the immune system and preventing self-healing. Fear of death and uncertainty are primary emotional hurdles for cancer patients. Fear-induced physiological responses prevent the body from entering rest-and-repair mode and halt natural killer cell production.

Nathan stopped chemotherapy for stage 4 lymphoplasmacytic lymphoma after tumors grew. He spent four grueling days facing his fear of death and accepting that he might die. After moving past the fear, he experienced complete remission while traveling years later. In a control group, 30 percent of patients who received saline instead of chemotherapy lost all their hair simply from fearing side effects, representing 40 people in the control group who experienced hair loss due to expectation and fear.

The optimal way to process emotions is like a waterfall, where they arise in the present and wash right through without accumulating baggage.

Joe was diagnosed with metastatic non-small-cell lung cancer. Without treatment, 25 percent of people with his diagnosis die within a year, 50 percent die within two years, and 80 percent die within five years. He postponed aggressive chemotherapy, addressed his lifelong anger and guilt toward God and his rocky relationships through energy healers, spiritual books, and a ten-day silent meditation retreat where he experienced rivers of energy, resulting in continuous tumor shrinkage over five years.

Action Steps for Releasing Emotions

Specific practical exercises can help unearth and release suppressed emotions from the body-mind-spirit system. You can use these modalities to clear hidden emotional baggage:

Keep a thought journal: take time at lunch and at bedtime for two straight weeks to write down all the emotional events of your day, both positive and negative, and note the underlying thoughts preceding each emotion.
Make a list of your emotional moments: write down all the most emotional moments from your past as far back as you can remember, remember the events fully, and then burn the list in a fire-burning ceremony while mentally releasing suppressed emotions.
Practice daily forgiveness: think of someone from your past or present each morning to forgive, or forgive yourself for any past wrongs if no one else comes to mind.
Take a stress management course: enroll in a local or online course for four to eight weeks, such as Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction.
See a healer or therapist: find a qualified energy healer or psychotherapist specializing in modalities like energy kinesiology or the BodyTalk system.
Try hypnosis or EMDR: use modalities such as hypnosis or eye movement desensitization and reprocessing to release unconscious emotional memories from childhood trauma.

6. Increasing Positive Emotions

Experiencing positive emotions acts as rocket fuel for the immune system, turning off fight-or-flight mode and enabling cellular repair.

When you feel joy, love, or happiness, the brain releases healing hormones like serotonin and endorphins into the bloodstream. These hormones lower blood pressure and cortisol, improve circulation, and enhance natural killer cell activity to remove cancer cells.

Early-stage prostate cancer patients split into an alternative-treatment group showed decreased tumor markers and turned off cancer genes after three months of a regimen focused on diet, exercise, and emotional practices. Zero men in this alternative group had their cancer flare up compared to six in the watchful-waiting group.

Happiness as a Daily Habit

Happiness is not something you are simply born with or without; it is a habit that must be practiced daily. You do not need to feel happy all day every day. Janet Jacobsen, diagnosed with uterine cancer at age sixty, used playfulness to handle cynical attitudes by giving her cynicism a name, Cynny, and exaggerating her grousing.

Saranne Rothberg used comedy, started The ComedyCures Foundation, and took Tibetan herbs prescribed by Dr. Yeshi Dhonden to overcome stage 4 breast cancer after eighteen months. Saranne rented standup comedy tapes on her very first night in the hospital and threw cheerful chemo parties. Efrat Livny was diagnosed with stage 3C ovarian cancer at age forty-nine and used a pair of purple Converse high-tops to bring a smile to her face before chemotherapy, helping her remain cancer-free for over twelve years.

Action Steps for Increasing Positive Emotions

Readers can deliberately increase their positive emotions by following a practical prescription for fun that requires daily consistency.

Start every day with a smile or a feeling of gratitude by watching a favorite YouTube video, subscribing to a Joke of the Day e-mail service, flipping through a photo album, or writing down five things you are grateful for in a bedside journal.
Monitor your media by ensuring you smile or feel gratitude before consuming news, and experiment with reducing the amount of news you take in.
Examine your entertainment by replacing stress-inducing detective dramas and murder mysteries with at least one comedic show added to your roster each week.
Find fun friends by evaluating your relationships to see who energizes or drains you, limiting time with those who drain you and increasing time with those who energize you.
Get active by finding activities that bring you joy—such as exercising, walking in nature, gardening, singing, dancing, meditating, cooking, or volunteering—and committing to them at least three times per week.
Do a nightly check-in before going to sleep by asking yourself if you had at least one moment of happiness today, making a mental note of it, or smiling and feeling grateful if you did not.

7. Embracing Social Support

Receiving love and social support is one of the key factors in Radical Remission because emotional connections directly trigger physical healing responses.

When you are surrounded by loved ones, the feeling of love releases potent healing hormones into the bloodstream. Brain MRIs, blood tests, and saliva analyses show that love and social support increase dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins. These hormones signal the immune system to decrease inflammation, improve blood and oxygen circulation, and raise white blood cell counts.

Studies show a 25 percent average increase in survival time for cancer patients with strong social connections. Breast cancer patients who increased their social support during their journeys experienced a 70 percent reduction in the risk of dying. Conversely, women who went through their cancer journeys entirely alone faced a four times increased likelihood of dying from breast cancer compared to those gaining support from ten or more friends.

Regular physical touch and nonsexual human contact release large amounts of oxytocin and other hormones that lower blood pressure and improve immune function. Ten seconds of daily hugging is required to lower blood pressure, reduce cortisol, and increase oxytocin. Pets provide similar physiological benefits.

Rabbits fed high-cholesterol diets who received daily human petting sessions had 60 percent less blockage in their arteries compared to isolated rabbits.

Kathryn Alexander was sixty-three when she was diagnosed with stage 3B hepatocellular cancer and faced the disease without insurance. She relied on friends and her church community to fund and arrange travel to Arizona for Life Vessel frequency treatments, and after eighteen months of her multifaceted healing approach, she arrived at surgery to find her grapefruit-sized tumor detached and no remaining cancer in her liver, remaining healthy and cancer-river seven years later.

The Biochemical Mechanism of Love

Healing requires mastering the power of reciprocity, which is the balanced flow of both giving and receiving help. You might struggle to accept help because you fear being a burden. Allowing others to give provides them with a profound sense of purpose and privilege while enabling you to heal.

Action Steps for Support Networks

You can actively build your support networks by making simple phone calls, joining groups, and directly communicating your needs:

Reach out to someone you love by picking up the phone today and calling to ask how they are doing without necessarily discussing health challenges.
Sign up for a gentle group exercise class or a class designed specifically for cancer patients.
Join a support group through your hospital, the American Cancer Society, an online forum, or alternative group activities like a photography class or hiking club.
Ask a close friend to e-mail your larger group of family and friends with specific tasks like cooking meals or running errands if you are uncomfortable asking directly.

8. Deepening Your Spiritual Connection

Spirituality is experienced not merely as an intellectual belief, but as a physical sensation and intense emotion of warm, peaceful energy.

Radical Remission survivors and alternative healers describe spiritual energy as flowing downward from head to toe, coating the physical and emotional bodies in unconditional love. This state is reached through regular physical or mental practices like meditation, yoga, prayer, or running, rather than dogmatic beliefs. Sister Jayanti, a leader of the Brahma Kumaris World Spiritual Organization, describes meditation as a process of drawing divine light and warmth into the soul and body.

Stopping the Thinking Mind

Quieting the thinking mind is an essential first step before true spiritual energy can begin to flow through the body. Racing thoughts and spiritual energy flow are mutually exclusive.

Matthew was diagnosed with inoperable stage 4 glioblastoma at 27 years old and given a 1 or 2 percent chance of survival. He traveled to Abadiânia, Brazil, in 2002, spent 4 years volunteering at John of God's center, and a follow-up MRI confirmed his brain tumor was completely gone.

Action Steps for Spiritual Connection

Readers can develop daily spiritual connection practices at home through simple, low-cost exercises designed to quiet the mind and induce calm.

Deep Breathing: Put everything aside, close your eyes, and take ten deep inhalations and exhalations with hands on your lower belly, silently counting to ten exhalations.
Walking Outside: Take a ten-minute walk outside bringing nothing except optional calming music, observing the world without thinking, using the silent mantra 'I am grateful for' on inhales and filling the blank on exhales.
Guided Imagery: Download or borrow a guided imagery CD or audio to focus the mind on imagery instead of racing thoughts.
Guided Meditation: Listen to instructions from guided meditation audio tracks, such as those by Jon Kabat-Zinn or Eckhart Tolle.
Daily Prayer: Set aside time each day to pray quietly for at least five minutes while taking deep breaths and imagining connecting to a peaceful, divine energy.
Spiritual Groups: Look around your neighborhood for a local, practice-oriented spiritual group like a meditation or prayer circle to maintain accountability and support.
Online Groups: Join an online practice-oriented group where members check in on their daily spiritual practice.

9. Having Strong Reasons for Living

Radical Remission survivors do not just want to avoid death; they possess an intense zest for living and specific reasons to stay alive.

Leigh Fortson was diagnosed with anal cancer at age forty-eight and experienced two recurrences, but maintained a core conviction that she was born on purpose to live life with as much love as possible. This excitement brings in chi or life-force energy.

Donna retired at age fifty-eight, was diagnosed with stage 3 colon cancer in 2005, and two years later successfully reversed her colostomy bag after achieving complete remission. She spent five thousand dollars for ten days at the Cougar Mountain Therapy Center after five days of chemotherapy infusions resulted in a six-day hospitalization in the intensive care unit.

Finding a Calling and Overcoming Fear

A cancer diagnosis often serves as a wake-up call to reassess unexciting aspects of life and introduce purpose. Research shows that initial denial correlates with lower recurrence and longer survival.

Action Steps for Reasons to Live

You can unearth your deepest reasons for living by completing specific exercises:

Write down how many years you want to live and keep your ideal number taped to your bathroom mirror.
Write your ideal obituary on a quiet evening, including the ideal age to live, how you'd like to die, who would survive you, and what you'd like to be remembered for accomplishing.
Make a simple list of all your current reasons for living and enjoying life when you are in a good mood, put a star next to things to increase, and make another list of new things to add.
Imagine you have unlimited wealth over three hundred billion dollars, perfect health, and guaranteed total success, and write down all the things you would do with your life.
Imagine doctors discover you are going to die in a year and a half of a painless stroke that cannot be prevented, and write down how you would choose to spend your last year and a half.
Send an e-mail to answer@RadicalRemission.com for an explanation of how your responses to these two very different scenarios relate to your deeper calling(s).

Conclusion