Kelly Turner, PhD, author of Radical Remission, has continued to collect stories of people who have become cancer-free. Some of them used conventional treatment that didn’t eliminate their cancer; others never utilized conventional treatment at all and are cancer-free.

Some people have called these cases spontaneous remissions. When Kelly studied these people, she discovered there was nothing spontaneous about their remissions. They worked very hard at it; she started using the term Radical Remission.

When Kelly asked me to write my story for the website where she is collecting these stories, my first response was that I am not cancer-free. I don’t see myself as fitting into the Radical Remission category. I currently have breast cancer metastasized to my lungs. She replied that she is noticing a whole category of people who are thriving with cancer, and she wants more examples of these people. I understood what she meant last September when I was inspired by reading the story of another person living with cancer.

In September, 2016, the Radical Remission Healing Story of the Month was from Nasha Winters, ND. She was diagnosed with Stage 4 ovarian cancer, too advanced to treat, 25 years ago. She is definitely thriving with cancer. That was my first introduction to Nasha and I was intrigued (you will find a link to her story below). Her story led to my looking at her website, reading part of her book that will be published in May, and scheduling a Healing Journeys workshop with her, Cancer and Nutrition: How Food Can Create the Optimal Terrain for Health, on June 17th.

Nasha says that “even healthy adults produce five hundred to a thousand new cancerous cells a day, and only one in a thousand people are truly cancer free . . . all of us have cancer cells in our body, no matter how healthy we are.” She differentiates between treating the tumor and addressing the terrain that allows the cancer growth.

She talks about the ten factors in the terrain of our bodies that “toss healthy cells into the mosh pit of uncontrolled growth.” Therefore any treatment that only addresses the tumor is going to be a temporary fix. If we also address the terrain, it can be an ongoing solution because it addresses what is causing the cancer to grow out of control.

I have known about the importance of addressing the terrain for most of the 28 years that I have been living with cancer (see my February Director’s Reflections). It is how I have managed my cancer, but I have often dealt with conflicting and confusing information. And at times I have felt like I’m not doing it right because my cancer hasn’t completely gone away. Nasha’s book, The Metabolic Approach to Cancer: Integrating Deep Nutrition, the Ketogenic Diet, and Nontoxic Bio-Individualized Therapies, is what I have been yearning for all these years. She describes how and why cancer grows, and how to manage it.

Metabolism is how the body utilizes the food we eat to obtain energy. Thus, The Metabolic Approach to Cancer is nutrition centered. “If food is the body’s gasoline, the mitochondria inside cells are the tiny engines responsible for converting that food into energy for the body to run on. It is therefore inside the mitochondria where metabolism takes place.” The root cause of cancer is actually damaged mitochondria. “While most modern diets and lifestyles are largely responsible for cancer-causing mitochondrial damage, deep nutrition, therapeutic diets, and nontoxic lifestyle approaches can provide the repairs.”

Based on what I am learning from Nasha’s research and knowledge, I am fine-tuning my diet and lifestyle, with the goal of having a terrain that isn’t conducive to the growth of cancer. I am working on writing my story for the Radical Remission collection. And I’m eager to learn more at our Cancer and Nutrition workshop in West Sacramento on June 17th.

As always, I welcome your comments; to reply please click here.

You can read Dr. Nasha Winters‘ inspiring Healing Story here.

In the Spirit of Healing,

Jan Adrian, MSW
Founder and Executive Director