Why I'm Studying Spontaneous Cancer Remissions

I have some really awesome news in this video and that is that I want to share what I'm doing my doctoral work on. Spontaneous remissions in cancer according to the theory of traditional or classical Chinese medicine. Now in this video I want to talk a lot about why I think studying spontaneous remissions is so important and why analyzing it through the lens of traditional Chinese medicine and not modern biomedicine is far more useful to people who are ill or have a cancer diagnosis. So stay tuned in this video we're going to talk a little bit about why I think this is so important for you for anyone that needs to heal themselves. Hey Alex Hine, author of the book Master the Day. Now I wanted to just quickly share why this idea of spontaneous remission in cancer is kind of capturing my heart, capturing the fever. The first thing is that when it comes to illness and disease so many of us are used to being a statistic right. This is saying that statistics don't matter to the individual. Like if I have cancer and I have a 5% chance of survival I don't care like that's the stat. I just want to live. I don't want to have this illness in my body. But the thing is when you look at any industry it could be entrepreneurship, it could be becoming an author, it could be happily being happily married. What do humans focus on? We focus on the average. 50% of marriages end in divorce. That's for the average person. Whatever there's a 50% chance of survival in this cancer. You have a 90% chance of your business failing in the first 5-10 years whatever the stat is. Like these are the stats we live our lives by and yet most people will never ever ever try if they start with that logical statistic. Most entrepreneurs, Steve Jobs would have never tried building a business if he knew that stat and he lived based on logic. Most people would never get married if they saw all the data on marriage and the rate at which marriages fail. And most people probably wouldn't even bother taking care of their health if they looked at all the things that could possibly go wrong. That's also not how reality works. Most humans, yes there is this general statistic but how could medicine ever possibly predict that this person has a 50% chance of survival when they're different genders, different ages, different mindsets. Being an optimist versus a pessimist has totally different effects on your health. The person who wants to live, the person who doesn't care to live, the person with a lot of social support, the person who's very lonely, the person happily married, the person miserable and married. Unless there's a stat that can find that level of specificity I don't really care about the stats about my illness. Spontaneous remission is instead of looking at the mean line. Most cancer patients have this rate of survival. What is that one survivor doing? What are the ten survivors doing? That's what I want to know. If I want to become an Olympian in track or Olympian in judo or the top tennis player in the world, I don't model what the average person does or the failures do. I model what the exceptional people do. And nothing is ever guaranteed but I want to model this one outlier. That's the best in the world. The survivor. The successful author. Successful entrepreneur. The happily married person for 20 years. I want to spend my life modeling that. The anomaly. The exception. While all of science is focused on the middle. The second thing is that I want to spend more of my time studying healing. Should be simple enough right? But medicine is not the art of healing. At least the way most people practice medicine. I could go to a massage therapist. It could be an acupuncturist or it could be a physician. Most practitioners do not practice healing. Practice medicine. Which often means giving a therapy for an illness. Now that's fine and all. But if you look at for example modern cancer treatments, chemotherapy, surgery, radiation, now immunotherapies, there's very little done to support the strength of the patient going through the therapy. There's very little done to actually strengthen the person's body. And I know there's all kinds of reasons. Physicians don't want to give other drugs, herbs, supplements, probiotics while the patient's going through this. But almost all the therapy is designed towards redlining the immune system. That doesn't give the person very good chances of fully healing or recovering or preventing recurrence later. So I want to study the art of healing as it always has been for thousands of years. There's a Sir William Osler quote who was a physician that was something along the lines paraphrased that it's curious that all the really great physicians of history were free from the bondage of drugs. What is wellness, what is health, what is healing is very different. And so this doctoral research gives me a chance to study individual patients and how these people went about their healing journey as well as the physicians and the practitioners and healers that helped these people get back to that healing journey. Now ultimately we don't know if those therapies even helped with their remission. They could have been the one in a hundred thousand that it would have done that anyway. But like I said I want to focus on the anomalies and healing and understanding it through Chinese medicine is my third point. Because to me Chinese medicine is the most sophisticated model of health, disease and establishing that homeostasis, that balance again in the body. It is the oldest continuous medical tradition maybe along with Ayurveda and to me the fact that it is so clinically efficacious that it works is mind-blowing in terms of its level of experience and sophistication and pattern differentiation and individuality within each patient. It's mind-blowing the level of depth and understanding of wellness and this is clearly a mistreatment with medicine. This is the proper treatment. These are signs you've done too much. We don't really talk about that in modern medicine. So that's why I want to dedicate my life to the mission of traditional or classical Chinese medicine and studying spontaneous cancer remissions. The hope that I can help each person going through their healing no matter what it is understand that miraculous healing is always possible. There's a rare chance, a small chance but it is always possible and unless people know that it is possible most will never even try and may just resolve to die or to give up or not even bother trying because their physician told them these are the stats. It's just not possible. The physician doesn't know that. No one does. That's between you and God. Whatever you want to call that being, that presence, that unknown factor, the force of nature that unifies everything on the planet and everything in the universe. So besides that deep and passionate rant I'm gonna be sharing a little bit of my doctoral research here as I do it over the next year but I think that is why this is such an important topic. Even though spontaneous remission is rare I still think this is very very important to study and to do.