Radical Remission: Surviving Cancer Against All

Odds
Guest: Dr. Kelly Turner

The purpose of this presentation is to convey

information. It is not intended to diagnose, treat, or cure
your condition or to be a substitute for advice from your
physician or other healthcare professional.

Alicia: Welcome, everyone. Alicia Lynn here from

AliciaLynnDiaz.com. And I’m so excited to welcome you to this very special
episode of The Soul of Healing Summit because, today, we’re talking with Dr.
Kelly Turner. And as you know, I felt called to put this summit together to
help you harness the power of your mind, emotions, and spirit to create
radical self-healing.

And today, Dr. Turner is going to be sharing with us her wealth of information
on cancer research in those areas. And she’s going to be talking on the topic of
radical remission, surviving cancer against all odds.

And Dr. Turner’s a researcher and psychotherapist who specializes in

integrative oncology. She’s the New York Times bestselling author of the book
Radical Remission, which covers the nine key areas that these thousands of
radical remission cancer survivors all had in common. It highlights the
research that backs that up. And shows you how you can harness these
factors in your own healing journey.

So it’s such an honor to have you here Dr. Turner today, welcome.

Dr. Turner: Thanks, Alicia. I’m happy to be proud of your summit. Congrats
on putting it together.

Alicia: Thank you so much. So what inspired you to write the book Radical
Remission? And how would you define what radical remission is?

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Dr. Turner: Well, I guess it makes sense to start with a definition because
that’s what sort of inspired me to do the research. But the definition of a
radical remission is any statistically unlikely cancer remission. So typically
what that means is someone who heals from cancer without any western
medicine whatsoever. Or after western medicine has done all that it can and
then they’re basically sent home to die by their doctors, but then they turn it
around.

So these are people who are literally healing in ways that medicine can’t
explain. So that’s what a radical remission is. In the medical field, it’s known
as spontaneous remission. But we can talk about that later. And the reason I
was inspired to study them is because nobody else was.

So I was a psychotherapist for cancer patients. I was counseling them, very

much enjoying my job and my life. And then I came across one of these cases,
where a stage IV cancer patient was sent home on hospice and he was alive
and well, cancer free 20 years later.

And I just sort of froze. And I said, “What the heck is going on here? How did
he do this?” And later that night, I went home and found that there were over
a thousand of these cases documented, verified in medical journals. And I
had, one, never heard of them. And, two, it was very clear that nobody was
studying them in depth.

And so that’s what inspired me to actually go back to school for my PhD. And
look at these thousands of cases in depth. And ask them the questions that
the doctors weren’t asking them. So the doctors were saying, “Oh, this person
came back. They got well. Here’s my case report. I don’t know how it
happened.”

And I was just sort of like, “That’s not a good enough answer for me. I want to
hear what these people have to say,” especially as a psychotherapist, I was so
accustomed to asking people, “Well why do you think you did that?” and
“What was your motivation?” Like it almost helped that I wasn’t a medical
doctor, because I was able to come to these cases with a really inquisitive
mind. I wasn’t threatened by them. They didn’t threaten the dogma of medical
cause and effect.

So I really was able to find these people. And from a very curious point of view
say, “How do you think you healed the stage IV cancer? Tell me everything.
Like I am so curious.” And no one had really ever asked them that question.
Certainly not their doctors, unfortunately. So it was a really fascinating
research. And I’m happy to simply the messenger of it.
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Alicia: So incredible. So did you have like a hypothesis of why when you were
going into doing all these interviews? Because I know you took a big chunk of
time out of your life to go interview over a thousand people that you were able
to find these studies on, right? Or, sorry, these case reports on.

Dr. Turner: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I haven’t done a thousand interviews yet. I have
analyzed over a thousand cases but many of them are written up. But I have
done over 250 in depth interviews now. And yes, I did take a full year out of
my life to go all around the world to try to find these people and to find their
healers.

So did I have a hypothesis? In this type of research – so I’ve been trained –

when I got my PhD, I was trained in both quantitative and qualitative research
methods. But quantitative research method, which is sort of like the gold
standard of research is what you would use in the randomized controlled trial.

Those weren’t appropriate for this phenomenon because you can’t do a

controlled trial until you have a hypothesis to test. So, no, I didn’t have a
hypothesis. Nobody had a hypothesis. Nobody knew why these people were
getting well. And that was the problem. You cannot conduct randomized
controlled trials until you have a hypothesis to test. And the issue with these
spontaneous remissions, what I call radical remissions, is that nobody had
any idea as to why they were happening.

So what was required in order to begin to study this phenomenon wasn’t

quantitative methods, but rather qualitative methods. And when you employ
qualitative research methods, the rule is you don’t have a hypothesis. You’re
supposed to go in truly as a blank slate, as a tabula rasa. So you’re supposed
to ask open-ended questions. You’re not supposed to be testing anything. But
we’re human, right? Even researchers are human. And of course I had my
own personal hunches. And I tried not to share those with people or even hint
at them.

But yes, I certainly had hunches that these people were probably changing
their diets. They were probably taking some sorts of herbs and supplements.
And then I thought that they would probably be reducing stress and
exercising. So those were my personal hypothesis going into these. And some
of those turned out to be true. And some of those turned out to be not true.

Alicia: So yeah, I know we could go really in depth into – it’s a whole science
in and of itself, right, to go into the physical and the herbs and all of that. And
I know you’ve spoken quite a bit on all of the nine keys. But I love today, just
to understand, it was really fascinating to learn that seven out of those nine
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keys were actually the mental, emotional, spiritual factors that – and I think
that even quite surprised you perhaps, at least in your book. I remember you
being like, “I didn’t think it was going to be that many.”

So yeah, and it’s just interesting because I feel like so much of the health and
holistic health culture these days really focuses a lot on the physical and
medical intervention practices. And I’m not against those in any way.

But it just seems like there’s a lot of missing information on how do I distress?
How do I go into releasing repressed emotions? Or how do it access a higher
connection or a deeper connection with myself or with source? And I just was
wondering if you could speak a little bit to the seven out of those nine that
were more on the subtle and...

Dr. Turner: Absolutely, yeah. And just to give people some context that they’re
listening in, I didn’t find just nine things that these people were doing. I found
over 75 different things that they were doing to try to get well. But not
everybody I interviewed was doing all 75. They were all, however, doing these
nine. So that’s how I got to the nine. I guess that there were 75, but not as
many people were using the 10th factor. And then even fewer were using the
11th and so on.

So when I looked at, “Okay, what is everybody doing?” So, we’ve got a lot of
things going on here, right? Some people are climbing mountains. Some
people are hanging upside down. Some people are eating frog legs. But what’s
everybody doing? And they were all doing these nine factors. Only two of
which are physical, as you point out.

So yeah, it really surprised me that seven of the nine were mental and
emotional. Until I sat down and thought about it a little more and said, “Okay,
say you’re a stage IV cancer patient. You’re very sick. You’ve tried everything:
chemotherapy, radiation, surgery. You’re sent home on hospice care.” Really,
the only physical things that you have to intervene on are what you’re eating
and that includes supplements, vitamins and stuff that you’re putting into
your body.

Many of these people were too sick to even exercise. So that’s one of my
hypothesis as to why exercise was not part of the nine. It’s because they were
simply too ill to be exercising at that point. They all exercise now by the way.
So exercising is good. But when you’re that sick and you can barely even put
any food into your body, the only thing left that you have is your mind and
your emotions and your spirit.

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So one of the people I studied, Shin Terayama from the chapter two of my
book, Taking Control of Your Health, which everybody loves his story as they
should. It’s amazing. But he was sent home on a wheelchair with a feeding
tube. So there wasn’t much he could do. But he could ask his wife to push his
wheelchair to the elevator and go up to the roof to watch the sun rise. And he
noticed that, that made him feel better.

So even when you’re literally on death’s door, you can do things in the mental,
emotional, and spiritual realm that can make you feel better. Not just
emotionally, but actually physically. These mental and emotional changes do
have physical repercussions. And I think that’s a really important point for
people to understand. And this isn’t just a hypothesis, this is scientifically
proven, right?

So what we think and what we feel directly changes the hormones that are
being released by the master glands in our brain. And those hormones are so
powerful. They flood our blood stream. And they instantly tell yourselves
whether to repair or whether to stop repairing and deal with the stressor,
right? So your hormones tell your body instantly, whether to stay in fight or
flight mode or move into rest and repair mode.

And we know, scientifically, that depending on the hormones that are released
by the master glands, your immune system will either start working really well
or it will just go on pause. So this idea that your thoughts and your emotions
and the way you perceive life and your spiritual practices can actually help
your physical body is a scientific fact. Because you’re changing your
hormones, which then tells your immune system to activate or not.

So there’s nothing to debate there in terms of mind-body connection. It’s a

fact. It’s there. And it’s really powerful, more powerful than, I think, many of
the people I interviewed ever could’ve imagined. So, yeah, there are these
seven mental, emotional, spiritual factors. And we could talk all hour about
each one of them. Is there any one in particular you wanted me to start
discussing?

Alicia: Let’s start with suppressed emotion. It seems like a hot topic there.

Dr. Turner: Absolutely. Absolutely. And notice that I chose to call it releasing
suppressed emotions as opposed to releasing negative emotions. And I was
basing that, again, off of what my interviewees were telling me. So what they
were talking about was, in order to help your immune system, it’s important
to release things that you’re holding on to. That can be positive or negative.
Anything that you’re gripping, right? Any emotional memory. Any emotional
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feeling like anger or jealousy or sadness or grief. Anything that you’re holding
onto and isn’t leading you, so that you can just return to the sort of empty
state of peace. Anything that’s filling you up and kind of clogging your system.
And I’m using their words. Again, I’m just a researcher, so I’m just a
messenger. This is the language that they used.

And then when of course when I talk to their alternative healers, and I know
that you’re an Ayurveda practitioner, the healers talked about how emotions
can clog the energy systems and clog the meridians or the – what is it in
Ayurveda? The nadis, right?

Alicia: That’s right.

Dr. Turner: Right. So that this idea that having these stuck emotions, over
time, literally can lead to stuckness in the physical body, as well. And that’s a
theory at this point. That, we haven’t proven in western medicine yet. But it is
a part of every traditional medicine system, from Ayurveda to traditional
Chinese medicine to the Kahuna healers of Hawaii.

All the different healing systems that I studied had this belief that if you have
blockages on the emotional, mental, spiritual levels, if they’re left over time to
be stuck as blockages, they will lead to physical illness – physical blockages,
right? And what is a cancer tumor? It’s a blockage of cells. It’s this buildup.

And that’s how cancer kills you in the end. These tumors just get bigger and
bigger and they start to sort of pushing out your organs and making it so the
organs don’t have room to do what they’re supposed to do.

So releasing suppressed emotions came up over and over again. And the most
frequent emotion that people talked about releasing was stress. But then there
were also sort of more subtle ones and even deeper ones because once you
release the stress, you can find out, “Okay, what’s underneath there, right?”

So once you get more work-life balance. And get more exercise and more sleep.
And maybe improve things at your job or get a better job. Or improve things in
your marriage or get a better marriage. Once you get rid of that stress, what
left underneath there is usually stuff from the past. So old anger, old trauma,
old grief. And those are sometimes harder to unbury, really. But it was
thought to be critical from the people I interviewed to unbury that. Even
though there was a resistance often of people to, “Oh I don’t want to go hash
all that up again.”

Well, you kind of have to. Because it’s sort of like, if you have – here’s an

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analogy, if you have a pan that has your eggs from five days ago, your
scrambled eggs, right? And they’re crusted all over the pan. You may not want
to scrape and hash all that up. And you might just be like, “Oh, I’ll just cook
over it.” But eventually you’re going to have to scrape that stuff off in order to
get a clean pan. That’s sort of a crude analogy.

But when it comes to your deep emotional history and your wounds, you
really do have to scrape that stuff up. And you might have to relive it and re-
feel it in a way. But you need to do that, according to radical remission
survivors, in order to actually finally release it. In order so that it doesn’t stay
stuck on your pan. Or in terms of cancer, stuck in your body.

So let me give you a good example of this. So one of the people that I
interviewed was this woman and we’ll call her Emily. And she was diagnosed
with advanced cervical cancer, I believe it was, I have to check my notes. It
wasn’t ovarian. Yeah, it was cervical. And she had an immediate
hysterectomy. But it was stage III, so it had gone beyond the uterine wall. And
so they wanted chemotherapy to start as soon as she recovers, like two weeks
after surgery.

And so she had two weeks to try to work on this herself. And she had a very
strong intuitive feeling that her cancer diagnosis was a result of this very
nasty divorce that had gone on for the past few years. And so she spent those
two weeks, not just recovering from the physical surgery, but working deeply
on releasing the anger she felt towards her ex-husband. And releasing the
hurt and the sadness and the fear of loneliness and all these things that
divorce had brought up in her. And she worked really hard for these two
weeks.

And she’s a Reiki practitioner. So she did Reiki. She did journaling. She cried.
She burned things in a fire ceremoniously. All these stuff. And she went back
two weeks later, they did a scan to see where her cancer was. And it’s typical.
They usually do like a CT scan before a chemo so that they have some kind of
a before picture to work on. And all of her cancer was gone.

So usually it doesn’t happen that quickly. And of course, we can’t say for sure
that it was her emotional work that allowed the cancer to go away. As a
researcher, I have to admit that it could’ve been a result of the surgery or
something like that. An immune response that came up because she had
surgery or something. But at least according to her and according to her
intuition, she feels that it was very, very necessary to release that anger and
that hurt and that sadness in order for her to fully heal.

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So it just came up over and over again, the importance of releasing these old
emotions. And then some healers even got into specifics of saying, “Depending
on where the physical blockages, that will give you a hint as to what the
emotional blockage is.”

So for example, in traditional Chinese medicine, the lungs are where grief is
processed. So if you have a lung tumor, there might be some grief there that
you haven’t processed. And again, it’s not saying that the grief caused the
lung cancer. It could’ve been toxins that started that.

But according to traditional Chinese medicine, if you’re exposed to toxins that

your lungs are supposed to process out, and your lungs are not working
properly because they are burdened by grief, energetically. Then yes, the
toxins cause the cancer. But so did your not-so-healthy lung system. Does
that make sense?

Alicia: Absolutely.

Dr. Turner: So it’s about not putting blame anywhere. It’s about getting your
system to work optimally. And according to the people I study and to their
alternative healers, your system doesn’t just work optimally based on reducing
toxins and increasing vegetables. Your system also must work optimally on an
emotional and spiritual level, because those layers of ourselves are all tied to
each other.

So you could have the perfect diet. But if you’ve got 50 years of resentment,
you’re probably going to get some sort of blockage that eventually appears in
the physical level. So when you’re working on healthy lungs, you of course
want to make sure don’t live right next to a freeway or an airport and
breathing in all that particulate matter.

But that you’re also making sure that you don’t have years of buried grief in
your system. For example, sexual trauma from the past can often come up in
your second chakra according to these traditional medicine systems. And that
down near your reproductive organs.

Some traditional medicine systems believe that breast cancer is related to sort
of over nurturing or lack of nurturing, because these are the organs of
nurturing, of providing milk. So you either you don’t feel nurtured by your
family or you're over nurturing to others and therefore not nurturing yourself.
And again, these are just theories.

But they are helpful to think about where – especially when you’re in a

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situation where you’re like, “I’m eating everything correctly. I’m doing all the
exercise. Physically, I feel like I’m doing everything I can. But my numbers still
aren’t moving.”

That might be an invitation to meet with someone like yourself or a therapist

or a traditional Chinese medicine practitioner to figure out, “Well, what might I
be holding emotionally in my body?” and, “What if I try to release that?” Maybe
that would finally get all of these systems flowing, including our immune
system. I feel like I’m going on and on, is this helpful?

Alicia: This is fantastic. Yeah.

Dr. Turner: Okay.

Alicia: Yeah. And you know one of the things I just want to point out that as
you were sharing, you mentioned with that woman’s story, something about
intuition. And I know you speak about intuition in the book. So I’m curious,
we kind of have this idea that our bodies know what to do to heal. But
sometimes we have a hard time trusting that. And I just want to invite that
key into this conversation.

Dr. Turner: Absolutely. Yeah. Intuition did turn out to be one of the top nine.
I mean, everybody I interviewed was using their intuition to some degree. Now,
there is a danger in everything, right? If you only eat kale and that’s all you
eat, you’re going to poison yourself. And if you only live on intuition and don’t
think about things like paying your bills, you’re going to have a problem.

So I’m certainly not here giving the message that, “Oh, they only followed their
intuition and they never listen to a doctor ever again.” That’s not what radical
remission survivors do. What they do is they let their intuition take a place at
the decision-making table. And usually, in our current conventional medicine
system, your intuition is not only not invited to come to the table, the
decision-making table, it’s actually thought of as untrustworthy and woo-woo
and nonscientific.

And I have to admit that I had that bias as well. When I came into this
research, I thought, “Okay, yeah, it’s good to listen to your gut. If you feel like
someone’s behind you, turn around and look.” But when it comes to curing
your cancer, let’s not go on gut feelings. And that was my own personal bias
that I had to swallow in silence interview after interview after interview,
because it just kept coming up.

And because I’m a researcher by nature, once I started realizing this was

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turning out to be a very, very frequent factor in my research, as a scientist, I
needed to know why. I needed to know how this could possibly be showing up
over and over again. So I started looking into the research on intuition. And
that’s what finally made me, personally, feel more comfortable with this
finding. Because the finding itself made me a little uncomfortable at first. I’m
like, “I can’t publish this. This is embarrassing, like intuition is going to help
you cure your cancer. What?”

But then I looked at the research. And I was like, “Oh my gosh. Wow.” The
human body, in its mind, body, spirit, everything, continues to amaze me. I
mean that’s incredible. So intuition is part of our bodies. It’s located in the
back of your brain. Back here reptilian part of your brain. And it’s also very
much connected to your gut. So what I found in the research is that we have
two very distinct parts of our brain. We have the reptilian part of our brain
and then we have the frontal cortex.

So the frontal cortex is where we think and make to do list and worry. And the
back of our brain doesn’t think. It acts. It decides. And it’s intuitive. And it’s
instinctual. And its whole purpose is to save our life. So that is the part of our
brain that back when we were hunters and gatherers, we used it all the time.

So back then, our ancestors could feel just like animals can feel when a
tsunami was coming or when a hurricane was coming or when there was a
bear lurking in the bushes. So that heightened awareness that you get when
your survival is at stake is a part of our brain that we’re all born with.

But luckily, for most of us living in the United States, that part of our brain,
not for everybody, there are plenty of people here in the United States who do
not live in safe conditions, and that part of the brain is active and turned on
all the time. But for most of us, it’s turned off. Until you hear the words you
have cancer. And once you hear those words, which are equivalent to a death
sentence, in our society at least. That part of your brain lights up and says,
“What? Death threat? Oh, okay, I’m, going to turn on now. That’s my
department.”

And what scientists have found is that these two parts of your brain, they are
mutually exclusive for the most part. So if one is on, the other one is off,
which is why people say, “I was diagnosed and I felt like my brain shut off and
I couldn’t process anything else the doctor said.” I mean how many times have
we heard that? I guess I’ve heard it a lot as a counselor.

But it’s true. The front of your brain is shutting off and the back of your brain
is turning on. And that back of your brain is suddenly turned on and talking
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to you and telling you what to do first, second, and third. And that’s why it’s
so important that we let this intuitive voice that really turns on when we
perceive we’re in danger, right? If you tell – I have a two-year-old and he
doesn’t even know what the word cancer means. If I told him today, “Oh,
honey, you have cancer.” Which he does. We have cancer cells. All of us have
cancer every day in our bodies. He’d be like, “Okay.” I mean that’s like me
saying, “Oh, honey you have a bump on your arm, you must’ve gotten bit by a
mosquito.” It means no different to him.

But as we are inculcated into the society, we learn that cancer is this big scary
death-threatening thing. And that’s why that part of your brain lights up when
you’re diagnosed with cancer. So, scientifically, it now makes sense to me why
everyone I interviewed is talking about having these gut feelings, hearing this
voice, having a strong hunch that they just needed to do this first, meaning, “I
need to go back to church and I need to refine my connection to God in order
to get through this,” or “I need to leave my job, my job is killing me.” Whatever
that voice was telling them, they listen to it because it was – it felt urgent and
it felt instinctual. And guess what? It is.

We have this life saving instinct that kicks in. And it’s really important to
listen to it. And modern science takes that inner wisdom away from us.
Modern medicine says, “I’m the doctor. I went to school for ten years, you
didn’t. So let me tell you about your body.” Well, with cancer, it’s a little tricky.
Because western medicine doesn’t really know what caused that cancer and it
also doesn’t really know how to definitively cure it.

Now, I always say in every interview I do. I’m not against western medicine.
I’m not against chemotherapy, surgery, and radiation. I just happen to study
people who heal without those things. And I believe firmly that we have
something to learn from those people. So what’s cool about the nine factors
that I uncovered in my research is that they can all be done right alongside
chemo, surgery, and radiation.

Some people may choose to do them separately or sequentially. That’s up to

them. That’s not up to me. But all I’m here to say is, this is what these people
did. And following their intuition was absolutely one of the things that
everybody did. And we can talk about – I don’t know if you want to talk more
about research behind intuition or like ways to access your intuition. But it
certainly is – it’s just a fascinating finding for me.

Alicia: Yeah. It’s interesting that as you were bringing up intuition and
connecting it to the reptilian part of our brain. Usually, we would associate
that with only being able to be in survival or make survival decisions. And a
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lot of time, intuition is talked about from the higher intuitive centers. Or at
least in eastern traditions, it’s talked about in a slightly different way. Yeah.
So it’s fascinating to hear like just this deep strong knowing of when we’re put
in kind of like a life or death situation, it’s like, ‘I know what to do’ kind of
thing. And so – go ahead.

Dr. Turner: Yeah. I’ve studied yoga, as well. I’m a certified yoga teacher. I
don’t teach anywhere. So I know the chakra system and then my husband’s a
traditional Chinese medicine practitioner. So I know about that system as
well. And I’ve some exposure to Ayurveda, as well. And I’ll just talk about the
yoga system, because that’s the one that I know. But intuition is very much
connected to the third eye, your sixth chakra right here.

And so, I’m like, “Well, how does the back of the brain, in western medicine,
which is where we’ve sort of found intuition, how does it relate to this third
eye?” Well, the pituitary gland is in the center of your brain, right? So if you
were to sort of drill directly back behind your third eye, you would get to your
pituitary gland. And certainly when I’m doing meditation and I focus on the
third eye, I feel this rush of energy up to there. But it’s not just like here on
the outside. It feels like it’s going in to my head, like straight back.

So I do think that there is some sort of connection between this intuitive

energy center, which they say focus on the third eye and the pituitary gland.
And then of course, the pituitary gland, it’s right in the middle of your head,
and then sort of just below that. So if you were to draw like a line from here
through your head, what you get to back there is the reptilian brain.

So sometimes when I visualize it in my own meditations, I visualize sending

energy to this intuitive center energetically. And I feel like if I can just bring
energy there, it will just go into my pituitary gland and I’ll tell the pituitary
gland what to do. And then it will also signal back to that part of the brain.

So it feels like that this access is sort of connected for me in my personal

meditations. And certainly many of the radical remission survivors that I
interviewed talked about the third eye and opening that up. Because there’s a
difference between fear and intuition. And it’s a subtle distinction. But
intuition can be dealing with a fearful topic. But the way that it deals with it is
definitively.

It’s like when you have a fearful voice, it’s like, “Oh, my God. I’m going to die.
What’s going to happen? Oh my God, my children. Oh my God, oh my God.”
That’s fear talking to you. When intuition is talking to you about a fearful
topic, it’s saying, “Get out of your job.” It’s not saying, “Oh my God, I got to
© 2016 AliciaLynnDiaz.com (Sacred Uprising, Inc.). All rights reserved. 12
quit my job,” it’s saying, “Get out of your job.” And at least that was the
distinction I heard in my interviews was, of course there are moments of fear.
Of course, there are sometimes months and weeks of fear.

But that intuitive voice will kind of cut through the fear and give you an
instruction, a command. And certainly, when I’m not in fear and I’m just
meditating, when intuition comes to me, maybe through my third eye area or
whatever. There isn’t fear attached to it. It’s just sort of like a present. A
present of information. Or a present of inspiration. Or a present of something
to think about. Or something in my meditation, I usually call so and so. And I
don’t know why, but it’s just a command “You should call so and so.”

And so I reach out to that person. And they were like, "Oh, it’s so funny, I’ve
been thinking about you. I want to work together with you on my new project.
What do you think?” So that intuitive voice, yeah, came up over and over
again.

Alicia: And did you say you had – was there any research kind of showing this
access or another…?

Dr. Turner: Oh, the access the third eye and the reptilian brain? No. That has
not been proven yet. That’s my own hypothesis of how to sort of merge these
two viewpoints, right? The conventional medicine viewpoint of, “Okay, we can
see that the brain lights up back here.” And we know that the pituitary gland
changes in what it releases. But the western medicine hasn’t really done too
many clinical studies on the third eye.

Although there have been some studies that show that when you meditate –
when you ask meditators to focus on the third eye, their hormonal output
does change. And again, that’s showing a connection between focusing on the
third eye and having your pituitary gland spew out different hormones.

So we’re getting there. But in general, conventional medicine isn’t doing tons
and tons of studies on the third eye yet. It was actually really hard for me to
find studies on intuition. It’s not something that scientist are really studying.
There are wonderful places like The Institute of Noetic Sciences, which is
based in San Francisco. And they are trying to study things like intuition,
prediction, predicting the future, that sort of thing.

But yeah, it was hard to find actual studies, especially ones that are related to
health. There have been a lot of studies on intuition in the field of psychology.
So people trusting their gut when it comes to buying a home or buying a car.
There’s been lots of studies on that, ironically. But when it comes to trusting
© 2016 AliciaLynnDiaz.com (Sacred Uprising, Inc.). All rights reserved. 13
your gut as to, “What should I do to treat my cancer?” Those studies just
simply haven’t been done. It doesn’t mean it’s not important, it just means
that studies haven’t been done yet.

Alicia: Yeah. One of the things that you mentioned about the intuitive voice
being this commanding voice, more definitive voice, versus the meanderings of
the fearful voice. Was the commanding voice and that aspect of intuition
something that, when you interviewed the radical remission survivors, was
this something that helped them take control back of their health? Because
that was one of the keys to is like.

And you mentioned it earlier, but I’d love to go a little more deeply into that,
because that’s a really empowering concept of reclaiming my power in the
healing journey.

Dr. Turner: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And that goes back to the point of doctors
usually dismiss intuitive voices or thoughts as untrustworthy. And so all the
power is taken away from your intuitive voice. But the radical remission
survivors that I study, they get to a point where they let their doctor take a
seat at the decision-making table and they let their own intuition take a seat
on the decision-making table.

And they are at the head of the table. So they’re the CEO of their health. And
the doctor gets to weigh in with his suggestions, “I think you should do this
and this.” Their acupuncturist gets to weigh in. Their therapist gets to weigh
in. And their intuition gets to weigh in.

And so this idea of taking control of your health, which was one of the nine
key factors, what I heard from survivors was this idea of them really taking
their power back from their doctors. The medical model that came up really in
the 1940s and 50s with the rise of surgery, that’s when doctors really became
experts.

Before surgery, homeopaths and chiropractors and doctor were on a level

playing field. It really wasn’t until, you can Google this, the Flexner report,
that the rise of the American Medical Association came about. And
homeopaths and chiropractors were considered quacks by the AMA. And they
were pushed down in terms of status.

And again, I have nothing against western medicine. But one thing that I
think they can get better is giving more power and validity to the patient
experience and to what the patient is going through. So certainly, radical
remission survivors stopped taking what their doctors were saying as absolute
© 2016 AliciaLynnDiaz.com (Sacred Uprising, Inc.). All rights reserved. 14
truth. And simply let it be one opinion or one suggestion. And then they let
their own intuition come to the table, as well.

Because your doctor could say, “We have to start chemo tomorrow.” But your
intuition could be saying, “That’s going to stress you out even more. What you
need to do is find a way to financially quit your job that you hate. Make sure
that you’re financially stable having quit your job. And then you can do
chemotherapy. But if you do chemotherapy next Monday like they’re telling
you, you have to, you’re just going to implode.”

And many people heard that intuitive voice and then they were able to say to
their doctor, “Thank you for your suggestion. I may do it later or I’m going to
need to do it in a month. But first, I need to do what my intuition is telling
me.” And so certainly this intuitive voice that often came up pretty strongly for
people gave them the courage to get more on an even playing field with their
doctors. Which is scary because you think, “Oh, they must know what’s going
on. They know better than I do.” But nobody knows your body and your
history better than you do.

Especially when it comes to things like emotional past. And I know that in this
summit that you’re so focused on this beautiful part of ourselves that many of
us don’t connect to our health. But if you have an emotional trauma from the
past. Whether that be unresolved grief. Or unresolved assault. Or unresolved
anger. Or unresolved heartbreak. Whatever it may be. If it’s unresolved, that
can impact your health really, really strongly.

And so it’s just as important to go to your chemo appointment and eat your
leafy greens as it is to work on that 20-year-old unresolved emotional issue.
Again, according to radical remission survivors, they would say those are all
equally important.

Alicia: And one of the things I remember seeing in your book was this idea
that kind of ties in to this topic of experiencing positive emotion and the three
different kinds of love. Can you speak to that?

Dr. Turner: Yeah. Again, this was something that came from the people I was
interviewing. So the three kinds of love. So the first is just sort of feeling
happy. Feeling joyful. Feeling love. Feeling happiness. Increasing your
happiness, your daily happiness. And you could do that with distraction. If
you’re mired in fear all day, you can watch somebody’s latest standup comedy
video. And you can distract yourself out of that. And give yourself this sort of
feeling of love.

© 2016 AliciaLynnDiaz.com (Sacred Uprising, Inc.). All rights reserved. 15

Then there is a love that you receive from others. So feeling loved by other
people. Having it come towards you. Accepting it. Being able to accept it. Some
people are like, “Oh I can go make myself happy. I can take myself out for a
fun day. I can do things for myself today, for me, that will boost my
happiness.” But then when someone gives them a compliment, they’re like,
“Oh, no, no, you’re crazy.” And they can’t receive that love. So there’s the love
that you generate in yourself by giving yourself a ‘me’ day or doing things that
bring you joy.

Then there’s a love that you receive from others. And being able to receive love
can be very hard. Especially if you have years of self-doubt or trauma that
makes you feel unsafe or this feeling that you can allow yourself to be helped
because that will make you weak. There’s a lot of things, emotional things,
that can keep people from that second kind of love, where you’re receiving
love.

And then the third kind of love is a love that they talked about in a very
different way. Which is what I called spiritual connection. But some of them
called divine love or source or god, whatever you want to call it. This third type
of love they always talked about as being very deep in the sense that they felt
it very deep within their being.

And they described it as something that was, once they were able to access it,
it was unconditional. It was there. It just embraced them. And it wasn’t your
friend embracing you. It was this – and again, I hate to use religious words,
because I know some people really get turned off by it. But they described as a
spiritual or divine. Feeling of being loved by the divine. By something that was
unconditional and bigger than the universe.

There was no end to it. It was never going to go away. And in fact, it was
always there. They just have to sort of drill a hole down to it and reach down
and touch it. And that was an analogy I used in the book because it was an
analogy one of the healers used. Which was imagine that we’re walking on this
earth and you feel so disconnected and you feel so thirsty. And realizing that
you actually don’t have to be thirsty because a foot underneath the ground,
underneath you at all times, is this sea of drinkable water. And all you need to
do is take the time to stop. And drill down. And sip your water.

And that’s how people described this spiritual connection, which is one of the
other nine key factors. They described it as taking time to connect to
something. We can call it divine energy, if you want. Connect to this divine
energy that’s actually always present. But if you don’t take the time to dig a
hole and put your straw down and drink that water, you’ll get parched. You’ll
© 2016 AliciaLynnDiaz.com (Sacred Uprising, Inc.). All rights reserved. 16
start getting sick because your body actually needs this connection, this
energy in order to feel it’s best.

And that was a really interesting way for me to sort of visualize spiritual
connection. Other people talked about it as recharging their batteries, right?
So we can go, go, go, go, go. But if we don’t actually stop and recharge our
batteries every once in a while, in term of radical remission survivors, they
would say daily, you’re going to burn out and you're going to break down.

So this idea of spiritual connection isn’t something that’s optional according to

radical remission survivors. It’s necessary on a daily basis in order for them to
keep their bodies cancer free. And again, that’s according to them. But based
on all the research behind what spiritual connection practice can do to your
immune system, I would say it’s not a bad suggestion. In fact, it’s probably
one we should all be doing.

It’s hard because our society doesn’t value it. It’s hard for me. Like during my
research, I spent a month in India and I was meditating two hours a day. That
is the most I’ve ever meditated. And I was like, “I’m going to come back. This is
changing my life. I’m a new person. I’m going to keep this up.” And here I am,
a mother of two and I can barely find five minutes a day to make that
connection. But at least I know now how important it is.

And that when I start feeling ran down or sick, I don’t just go to the doctor
and ask for medicine, not that I did that before. But I know that one of the
first things I need to do is recharge.

Alicia: So you actually got to – you did have research on how a spiritual
practice or however that shows up for someone impacts the immune system
and just the total health and body function.

Dr. Turner: Oh my gosh, there is so much. Everyone listening, go to

pubmed.gov. And just type in “meditation cancer.”

So the disclaimer here, “Meditation is easier to study than prayer.” I have

nothing against prayer. I think prayer is incredibly powerful. But from a
scientific standpoint, it’s a little harder to study someone praying, because
they’re usually praying to a God or for somebody else. Whereas meditation is
something that you just start doing to yourself. And so it’s a little easier to
control the study of that.

So when we look at prayer studies, they’re kind of ambiguous. When we look

at meditation studies, they’re crystal clear. And it’s not that meditation is

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better. It happens to be better suited for a testing environment. But loads of
studies that show – my favorite one, shows that people who have never
meditated, who started meditating 30 minutes a day. After eight weeks –
again, they have meditated before, after eight weeks of half an hour a day,
they’ve turned off their cancer genes. Think about that for a minute. They
have turned them off, okay?

So this isn’t just about increasing your white blood cells or your natural killer
cells. And there’s plenty of studies out there that show that. Meditation equals
more natural killer cells. But this and a few other recent studies have shown
that meditation can even turn off your onco genes, your bad cancer genes.

So if you’re worried and you think that, “Oh, I’ve inherited this gene. There’s
nothing I could do.” There is something you can do. You can do a spiritual
connection practice like meditation. And after eight weeks, there’s a strong
chance that you’ll have turned that off like a light switch.

Alicia: That’s incredible. Very helpful.

Dr. Turner: And very empowering.

Alicia: Yeah. Right. And like you said when you’re in a place of being so
depleted, sometimes all you have left is your mind. And you have control or at
least access to every single moment of the day. Yeah, thank you for sharing
that.

Dr. Turner: You’re welcome.

Alicia: Now, I know we’re kind of wrapping up here. But I do have another
question for you.

Dr. Turner: Sure.

Alicia: Because we were able to touch all the keys, except for the strong
reasons for living. And I’m curious what role living a purposeful life and really
feeling like, “I’m here on this planet doing what I was born to do.” Like what
role that does have in health or in healing cancer?

Dr. Turner: Well according to radical remission survivors, it has a very

essential role. According to traditional medicine systems, it has everything to
do with life force, what’s called qi in Chinese medicine or prana in Ayurveda. If
you have a purpose…Or it’s dharma right, in Ayurveda? I’m hopeful I’m
getting that right.

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Alicia: You got it.

Dr. Turner: Your dharma, your life purpose, what you feel called to do, sort of
from that place when you were a kid and you’re like, “I just want to do this for
a living or when I grow up.”

That calling of what you want to do, according to traditional medicine

systems, it pulls life force into your body. And the idea for that is that once
you ran out of life force, according to these traditional systems, that’s when
your body dies. And so if you want to keep the body alive, you need to keep
bringing life force into it. And one of the ways you’d do that is by focusing on
why you want to be here, right? When you no longer have reasons for being
here, your life force ebbs. It leaves your body until it’s all gone and that’s when
your body shuts down.

From the western standpoint, conventional medicine, what we found is – now,

no one has done studies on, “Do you have strong reasons for living and does it
help your cancer?” But there have been tons of studies on depression. So one
of the classic definitions of depression is not having a will to live, right? So
what we found, scientifically, is that when you take cancer patients and some
of them you treat their depression and the other – so you take a group of
depressed cancer patients, some of them you treat it, other ones you just leave
alone.

The ones you treated their depression, lived significantly longer. Sometimes up
to two times as long. So simply by working on this depression, which includes
the will to live, we are increasing survival time. And this has been done in
controlled trial. So this isn’t just observational. These are clinical trials. By
treating the depression and working on getting people to focus on why they
want to be here, why they want to get out of bed in the morning. You will
statistically lengthen your survival time with cancer.

So that’s pretty powerful to know. And there’s some wonderful – obviously,

there are different ways to treat depression. But even if you’re not depressed
but you feel sort of lost as to, “Whoa, why do I want to stay here on this earth?
Why do I want to get out of bed in the morning?” There’s some wonderful
exercises.

And actually there’s one in my book. It’s a three-part exercise that I think is
one of the quickest and easiest ones to sort of get right to the root of it. To
figure out what really does light you up? And I use that word because when
you’re lit up, you have qi, you have life force in you. And that’s according to

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radical remission survivors and their healers, you need that life force in order
to stay alive.

Alicia: Awesome. Wow, this is such empowering information. And I literally

could’ve gone down so many different tangents as I’m sure you could have as
well. And just thank you for this. Thank you for dedicating your life to this
path and for sharing so generously with us and everyone.

Dr. Turner: Well, you’re welcome. It’s my pleasure. I’m just a messenger of
these amazing radical remission survivors. And if anyone listening knows any
radical remission survivors, I’m still continuing my research at
radicalremission.com. So they can go there and submit their case, their
healing story in 10 minutes or less. And that’s really important because we
need to know about them and we need to learn from them.

Alicia: Awesome. I’m so glad you’re doing that. Thank you. And just any last
words of encouragement that you have for our audience trying to reclaim their
power on their healing journey?

Dr. Turner: I guess I would say, especially in line with your summit, don’t
underestimate the importance of tending to your emotions and your spirit. So
many people think that, that’s not as important to your health as the physical
stuff. But according to the people I study, it’s as important if not more
important. So don’t tend to that last. Tend to that first or at the same time as
you’re working on diet and herbs and all that other stuff.

Alicia: Awesome. Thank you.

Dr. Turner: You’re welcome.

Alicia: Wow. Thank you so much. Thank you, everyone, for joining us. I want
to encourage to visit Dr. Turner’s website, drkellyturner.com as well as
redicalremission.com. And yeah, you can learn more about her work and
check out the book, I highly recommend, Radical Remission.

Just thank you so much for joining us, everyone. This has been Dr. Kelly
Turner and Alicia Lynn Diaz with The Soul of Healing Summit. Take care.

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