The Spontaneous Regression of Cancer — The Amazing Story & a Reality Check From Experts

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“The cancer just went away with an alternative treatment.” “I went for a special regimen in Germany.” Those are the phrases many of us with cancer dream about. They are also huge red flags for established oncologists.

And yet spontaneous regression of cancer is a documented phenomenon. The noted National Cancer Center researcher Dr. Steve Rosenberg told SurvivorNet he spent decades trying to understand the apparent disappearance of cancer in people who don’t undergo traditional treatments — especially after he witnessed the phenomenon in a patient of his own.

Kathryn Doherty was diagnosed with invasive breast cancer. Her doctor told her that she needed to have a mastectomy to survive, but her gut was telling her that surgery really wasn’t the route for her. We’d like to preface her story by saying that all the cancer experts we collaborate with at SurvivorNet caution against pursuing alternative treatments instead of standard protocols. Methods of alternative medicine that have not been proven by science may sound appealing, but they can be dangerous.

In Kathryn’s case, she said she felt like she needed to follow her gut. “I went to a cancer clinic in Germany, I was there for three weeks. I did three hypothermia treatments. I did infusions of all kinds. I started juicing,” Kathryn explains. “…As of my last blood work, I asked my doctor: am I stage zero? And he said, you’re actually NED — no evidence of disease.”

When speaking to SurvivorNet about exceptional responders, Dr. Elizabeth Comen explained that while these stories about people being cured do exist, people need to pay attention to hard science.

“There are these tremendous stories of radical remissions where patients maybe had an infection and they were cured of their cancer,” Dr. Comen said. “There should be dedicated studies that show they were diagnosed with cancer A, there was a biopsy of that cancer that proved what they had. They received whatever treatment that they got … and that they were followed up for years and years and years and they still didn’t have that cancer. That’s what it takes.”

Kathryn ended her story by saying she wouldn’t recommend the route she took to another person dealing with cancer, but in her case … it just felt right.

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