Why does cancer just go away? Cancer research clearly needs to change direction. Perhaps, as Professor Goodwin suggests, one avenue might be to explore the mechanisms of spontaneous remission.

Indeed, peppered throughout the medical literature are accounts of seemingly advanced, even ‘terminal’, cancers that inexplicably and suddenly disappeared. Just before his untimely death in his 40s, medical researcher Brendan O’Regan collated over 1000 case histories of apparently ‘miracle’ cancer cures - without any obvious medical, or indeed divine, interventions (Spontaneous Remission: An Annotated Bibliography, Sausalito, CA: Institute of Noetic Sciences, 1993).

What this shows is that spontaneous regression of cancer is not a miracle, a fantasy or fluke. It is a biological reality suggesting that there may well be a switch to turn cancer off. However, if cancer research fails to change its course, medicine will continue to fumble for that switch in the dark.

Tony Edwards