Mistletoe

On Cancer

Unbekoming

Dec 23, 2023

Handing over our health and our bodies to people who see us as a profit source is the wrong move. – Lori
What’s worse, most of the Radical Remission survivors I began talking to said that their doctors, while happy for them, often had no interest in hearing about what they had done to get better. – Radical Remission by Kelly Turner
I attribute the power of fever, or hyperthermia, or saunas, or any warmth therapy to its ability to heal cytoplasmic gels that for whatever reason have become poisoned, distorted, and dysfunctional. – Cancer and the New Biology of Water by Thomas Cowan

Radical Remission by Dr. Kelly Turner

INTRODUCTION

anomaly noun: Something that deviates from what is standard, normal, or expected.

You have probably heard a story like this: A person with advanced cancer tries all that conventional medicine has to offer, including chemotherapy and surgery, but nothing works. She is sent home to die but five years later strolls into her doctor’s office, healthy and cancer-free.

When I first heard a story like this, I was counseling cancer patients at a large cancer research hospital in San Francisco. During my lunch break, I was reading Dr. Andrew Weil’s book Spontaneous Healing when I came across a case of what I call Radical Remission. I froze, confused and stunned. Had this actually happened? Did this person really overcome advanced cancer without using conventional medicine? If so, why had it not been on the front page of every newspaper? Even if it had happened only once, it was still an incredible event. After all, this person had somehow stumbled onto a cure for his cancer. The men and women I was counseling would have given anything to know this survivor’s secret—and so would I.

Intrigued, I instantly began trying to find other cases of Radical Remission. What I found shocked me. There were over a thousand cases in print, all quietly published in medical journals, and yet here I was, working at a major cancer research institution, and this was the first time I had ever heard of one.

The more I dug into this topic, the more frustrated I became. It turned out that no one was seriously investigating these cases, nor were they making any attempt to track them. What’s worse, most of the Radical Remission survivors I began talking to said that their doctors, while happy for them, often had no interest in hearing about what they had done to get better. The final straw for me, though, was when a few of the radical survivors told me that their doctors had actually asked them not to tell any of the other patients in the waiting room about their amazing recoveries. The reason? So as not to raise “false hope.” While it is certainly understandable that these doctors would not want to mislead their patients into thinking another person’s healing methods might work for them, it is quite another thing to silence completely these true stories of healing.

A few weeks later, a counseling client of mine broke down in tears while receiving her chemotherapy. She was thirty-one years old, with young toddler twins, and had recently been diagnosed with aggressive stage 3 (out of a possible 4) breast cancer. Through her sobs, she pleaded with me: “What can I do to get better? Just tell me what to do. I’ll do anything. I don’t want my children growing up without a mother.” I watched her sitting there, exhausted and bald-headed, with her only hope of recovery dripping slowly into her veins. And then I thought of those thousand-plus cases of incredible, radical recovery, which no one was investigating. Taking a deep breath, I looked into her eyes and said, “I don’t know. But I’m going to try to find out for you.”

That was the moment I decided to continue on for my Ph.D. and dedicate my life to finding, analyzing, and—yes—talking about cases of Radical Remission. After all, if we are trying to “win the war on cancer,” doesn’t it make sense to talk to those who have already won? In fact, shouldn’t we be subjecting these amazing survivors to numerous scientific tests and asking them every question we can think of in an attempt to find out their secrets? Just because we cannot immediately explain why something happened, that does not mean we should ignore it—or worse, tell others to keep quiet about it.

The example I always use is Alexander Fleming, a scientist who chose not to ignore an anomaly. As the story goes, in 1928 Fleming came back from vacation to find mold growing in many of his petri dishes, which was not surprising to him given his long absence. He began sterilizing the dishes, figuring that he simply needed to start his experiment over. Thankfully, though, he decided to pause and take a closer look, and this is when he noticed that all the bacteria in one particular dish were dead. Instead of ignoring this anomalous dish and dismissing it as a fluke, Fleming chose to investigate the matter further—and doing so led him to the discovery of penicillin.

This book shares the results of my ongoing research into the Radical Remission of cancer. It is the outcome of my decision not to ignore these anomalous cases but rather do as Alexander Fleming did: take a closer look. However, I will first give you a bit of my own background, so you can better understand where I am coming from and what inspired me to dedicate my life to this topic.

MY STORY

My experience with cancer began when my uncle was diagnosed with leukemia when I was three. His disease was a long, drawn-out process that lasted five years, casting a shadow over our family gatherings and making all of us young cousins incredibly afraid of that mysterious illness called “cancer.” He eventually died when I was eight, leaving my nine-year-old cousin fatherless. That’s when I learned that daddies could die of cancer.

A few years later, when I was only fourteen, a close friend of mine was diagnosed with stomach cancer just after our eighth grade graduation. In shock, our small Wisconsin town instantly rallied around him, boosting him up with numerous pancake breakfast fund-raisers and hospital visits. Some of my friends were hopeful, but I could not ignore that feeling of dread deep inside my stomach. After all, I had seen this before. Following two long and side-effect-filled years, my friend died at the age of sixteen. Our entire community attended his funeral, and over the next few years, my other friends and I would go to his grave site regularly to leave flowers. His death taught me that absolutely anyone could die of cancer, at any time.

While earning my undergraduate degree at Harvard University, I was introduced to complementary medicine, yoga, and meditation for the first time. These strange practices and ideas made me start to question my previously held beliefs about the mind and body being separate, and I slowly began to practice yoga. Four wonderful years later, my first job after Harvard was to coauthor a book on global warming, and I suddenly found myself sitting behind a computer all day with none of the social interaction I had enjoyed during college. When a friend suggested that I address my isolation by volunteering, the first idea that popped into my head was to help cancer patients, no doubt because of my early experiences with it.

I still remember my first day volunteering in the pediatric wing at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. All I did was play Monopoly with some children who were receiving intravenous chemotherapy, but the depth of meaning I felt by helping them forget about their disease for a few hours was truly life-changing. I knew I had found my calling, and after a few more weeks of volunteering, I was already researching graduate school programs. I attended the University of California at Berkeley for my master’s degree in oncology social work, with a specialized focus in counseling cancer patients.

While attending graduate school, my interest in complementary medicine deepened, leading me to read many books on the subject and complete an intensive yoga teacher’s training course. I spent my days counseling cancer patients and my evenings studying and practicing yoga. At that time, my husband was earning his degree in Traditional Chinese Medicine (acupuncture, herbs, etc.) and also studying an esoteric form of energy healing, so I was surrounded by examples of complementary medicine. It was during this time that I read Andrew Weil’s book, which changed the course of my life by introducing me to what Weil calls “spontaneous healing” and convincing me to continue toward my Ph.D., so I could study this fascinating topic in depth. From that point on, I have devoted my life to discovering what people do to overcome cancer against all odds.

WHAT IS RADICAL REMISSION?

In order to understand what Radical Remission is, it is helpful first to think about what is considered “standard” or “non-radical” remission. A doctor expects cancer to go into remission if it is caught early enough and is one of today’s more “treatable” cancers. For example, if a woman is diagnosed with stage 1 breast cancer, she will be expected—statistically speaking—to be cancer-free for at least five years, as long as she completes the recommended medical treatment of surgery, chemotherapy, and/or radiation. However, if that same woman is diagnosed with stage 1 pancreatic cancer, there is only a 14 percent chance that she will be alive in five years, even if she completes all the recommended medical treatment. This is because conventional medicine does not currently have treatments for pancreatic cancer that are as effective as those it has for breast cancer.

I define Radical Remission as any cancer remission that is statistically unexpected, and those statistics vary depending on the cancer type, stage, and medical treatment received. To be more specific, a Radical Remission occurs whenever:

a person’s cancer goes away without using any conventional medicine; or
a cancer patient tries conventional medicine, but the cancer does not go into remission, so he or she switches to alternative methods of healing, which do lead to a remission; or
a cancer patient uses conventional medicine and alternative healing methods at the same time in order to outlive a statistically dire prognosis (i.e., any cancer with a less than 25 percent chance of five-year survival).

Although unexpected remissions are rare, thousands of people have experienced them. I ask all oncologists I meet if they have ever seen a case of Radical Remission in their practice; so far, each one has answered yes. I then ask if they took the time to publish the case, or cases, in an academic journal; so far, each one has answered no. Because of this, we will not know how often Radical Remissions truly happen until we create a systematic way of tracking them. To help accomplish that goal, this book’s website—RadicalRemission.com—allows cancer survivors, doctors, healers, and readers like you to submit quickly and easily your cases of Radical Remission, which can then be counted, analyzed, and tracked by researchers. This database is also freely searchable by the general public, so cancer patients and their loved ones can read how other people with similar diagnoses managed to heal against all odds.

ABOUT THIS BOOK

When I first began studying Radical Remission, I was surprised to find that two groups of people had been largely ignored in the thousand-plus cases published in medical journals. The first group was the radical survivors themselves. I found it shocking that the vast majority of academic articles did not mention what the patients thought might have led to their remissions. I read article after article by doctors who carefully listed all the biochemical changes the Radical Remission survivors experienced, but none of the authors reported directly asking the survivors why they thought they had healed. I found this very odd, given the fact that the survivors may have done something—even unwittingly—that helped to heal their cancer. Therefore, for my dissertation research, I decided to find and interview twenty people who had experienced Radical Remission and ask them: “Why do you think you healed?”

The second ignored group in the research was the alternative healers. Because most Radical Remissions occur, by definition, in the absence of conventional Western medicine, I was surprised no one had studied how non-Western or alternative healers treat cancer. Many of the radical survivors I was hearing about at this time had sought out healers from all corners of the world; therefore, I traveled throughout the globe and interviewed fifty non-Western, alternative healers about their approaches to cancer. I spent ten months tracking down and interviewing alternative cancer healers in the jungles, mountains, and cities of ten different countries, including the United States (Hawaii), China, Japan, New Zealand, Thailand, India, England, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Brazil. It was a life-changing research trip that led me to meet many fascinating healers, and this book summarizes all that they shared with me.

Since that initial dissertation research, I have continued to find more cases and have now conducted over a hundred direct interviews and analyzed over a thousand written cases of Radical Remission. After analyzing all these cases carefully and repeatedly using qualitative research methods, I identified more than seventy-five different factors that may hypothetically play a role in Radical Remission, including physical, emotional, and spiritual factors. However, when I tabulated the frequency of each factor, I saw that nine of those seventy-five factors kept coming up again and again in almost every interview. In other words, very few of the people I interviewed mentioned, for example, the seventy-third factor, which is taking shark cartilage supplements, but almost every person mentioned doing the same nine things in order to help heal their cancer. These nine key factors for Radical Remission are:

Radically changing your diet
Taking control of your health
Following your intuition
Using herbs and supplements
Releasing suppressed emotions
Increasing positive emotions
Embracing social support
Deepening your spiritual connection
Having strong reasons for living

It is important to note that these are not listed in any kind of ranking order. There is no clear “winner” among these factors. Rather, all nine were mentioned just as frequently in my interviews, even though—as you will see in this book—some people tended to focus more on one factor than the others. Please keep in mind that the majority of the Radical Remission cancer survivors I study did all nine of these factors, at least to some degree, in their efforts to heal their cancer.

For the sake of organization, I have arranged this book into nine chapters that describe each of these factors in depth. In each chapter, we will first explore the main points of a factor, including taking a look at the latest scientific research on that topic. Then we will explore a complete Radical Remission healing story that highlights that factor. Finally, each chapter concludes with a simple list of action steps that, if you wish, you can take right now in order to start bringing these key factors for Radical Remission into your life.

BEFORE WE BEGIN

Before I share these key healing factors with you, I would like to clarify a few things. First, I would like to state clearly that I am not at all opposed to conventional cancer treatment, including surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation.

Just as I believe that most people need shoes to run a marathon, yet a select few have found a way to run twenty-six miles barefoot and healthfully, I similarly believe that most people will need conventional medicine to outrun cancer, while a select few have found ways to overcome it using other means. As a cancer researcher, I am simply dedicated to learning more about the latter group’s “training regimen,” in an attempt to find out how they achieved such an odds-defying feat.

This is what mainstream doctors that want to tell the truth need to do so as not to be booted out of civil society and not be condemned to self-publishing.
I can live with it. This content needs to be out there and passages like this are a small price to pay. It’s a political statement, not a medical one.
Also…
I reject the notion “that most people need shoes to run a marathon, yet a select few have found a way to run twenty-six miles barefoot and healthfully”.
That is a terrible analogy for this situation. That somehow “most people” are different from those that manage a “radical remission”.
If most people are given actually safe and effective protocols (instead of poison) then there would be nothing “radical” about their remission.
Anyway, it’s a political statement so I will move on.
Putting my misgivings about this statement aside. It remains an important book.

Second, it is not at all my intention to raise false hope by writing this book. Remember the doctor who did not want his other patients to hear about Radical Remissions? I sympathize with him, because facing a waiting room full of people who have little statistical hope of survival is certainly a daunting task. However, keeping silent about Radical Remission cases has led to something far worse, in my opinion, than false hope: no one is seriously investigating or learning from these cases of remarkable recovery. In my very first research class at UC Berkeley, I learned that it is a researcher’s scientific obligation to examine any anomalous cases that do not fit into his or her hypothesis. After examining those anomalies, a researcher has only two choices: she can either explain to the public why those strange cases do not fit into her hypothetical model or she can come up with a new hypothesis that includes those cases. Either way, there is absolutely no scenario in which it is okay to ignore cases that do not fit into your hypothesis.

“False Hope”. What the hell is that?
If you tell someone the probabilistic truth about one option versus another, there is nothing false about that.
“Chemo will give you X chance of survival and high dose Vitamin C will give you Y chance of survival…what do you want to do?” There you go, that wasn’t very hard and there was nothing false about it.
The problem is that no mainstream oncologist anywhere will utter that sentence.

In addition to it being scientifically irresponsible to ignore flat-out the people who have cured their cancers using unconventional means (especially when our shared and common goal is to find a cure for cancer), I would like to discuss the term “false hope.” Giving false hope means making people hopeful about something that is untrue or false. Radical Remission cases may not be explainable—at the moment—but they are true. These people did cure their cancer in statistically unexpected ways. That is the key difference to understand, so we can get over the fear of raising false hope and begin the process of scientifically examining these cases for potential clues on curing cancer. The nine key factors described in this book are hypotheses for why Radical Remission may occur; they are not yet proven facts. Unfortunately, it will take decades of quantitative, randomized trials before we can say for sure whether or not these nine factors definitively improve your chances of surviving cancer.

I did not want to wait decades before sharing these important hypotheses with you. Instead, I wanted to share the results of my qualitative research so we can begin a much-needed discussion about why these cases are being ignored and what they might be able to teach us. The only possibility for raising false hope would be if I were to tell you that you will absolutely cure your cancer if you follow these nine factors. I am not saying that. I am simply saying that, based on my research, these are the nine most common hypotheses for why Radical Remission may occur.

Now that I have made it clear that it is not my intention to raise false hope, let me tell you what I do hope for. First, it is my sincerest hope that other researchers will begin testing these hypotheses for Radical Remission as soon as possible. I also hope that cancer patients and their loved ones will be inspired by this book of true healing stories, just as I was when I discovered my first case of Radical Remission—that they will be comforted by the fact that some people really do recover from cancer against all odds. In addition, I hope this book will motivate people to continue searching for additional ways to optimize their health, whether they are looking to prevent cancer, are in the midst of receiving conventional cancer treatment, or are looking for other options because that treatment has done all it can. Most important, though, I hope this book will be the start of a much-needed discussion about Radical Remissions, so we can stop ignoring them and start learning from them.

WHEN IT COMES to cases of Radical Remission, we may not yet be able to understand why these people healed from cancer or why their techniques worked for them but do not always work for others. However, I firmly believe that if we put intense effort into studying these cases—instead of just ignoring them because we cannot explain them—then two possible outcomes will occur: at the very least, we will learn something about the body’s ability to heal itself, and at the very most, we will find a cure for cancer. Neither of these outcomes can occur, however, if we continue to ignore cases of Radical Remission. After all, where would we be if Alexander Fleming had ignored the mold in that one petri dish? As history has shown us, studying anomalies is not an unproductive use of time. On the contrary, studying anomalies has historically led to tremendous breakthroughs—and that’s where real hope lies.

Which now brings us to mistletoe.

Here is a short section from Cowan’s great book on Cancer.

Cancer and the New Biology of Water by Dr. Thomas Cowan

Mistletoe

Our ﬁnal plant is the undisputed king of natural cancer medicines: mistletoe. No other natural medicine has such a long history of usage (over a hundred years), clinical trials, and basic research as does mistletoe. Clinical usage and research unequivocally demonstrate that mistletoe use for cancer is safe, extends quality of life when used in clinical trials with cancer patients, successfully treats pleural eﬀusions1 that result from lung cancer, improves survival in patients with stage 4 lung cancer, and improves survival in patients with stage 4 cancer of the pancreas. In addition, in some cases mistletoe use can result in remissions, such as remission in a patient with non- Hodgkin’s lymphoma or a patient cured of cancer that had metastasized to his skull. Installation of mistletoe extracts in the bladder of patients with bladder cancer has been associated with improved outcomes and occasionally full remission. And scores of published papers document the mechanism by which mistletoe extracts have a positive eﬀect on all markers and parameters associated with the cancer process, including one in particular comparing the mechanism of action of mistletoe extracts with that of Coley’s toxins. Without a doubt, mistletoe extracts should be considered settled science in the annals of therapeutic interventions that improve the outcome for patients with cancer. The questions that I wish to address are: What is mistletoe? How does it work? And how does it ﬁt in with my central thesis that cancer is fundamentally a problem of the cytoplasmic water?

As a side note, Monica Hughes has written extensively about Coley’s toxins. Here.

In more than thirty-ﬁve years as a practicing physician, I have treated almost all of my cancer patients, numbering in the hundreds, with some form of mistletoe. This has given me a lot of experience with how to use mistletoe and what we can expect from it. Experience has taught me that while I still consider mistletoe therapy the backbone of any holistic cancer treatment, it’s not perfect. I also hope to make clear the reasons mistletoe cannot be the end of the line in cancer treatment but rather is a useful step along the path.

Generally, my experience with mistletoe is that patients who, usually as a result of surgery, have no active disease (on scans) will have a very favorable outcome as a result of mistletoe use. The melanoma patient I described earlier in this chapter who used chaga mushroom to such positive eﬀect is alive, well, and free of disease four years following her recurrence. This is an extremely unusual outcome for melanoma patients, and the outcome is probably also due to her use of mistletoe.

Another patient originally consulted me about her situation with osteoporosis and back pain that developed following her conventional treatment for an aggressive fallopian tube cancer. After a recurrence of the cancer in her lymph nodes and pelvis, she was treated with radiation and ended up with a lot of back pain and spinal fractures. As she described it: “Several fractures in my spine led me to my ﬁnding Dr. Thomas Cowan. Through natural substances he healed my bones in a matter of weeks. He asked me what I was doing about my cancer. I replied, ‘Nothing. I hope it is gone.’”

Generally, this is a situation where the cancer would usually return, so to be proactive I suggested she start mistletoe therapy. She was ﬁne for years until, as is often the case, her physician husband had his own health crisis. The stress in her life, along with stopping the mistletoe therapy during a hectic time, coincided with a return of cancer in her lung. At the time, a surgical debulking procedure was performed and she was told her prognosis was poor. In spite of this, she refused chemotherapy and restarted mistletoe. Now, almost two years since that procedure, she continues on her mistletoe therapy and is alive and well. Her friends and doctors refer to her as a miracle patient because, in spite of her poor prognosis, she seems to be ﬂourishing and living an active, disease-free life.

The principle is simple: If you are able to remove the original tumor, mistletoe therapy can be a safe, eﬀective, and easy-to-administer long-term follow-up strategy. A prominent surgeon was diagnosed with a malignant cancer of the kidney. He had a successful surgery that obtained clear margins, but unfortunately a follow-up PET scan showed increased activity in a lymph node next to the aorta. This lymph activity is often a sign of a poor prognosis, and his consultation with an oncologist was not reassuring. He was told he had three to ﬁve years to live whether or not he underwent chemotherapy, as chemotherapy is known to not work well for this particular type of cancer.

This patient, however, had many years of contact with physicians based in Germany and to his surprise many of his physician friends urged him to eschew chemotherapy and try mistletoe therapy instead. He contacted me, we started mistletoe therapy, and he has used it as a stand-alone therapy ever since. At his ﬁve-year diagnosis “anniversary,” a follow-up PET scan revealed that he is free of disease. As of this writing he is alive, well, fully active in his life, and grateful for the choice he made ﬁve years ago.

Occasionally, there are cases with very poor prognoses after surgical removal of a tumor but in which long-lasting, almost miraculous recoveries occur. I had an acquaintance who was the young mother of four children when she was found to have stage 4 colon cancer with a large metastasis to her liver, a diagnosis that carries an extremely poor prognosis. She was treated by a friend of mine with the support of an oncologist at Johns Hopkins who realized that conventional chemotherapy had little to oﬀer her. The amazing sequel to this story is that now, ten years free of any disease, almost unheard of in this situation, she is spearheading the ﬁrst clinical trial of mistletoe therapy in the United States. Here is her story:

Every day I am ﬁlled with such gratefulness for the gift of healing I received in overcoming stage-4 colon cancer that statistically gave me a less than 8% chance of surviving. I attribute a large part of my healing to mistletoe. I was the very same age and had the very same type of cancer that took my father’s life, my grandmother’s life, and half of her siblings as well. Discovering that the survivorship of stage 4 colon cancer with metastasis to the liver was less than 8%, my husband, Jimmy, and I made the decision to forgo chemotherapy and radiation, as it would not have increased my chances of survival. On the conventional side, I had incredible surgeons who removed the cancer from my colon and liver, and I had a great oncologist who was willing to monitor me with scans and blood work even though I was not going to follow his standard protocol of chemotherapy and radiation. I wish there were more oncologists and physicians … who are humble enough to work with their patients when considering a patient’s desire for a more complementary or holistic approach. On the complementary side, [my doctor] changed my internal environment to ﬁght any remaining cancer after surgeries with a plant based diet, homeopathy, cancer ﬁghting supplements, and Mistletoe injections. I had faced, fought and overcome cancer.

What is mistletoe’s story and how does it work to help cancer patients? Well, we all know the story of mistletoe’s connection to Christmas. The birth of Jesus is a story of light breaking through at the darkest time, a story of hope and overcoming our toughest challenges. Mistletoe, unlike most “normal” plants, is present in the Christmas story because it has liberated itself from the usual ﬂower-in-the- spring, fruit-in-the-summer rhythm to hold oﬀ the ripening of its berries until around the time of the winter solstice, the darkest time of year. Mistletoe is a semi parasitic plant, getting its nutrients from the sap of the trees it parasitizes. It grows in a circular form, much like a tumor growing on our internal organs, equally in all directions. Mistletoe is undiﬀerentiated; all parts of the plant—root, leaves, ﬂower, stem—are morphologically about the same, which is again reminiscent of the undiﬀerentiated primitive growth habit of the typical cancer mass. If you look at a tree “infected” with mistletoe, it looks like a tree with multiple tumors; as with chaga and its host the birch tree, until very late in the infection, trees with mistletoe seem to thrive. Mistletoe is the picture in nature of the coexistence of undiﬀerentiated growth with its host. It reminds us that this is not, as Nixon proposed, a war on cancer, but is a journey of coexistence. It seems that until we learn that vital concept, we are destined to promote a warlike consciousness and to have cancer be a major player in our culture. Mistletoe demonstrates the way out of this primitive and destructive mind-set, a mind-set that forms the foundation of our modern approach to oncology. We want to kill everything that is not us. In attempting to do so, we destroy ourselves.

When Rudolf Steiner, the ﬁrst person we know of to propose mistletoe as a medicine for cancer, was asked “What does mistletoe do?” he gave two answers. The ﬁrst was that mistletoe simulates a bacterial infection. The second was that mistletoe is the medicine to heal the etheric body. The ﬁrst of these responses makes me wonder if Steiner, who was not a medical person at all, was aware of work going on at that time with Coley’s toxins and other attempts to treat cancer by provoking febrile responses in patients. Coley was developing ways to avoid giving his cancer patients infections like erysipelas and pneumonia and instead simulate the fevers that accompany these infections with toxins derived from diﬀerent bacteria. The infection is not the therapy; the body’s ﬁght to overcome the infection is the therapy. Speciﬁcally, fever with its inherent stimulation of the innate or cell-mediated immune response from an immunological point of view has been one of cancer’s greatest healers for centuries. Mistletoe therapy, given at the correct dose in the proper manner, can and does stimulate this fever response in sick patients. This has been and will always be a main therapeutic approach to the problem of cancer.

From the perspective of the cytoplasmic water and cancer connection that is the basis of this book, I attribute the power of fever, or hyperthermia, or saunas, or any warmth therapy to its ability to heal cytoplasmic gels that for whatever reason have become poisoned, distorted, and dysfunctional. As a result of this distortion they can no longer generate the energy needed to run the life of the cell; they are no longer able to create the separation of charge from the inside to the outside of the cell; the cell loses its energy, clumps together, and undergoes transformation into a cancerous growth. Anything one can do to heat the gel and allow it to cleanse itself through fever in order to reconstitute a more healthy cytoplasm is in the direction of healing. Mistletoe, through its stimulation of warmth in the human organism, helps toward this end.

Steiner’s etheric body, the ﬂuid or water part of the human organism, was also referred to as the formative force or the life force of the organism. The etheric body is exactly what is missing in that heap of chemicals that comes from a carrot (chapter 3). The carrot is a combination of these chemicals, along with a formative, water-based body or force that imbues it with life. According to Steiner, when this life, this water body, is ill at its extreme, that is what we call cancer. Mistletoe, he said, is the medicine that can begin to heal this etheric body of the ill patient. (That, in a nutshell, is the point of this book.) When we combine these two perspectives—the more metaphorical understanding of Steiner and the research showing mistletoe extract as an immune stimulation, cytotoxic (kills cancer cells), apoptosis-promoting medicine —we can see that mistletoe is well placed to take its rightful role as a centerpiece of any true cancer therapy. However, mistletoe is also a gentle medicine, which means that it is often not enough.

To some extent this is due to the tentativeness of modern doctors to stimulate high fevers in their patients. We can do this with mistletoe injections, particularly given intravenously, but it is a dramatic therapy that not all doctors are willing to prescribe and not all patients are willing to undergo. The lack of eﬀectiveness of mistletoe could also be due in part to the preparations themselves. There are currently about six brands of mistletoe available worldwide. Each has its proponents and detractors; none is as immunologically active as I would hope. In chapter 12, I give precise instructions on how to use mistletoe injections, including the type of mistletoe that I have found most successful. And, ﬁnally, while mistletoe is undoubtedly a medicine for the etheric or water body, I propose that in conjunction with its use we also need to examine the nature of the water itself in the cell. In other words, we can stimulate or encourage all we want, but at some point we need to look directly at the intracellular water as well as attempt to understand and harness this actual etheric force to which mistletoe is pointing us. It is to these important areas that we turn our attention next.

Lies are Unbekoming

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