Understand The Healing Factors In Radical Remission Research

Karla Mans Giroux

Thank you. I appreciate it, Dr. Karlfeldt.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

I am intrigued. Tell me more about your story. Tell me what you did. because, for people who are diagnosed with cancer, it is such a scary word and you feel powerless. You are looking then for tools to be able to overcome this fear and then to be at a place where, for seven years, there has been no evidence of disease. That is amazing.

Karla Mans Giroux

Yes. I am very blessed. My story starts back in 2003 when I was 37 years old. I had a two-and-a-half-year-old and a five-year-old, and I got a breast cancer diagnosis. It was stage three. I went through chemotherapy and radiation after the mastectomy, and then five years of Tamoxifen. Every year that I got away from that diagnosis, I felt better and better. At five years old, I was feeling good. Certainly, after ten years, I felt I was out of the woods. This is good. It is done. But unfortunately, it metastasized to the bones. 11 years after that original diagnosis. Now, I did not know any better in 2003, and I just went back to my busy career and my two-year-old and my five-year-old. I did not know that I could, should, or might have made changes that could have helped me. I do not dwell on that much. I do not want to look backward; I like to look forward. 

I just decided I was going to do everything I could to change what I could and what was within my power to change so that I could overcome this diagnosis and make that 100th birthday that I have always had a goal to make healthy and sane, by the way. On that diagnosis of metastatic breast cancer, it had metastasized to bone, and it was hips, pelvis, ribs, spine, and clavicle. It was everywhere. There might have been tiny spots in the lungs, but I could not tell for sure. The biopsy of the bone was inconclusive. It was kind of hard to do, but they put me on the same treatment. Or they put me on treatment for the same type of breast cancer I originally had, which was hormone receptor-positive or negative. I responded immediately.

I immediately made changes to my diet and to my lifestyle. I had a very busy, stressful, global job, and I immediately took a medical leave of absence to focus on myself and my health. Those changes, along with the hormone-blocking drug that I started taking, did arrest cancer. I was diagnosed in late November, and by January I was noticing the symptoms were receding, and certainly by my three-month scan, the cancer was stable. Again, more receding because the symptoms were completely gone. Initially, the cancer was growing in such a way in the bone that it was pinching a nerve, and that numbness and falling were not happening anymore. That was good news, and I had not found the book Radical Remission yet, but it became one of the biggest help for me because I did hire a cancer coach in the beginning. I did change my diet, look at stress, and look at other things that I had control over. But when I found The Radical Remission book in about 2016, I went through the chapters, and the table of contents and said, Check, check, check. I have done these things. This is great. But there were a couple of these healing lifestyle changes—these factors that Dr. Turner and I researched—that I had not delved into yet and did not know that they could be beneficial. I continued looking into it and continued to work on changing my lifestyle as much as I could because I did believe my body could heal. But they needed to change the environment in which the cancer grew.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Tell me a little bit about Dr. Turner. How did she come up with these principles? What were they based on?

Karla Mans Giroux

Yes. Dr. Turner was doing her Oncology Social Work Degree at the University of California, Berkeley, and she ran across one story that grabbed her because she was feeling bad about all of the people she was working with who were dying from their diagnoses. When she ran across the story of Shin Terayama, who was a Japanese man who had kidney cancer and had gone on to be labeled a spontaneous remission, she got curious. She wanted to know what he did, and why are we not studying them. As she started to dig in, she found that there were a lot more people who had spontaneous remissions. She dug in, and she started to do the research. This was her PhD research, which was funded by the American Cancer Society. She traveled the country—not even the country—but the world for a year, collecting stories and interviewing people. Of the 1500+ people that she interviewed, talked to, surveyed, etc., these ten, what we call healing factors, were common among every single one of them. She found about 75 different healing factors. But these ten were common among every single one of these individuals who were labeled as having spontaneous remission. She decided to call them radical remissions because she knew there was nothing spontaneous about them. These people did my hard work.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Yes, exactly. Spontaneous is just when you activate what I think is the true doctor, which is the doctor that exists within us, that innate intelligence that we all have. I am curious, though, about these factors—were they all different types of food? Were they, and how are you thinking? What were some of these factors? What areas did they cover?

Karla Mans Giroux

Yes, it covers three different main categories. The physical factors, as a lot of people immediately go to let me change my diet, let me look at exercise, and let me look at herbs and supplements. Then there is the category of emotional, and that would be getting social support or increasing your social support. That means embracing the love and support that you get by asking for and receiving help. Also, having a strong reason for living is important for releasing suppressed emotions and increasing positive emotions. Then there are the spiritual factors. Spirituality follows your intuition. I feel I am forgetting one, and empowerment. Being empowered to be your advocate, many of us, those who certainly have an older age, look at doctors as authority figures and just follow doctors’ orders. They do not understand that you have power within and should be empowered to be your advocate. Do your research and make your own decisions. We call it being the CEO of your health.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

People that you coach and that you work with are searching out the radical remission project. What are the commonalities that you see? These are things that people tend to have challenges with that they may not think of.

Karla Mans Giroux

I find that everybody has thought of diet, and everybody wants to focus on diet. They want to focus on the physical, tangible things. That is only one of ten of these healing factors. A lot of the folks that I work with now have not even thought about releasing suppressed emotions. That is about releasing things that we are hanging on to from the past, hanging on to, and wishing that things were the way they used to be. I used to be a ballerina, but now I cannot do that anymore. But I am angry about it or upset about it, and I have not given up on it. I want to be that ballerina. It is a little bit of that. Memories are not a bad thing, but nostalgia can be a bit of a problem if you keep wishing you were somewhere else in the past. You need to be here in this moment, present in your life. People do have a little bit of a hard time wrapping their heads around that one. We tend to dig in on that.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

That is, in going back to that empowerment, because you do not have a focus of power unless you act from a place of the now, if you act from a place of the past, you can change that other than your attitude about it. Bringing in your energy to the now, it falls along with being the CEO of your health, where you are not just going to give away your body to a doctor here; please fix it. But you have to work on it yourself, knowing that you are the one and that you are the locus of power.

Karla Mans Giroux

Exactly. That is true. In Dr. Turner’s original book, Radical Remission, which came out in 2014, the factor was called Taking Control of Your Health. When she came out with her second book, Radical Hope, in 2020, she changed the title to Empowerment: Being Empowered. She felt we could not have control over everything. A better title would be, To be empowered.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

I love that. Letting go of the past, but then you all talked about bringing in when we get to remove space or get rid of toxic emotions or negative emotions, but then we need to fill that space with something else. Otherwise, we will just attract more negative emotions after we have done the detox.

Karla Mans Giroux

Well, for those of us with a diagnosis, it is hard to get away from the negative thoughts. The fear is going to be there. The anger, the frustration, and the anxiety over all aspects of treatment and overcoming a diagnosis—we have to recognize that we are humans, and all of those feelings are going to be there. But it is important to increase our positive emotions and make sure that every day, even if it is just for as little as 5 minutes a day, we feel love, happiness, joy, whatever gratitude, anything positive, is going to release a flood of those happy hormones, those beneficial hormones. When we look at all ten of these healing factors, they are all supporting our immune system. They are all about building more of those good hormones, releasing more good hormones into our bloodstream, and putting us into that relaxation state in repair and rest mode instead of fight or flight mode. The cancer diagnosis puts us in a fight-or-flight mode, and it is hard to get back out of it. Making sure that we can get into relaxed mode is important. All of the survivors conveyed to Dr. Turner that it was a muscle that they needed to work out; they treated it as a daily workout. Let me make sure I get my increasing positive emotions in each day.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

That is a key. Just what you were talking about. Most people are aware of diet, but it is still challenging for people diagnosed with cancer to dial in the appropriate diet. But we know that let us say, broccoli is a cancer-fighting food, and they eat broccoli. They are getting those nutrients, and that becomes a daily habit. But you are saying that the emotional component is such a key, and that is a nutrient that you continually have to have as a habit to ingest daily. In addition, later on, we will go into the spiritual as well. Yes.  That is, yes, we get to develop these patterns as lifestyles to achieve the goal we want to achieve.

Karla Mans Giroux

Absolutely. Well-said. Yes. Just a real quick on the diet. There is not one diet that Dr. Turner found that everybody followed. What the commonalities were, however, was greatly reducing or eliminating meat, wheat, sweets, and dairy and increasing the vegetables and fruits so that you are eating more real food, more plants, less processed foods, and other possible carcinogenic foods.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Yes, that is great. Yes, let us go through the three physical ones. We have them on a diet. Yes. As long as we focus on things that bring nutrients to the body, support the body’s healing mechanisms, and then remove the ones that subtract from them, in regards to then, you have the section on exercise as well. Were there certain exercises that were better than others, or what did you find there?

Karla Mans Giroux

What did she find there? It is interesting because in the first book, Radical Remission, this was not a factor. Later, she went back and looked because she looked at the independent research and other studies that say how important exercise is to reducing your risk, overcoming treatment, or reducing your risk of recurrence. She wondered, Why did this not come up before? In the first book, many of the people that she talked to had been sent home to hospice after conventional treatment failed them. Others were taking a completely alternative approach, but many of those people could not exercise it in the traditional sense of the word. They were not running marathons anymore or going to the gym and lifting weights. But what she found when she went back through her research and re-interviewed me with these original survivors was that they all moved their bodies as much as they could when they could, and they continued to increase their movement and exercise. It was not, again, one type of exercise. It was just moving your body, getting the exercise, and focusing on doing a little bit more each day.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Yes, I love that. I used to tell my patients, my cancer patients, that, even if it is, you can walk to the bathroom once you try to do the trip twice and just push the boundaries just a little bit, that you are moving and try to gain more and more movement and stamina that way.

Karla Mans Giroux

Yes, it is about helping people change their perspective on it because it involves moving your body, not necessarily traditional exercise. Walking is a perfectly fine exercise to utilize. Having the perception that your daily activities are helping you is much better than thinking you have to get back to running marathons or lifting weights in the gym.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

I love that. Then you have the question in regards to supplements. that I do quite a bit, along with many other things as well. But supplements—were there any commonalities with that?

Karla Mans Giroux

Yes. Again, very individual. The supplements are individual. Everybody should be getting tested and assessed by a practitioner who can help them decide what they need based on their situation. Their commonalities among the radical emission survivors, there were three different categories: detoxifying types of supplements, immune-boosting types of supplements, and nutrient absorption to improve the absorption of the nutrients that you are getting and to make the most of them. Those were the three general categories within which all of the survivors were taking supplements. Not all of them started out doing all ten of these at once. It is not a silver bullet. Having that diet is foundational first. If you are eating well, then you want to put the supplements into play, not use supplements as an alternative to a good, healthy plant-based diet.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Then going into the emotions, we would talk a little bit about bringing in or letting go of nostalgia or living in the past and letting go of toxic emotions and then bringing in good emotions, things that bring you joy, gratitude, those types of things. What are some of the other emotional factors that you mentioned?

Karla Mans Giroux

Yes. Having strong reasons for living is a big one, and that is one we should start the workshops with first, because if what your strong reason for living is, if what your why is, why do I want to be here? Why do I want to work to overcome this? Then it makes doing the other lifestyle changes a little bit easier because you can keep going back to. This is why I am doing it, whether it is family, you want to see your children’s milestones or your grandchildren’s milestones, or you want to finish the book you started writing or the painting you started creating, whatever it is. It can be small things. Strong reasons for living do not mean you have to have fame and fortune to win the Nobel Prize. Once people can get a handle on what their strong reason is, it makes it easier to do the work of the rest of these lifestyle changes.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

How do people go about that? Because there are people there who are tied into, well, I am a dad; I am a husband. I am an executive. This is what I do, and they sometimes do not know why. Also, how would you explore that?

Karla Mans Giroux

Yes. When we do the radical remission workshops, we offer workshops that take people through all ten of these healing factors, not only teaching them a little bit about them and the research and scientific evidence that supports them but also giving them activities to help take them through it and figure out how they are going to implement it into their own lives. Then there is a game plan to help them figure it out. Okay, what are the steps I need to take? But when it comes to the activity around strong reasons for living, we are helping people to get clear on what is important to them. If you had all the time and money in the world, what would you do with it? Where would you spend your time? What would you focus on? 

Then the other half of the activity is to take away all that time and money and ask them again, What is important to you? Where do you want to spend your time, etc.? It helps people get clear. If I get to have all these grand ideas because I have been given all this money and time, and then you have them go back and forth, you only have a year. What would you do with the time that you have? It helps them get down to: Well, this is what is important to me and many people; family is important, but not everybody has family, and not everybody needs to have a personal reason. Karla wants to live to be 100 healthy and sane, just to say I did it, and that is aside from my two sons, my husband, and anybody else in my family.

Helping people uncover what is important to them, whether it is the volunteer work that they do, the fact that they are a writer or a painter, scrapbooking, or just wanting to travel and be able to list. I have hit 20 different countries in my lifetime, whatever they might be. It is helping people figure that out. There are more things that we can do. There are more things that people can do. Then, outside the workshop, once we start getting there, their thoughts go in and help them understand that. Then they can do that work either with a coach or by finding other resources that help you find meaning and purpose in your life.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

I love that. Yes. You get to have that driving factor, and if you do not have that, then yes. You just blow in whatever direction the wind blows. It is going to be important to have that anchor. Is there another emotional factor?

Karla Mans Giroux

That empowerment is the emotional factor. We talk about that: being in control, being empowered, and releasing increasing social support. Social support is not about how many people you have in your life to support you. Some of us only need one person; others of us need 30 people or have them and want them. Extroverts and introverts could be a little bit different. It is more about asking for, learning to ask for, and receiving love and support because we are good at giving love and support. But because of this idea in Western culture that we need to be independent, that we can do it ourselves, and that we do not need anyone else’s help, it is hard for people to ask for the support they need when they are going through a healing journey. I hear it all the time. It is hard for me to ask for help; I turn it around on people. I am. Well, do you enjoy helping your loved ones and friends? Of course, they do. They get such a good feeling out of helping me. Why would you deny your friends and family the chance to help? That helps a little bit. That gets them going. Then I ask them to make a list. What are the things that you feel need to be done but that you do not have time to do? Make a list of all the things that you need to do now. You need to put your focus on yourself.

The small errands and small chores, the little things, or maybe even the big things, research—maybe you have someone in your life who can help you with that research. Wouldn’t it be better to have them weed through it all and show you the positive stuff that you do not spin down swirling into a black hole because you just read me research that was not beneficial to your diagnosis? There are lots of ways that we can let people help us. People want to bring food; give them a recipe that is plant-based. Ask them to make that for you because it is going to help you and it is going to teach them how to eat healthier for themselves.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Yes, it is important to feel connected, and by doing these types of things, all of a sudden you recognize how many people are out there who love and care for you, and are able to open up and be filled with that energy, it just that in itself can melt away a lot of diseases.

Karla Mans Giroux

Absolutely. You may know this: the research tells us, aside from Dr. Turner’s research, that having social support is more beneficial than not smoking, not drinking, and not eating a bad diet. Not that we tell anybody to go ahead and do those things and get lots of friends. But loneliness is a bigger problem than smoking, drinking, and eating badly.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Yes. It is important to take that step out and reach out to people who want to love you. Yes.

Karla Mans Giroux

Yes.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Yes, and this is not the least, but the last. That we are going to talk about. That is the spiritual component. Why is that important? Because there are a lot of people who feel, well, cancer is a physical disease. Why would I need to bring a spiritual aspect to that?

Karla Mans Giroux

Yes, for holistic healing, you need the mind, body, and spirit involved. This is another area where people are a little bit, well, yes, why do I need this? But spirituality asks you to deepen your connection to whatever you believe in, whatever that higher power is, whether you want to call it God, the universe, the divine, or the goddess. You call it whatever you want to call it. What matters is having that connection—having that deep connection where you believe that there is something bigger than you and that you are connected to it and others—dare I say, oneness? In thinking about how we are all connected, that is bigger than any one of us individually. By having that spiritual connection, you can tap into something beyond yourself. You are not alone. You can then use that to build your faith, your belief in your healing, and your ability to get well and get through this diagnosis.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Yes, I love that. Yes, that is important. Are these the 10 to recover the 10?

Karla Mans Giroux

Along with spirituality, within that spiritual realm would be intuition. Following your intuition. It is learning to listen to that still small voice within, and, to me, people might call that voice within God or universal, but it is also about learning to hone your intuition and pay attention to what that little voice is telling you. For me, it is not a voice. For me, it might be a vision; for us, it might be just a thought that pops into our heads. A sign on a license plate that you just saw in front of you with an intuitive voice shows up for people in different ways. But it is important to tap into that because it can then help you make decisions about your treatment. Which doctors? The doctor is for you; which protocol is the protocol for you? Which diet’s right for you? There are many things on which you can use your intuition to help you make decisions. It does take practice.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

It is that power of resonance? Because every tissue, every disease, and every pathogen, have a certain frequency. To be able to do that, if you tune in to yourself and connect with that with who you are, and then you can then match that frequency that you need that you might be missing in your external environment and then feel that this diet feels good because you are connected with what is going on with then or this individual, this naturopathic doctor, this medical doctor, this healer, whoever it may be, they carry that frequency that will then resonate with what is going on within me.

Karla Mans Giroux

Yes, well said.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Are there ways that individuals can enhance this gift? Because there are a lot of people who, when they feel something, think something, or dream something, think, well, my question is that that does not seem real. That seems odd. I am afraid to go in a direction that just seems loony.

Karla Mans Giroux

Yes, they will brush it off. Although we’ve probably all heard stories about people who had a dream, a repeated dream, and finally paid attention to it, oh, my God, then they found out they had a diagnosis or whatever the dream was trying to tell them. There are ways. There are simple little things you can start to do, and we always ask people to just start practicing. When your phone beeps or buzzes, do not look at it and see if you can guess who is calling or texting you. If you are standing on a bank of elevators and there are three elevators, see if you can guess which one is going to show up. These are just little things you can do when you do get that kind of intuitive feeling, that dream, that feeling, or that thought. Take note of it, write it down, and track whether or not you acted on it, whether it came true or did not come true. By paying attention, we start to honor our intuition, and it shows up for us more. But if we are not paying attention, then we do not pay attention to our bodies. We do not feel things happening in our bodies. We do not know if that diet made us feel better or not because we are completely oblivious and busy on the hamster wheel of life. It is the same with intuition. Stop and notice it, journal about it, and write it down. Just track these little intuitive hits, and you get to see how they turned out and that you can trust them. 

The next time you get that little tingly feeling, that is my intuition, and I need to pay attention. You might be telling me something good. Use it when you are driving. If you are going, you go to the same place multiple times, but you have different routes for getting there. Ask yourself, Which way should I go today? I used to do this a lot. Invariably, if I did not pay attention and go that way, then I would be stuck behind a train, in a traffic jam, in an accident, or doing something I should have done that way. My intuition was trying to tell me that those little things can help us hone it. Another great exercise to do is to put a question on a piece of paper and put it under your pillow at night before you go to bed. What is the question you want answered? It is almost as if your intuition or your subconscious just cannot help but answer it. Now you have to listen. The next morning, when you wake up before you get out of bed, grab a piece of paper and a pen and write down everything that you can remember about your dreams, what came up for you, or what is coming up now. That is another way to hone your intuition by asking the questions and then stopping to listen, writing down the answers, and following the trail.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Yes, that is. That is great. We all know that if we have someone we talk to and they do not listen to us, yes, we talk less. Yes, we say, well, it is useless to try to communicate with them because they are not going to listen anyway, and our bodies are the same way. If we do not listen to our body, then the body says, Well, why should I send them signals or can I guide them? They are just not going to listen anyway.

Karla Mans Giroux

Well, the body will sometimes start screaming at you, and that is when you get the diagnosis.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

That is cancer.

Karla Mans Giroux

Yes, then the intuition. You stop paying attention to it. It is going to stop talking to you. Yes, tune back in.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Tell me some stories of people who have gone through the Radical Remission Project and how it has impacted them. This is a Cancer Summit. I know that radical remission is not just focused on cancer; it is focused on many other things. But would you mind just sharing a couple of stories?

Karla Mans Giroux

Sure. I would love to. Yes.  It is just to say that initially, the book Radical Remission was focused on people with cancer. Radical Hope opened it up to say that these ten healing factors are helping people with other diagnoses. Yes, when it comes to folks with cancer whom I have taken through the workshops, there have been great things that have happened for people. One woman who struggled with asking for help came up with the idea that “I do need healthy meals, but I cannot do it myself. I am not feeling well enough. I am in treatment.” She is the one who came up with the idea that I am going to give people recipes that I want to try. This helped her to be able to ask for and then receive love and support in the form of food. Others have worked on me because of these factors, but it was releasing suppressed emotions. I just could not get it.

What they learned, and I can think of one client in particular, was, What is the suppressed emotion that I do not know that I am suppressing? You may not have a suppressed emotion you do not know about, but we’ve all got trauma in our lives. Even so, you feel like you had a perfectly lovely childhood. The fact is, if you had a childhood, you have had trauma—the little things that happened to us—especially when we are young and do not know how to deal with it or cope with it. We put weird coping mechanisms into place when we are five or seven years old. But this person realized that they did not need to uncover the big trauma that they had suppressed. They just needed to recognize that there were traumas that the surgery that they had when they were children was a trauma to their body that they needed to recognize, except and just check in with, have I let that go? 

The breakup with a boyfriend at some point, the ugly breakup that she would have, she realized, she was still hanging on to me of that, the whole, would have, should have, could have. If only I had done this, said that, whatever. Maybe there would not have been this big, ugly breakup. It is things that and it is sometimes just a little thing, but it can be a huge breakthrough for the people who go through the workshop to realize and to have this light bulb moment that, Oh, my gosh. It may not necessarily be the only thing that helps them heal from their cancer, but it can be the next step in finding their way to healing.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Yes, and the thing is that you may not be able to isolate this one specific thing. Was it that moved me towards healing, or was there no evidence of disease? Because cancer is such a complex disorder, it is multifactorial. You need to address it from all angles. and then the combination of things just makes things move forward in a good direction.

Karla Mans Giroux

Yes, exactly. 

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Well, Karla, thank you very much. Thank you for the work that you are doing and for the people that it is touching. Thank you very much for being there. Where can people go to learn more about the Radical Remission Project?

Karla Mans Giroux

Yes, they can go to radicalremission.com. They can learn more about the projects we offer in the workshops. There is an online course if you are not well enough to attend even a virtual workshop, but there are lots of teachers there. You can find coaches who are coaching one-on-one. There is a documentary series. You can watch the ten-episode docu-series Radical Remission on Radical Remission dot com. If people want to connect directly with me, they can use me as one of the coaches there, or they can go to my website, which is healthnavs.com. I would be happy to help anybody who is looking for my guidance on their healing journey.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Great. Thank you very much, Karla.

Karla Mans Giroux

Thank you. Dr. Karlfeldt.