Jennifer Matthews: Now, you see it ... now, you don't. Magicians can make objects disappear, but can our bodies make tumors go away? Alice Epstein says hers did. Alice's doctor said she had only a couple months to live after her kidney cancer spread to both lungs.
Alice Epstein: By the time the tests came back, there was really no hope.
Jennifer Matthews: She had surgery to remove the tumor in her kidney but didn't have any treatment for the other lesions. She says they just disappeared!
Alice Epstein: I do think it was wonderfully unusual.
Jennifer Matthews: Alice's doctor gave back her X-rays and admitted he didn't know why or how it happened. That was 20 years ago!
Alice Epstein: Now, there will be people who won't believe the sort of thing I'm saying, but we believed in the psychological approach. But it was more than psychology. I meditated twice a day. I calmed myself down. I really became a different person.
Jennifer Matthews: But can cancer just go away without treatment? Researcher Caryle Hirshberg says yes. And it even has a clinical name -- spontaneous remission. She's been studying the phenomenon for 25 years and has compiled the worlds largest database of reported cases from 800 journals.
Dr. Caryle Hirshberg: Cancer can bypass the body's surveillance system. It tricks the system.
Jennifer Matthews: Some patients develop a fever and an infection right before the remission. Doctors believe this triggers a powerful immune response that also destroys tumors. More research on the subject could help doctors find cures to different diseases.
Dr. Caryle Hirshberg: We look at people when they're sick, and we try to make them better, but we don't look at the group of people that get better and figure out why.
Jennifer Matthews: Researchers used to believe these remissions occurred in about one in every 100,000 cases, but Hirshberg's research shows they may be much more common.
Dr. Caryle Hirshberg: The statistics were about 10-fold.
Jennifer Matthews: Doctor Stephen Barrett, founder of quackwatch-org-com, admits spontaneous remissions do happen, but says they are still rare.
Dr. Stephen Barrett: Most people who recover from cancer do so as a result of standard medical treatment."
Jennifer Matthews: Alice says her recovery was the real deal, and she's written a book about her experience. And she says that "Miracle" is why she's here today.
This is Jennifer Matthews reporting.
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