About the Project

Introduction

In the early 1990s, spontaneous remission was largely treated as a medical oddity because it was poorly documented and dispersed across the global literature. To bring coherence to this fragmented field, the Institute of Noetic Sciences initiated the first systematic effort to identify and catalog medically reported cases of spontaneous remission worldwide. That effort culminated in Spontaneous Remission: An Annotated Bibliography, published in 1993 by Caryle Hirshberg and the late Brendan O'Regan. Drawing on reports from more than 800 journals in 20 languages, the bibliography established the first comprehensive reference for the field and remains a foundational scholarly resource. The complete original bibliography is available as downloadable PDFs here: Spontaneous Remission Bibliography – IONS

Today, that work continues in the form of the Spontaneous Remission Database. This searchable, continually updated resource preserves the original bibliography while extending it with newly identified cases through 2025.

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Background

Hirshberg and O'Regan defined spontaneous remission as “the disappearance, complete or incomplete, of a disease or cancer without medical treatment or with treatment considered inadequate to produce the resulting disappearance.” Using the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-9-CM), they organized hundreds of documented cases across cancer and non-cancer conditions, supplemented by review articles, behavioral analyses, and clinical and experimental studies. Although spontaneous remission was long assumed to be exceedingly rare, the authors’ analysis suggested a different picture. Patterns in the data indicated that apparent rarity was at least partly due to underreporting, with a noticeable increase in documented cases over recent decades.

While the original book is no longer in print, all chapters and appendices are preserved as downloadable PDFs through IONS. The Online Spontaneous Remission Bibliography Project initially extended this work by digitizing the original content, adding explanatory materials, FAQs, and updated literature reviews. That phase was led by Marilyn Schlitz, PhD, with contributions from Nola Lewis.

The most recent evolution of the project transformed the bibliography into a fully searchable online database and expanded it with newly identified cases. This phase was led by Joshua Weis, MD, Chief of Clinical Design and Transformation at Brant Community Healthcare System, with support from IONS staff, including Cassandra Vieten, PhD, Garret Yount, PhD, Arnaud DeLorme, PhD, Erik Brinsmead, and Helané Wahbeh, ND, MCR. Countless hours were also donated by the following volunteers: Ryan Oakeson, MD, Fadi Kyle, MD, S. Colby Peters, PhD, Salma Ahmadzai, Kevin Nelson, Maria Gonzalez Ramirez, MD, Pooja Pundhir, MD, Smrti Agrawal, MD, Patrice DiChristina, Margaret Clausen, Robert Ellis, MD.

Together, these efforts reflect more than three decades of sustained inquiry, transforming spontaneous remission from isolated and anecdotal reports into a living, searchable scientific resource. Importantly, the database should be understood not as a complete census, but as the visible tip of a much larger phenomenon. The cases it contains have survived multiple barriers to publication, including clinical recognition, documentation, author initiative and effort, and editorial acceptance — each of which excludes many other genuine remissions. As a result, the database constitutes a rigorously verified subset of a far broader, largely unseen clinical reality, providing conservative but credible evidence that spontaneous remission is substantially more prevalent than the published literature alone would suggest.

Acknowledgments

This project would not have been possible without the generous support from Gail Lynn, inventor of the Harmonic Egg®, and other anonymous donors.