I am so pleased to announce that I’ve been accepted into Harvard Medical School’s remarkable NEER study or Network of Enigmatic Exceptional Responders, which is part of the People-Powered Medicine (PPM) program. Through NEER people like me who have beaten the odds and thrive cancer-free, are finally being looked at more closely to identify how others might benefit from our success.
According to Harvard's website, “A persistent barrier to understanding and treating many conditions is obtaining information that goes beyond what we normally collect during a clinical evaluation, including such information as environmental exposures, treatments at home, other diseases/illnesses, and activities. PPM is a project that aims to gather as much information as possible about individuals with particular conditions into one secure research database.”
Specifically, NEER is looking closely at people who have had a unique or exceptional response to treating cancer and would be dismissed as an outlier with not much to teach the medical community. Recognizing the dramatic reversal in that type of thinking, Harvard Medical School will document the specifics of what those patients did and develop a database that shines a light on behavior, diet, spirituality, lifestyle changes, integrative modalities, and other ways in which those individuals defied the odds.
According to Glenn Sabin, author of N of 1: One man’s Harvard-documented remission of incurable cancer using only natural methods, “Studies like NEER, and the growing field of oncology bioinformatics, ask: do we have a small and large molecule (anticancer agents, including targeted therapies) deficit—a lack of effective novel drugs—or is the prevention and cure of cancer more elusive because of an information technology deficit? In other words, a lack of knowledge and process to match existing FDA-approved drugs (old and new), or more holistic approaches to match each patient’s unique cancer.”
NEER will not only give credibility to patients like Glenn and myself who have attacked cancer in an unconventional way, it will give doctors a better informed and more effective way to answer questions about taking a less toxic and more integrative approach to beating cancer. Ask your doctors if they’re familiar with NEER and the National Institutes of Health Integrative Health Program. If they’re not, light a fire under them to become more curious and better health care practitioners by being better informed.