John Matzke was just 30 years old when he was told that he had only 18 months to live. At 6 feet 4 inches tall, with blue eyes and broad shoulders, Matzke cut an impressive figure. He’d been a football player at Dartmouth College, where he studied geology. That was also where he met his wife, Lyn, who worked in town. In 1973, Matzke and Lyn moved to Wisconsin to run a small homestead, where they grew organic vegetables and raised chickens and a pig. Just seven weeks after the birth of his first son, in 1974, Matzke noticed a lump in his armpit. A biopsy showed that the lump was malignant melanoma, a particularly fatal form of skin cancer. He would have that tumor and then a few others removed by surgeons.
Painting by Benjamin Adcroft
By 1984, the cancer had spread to his lung. Having served in the Army’s Fifth Armored Division in Ulm, Germany, Matzke went to the Veterans Administration hospital in White River Junction, Vermont, to see his oncologist, Joseph F. O’Donnell. Knowing that his patient’s chances of surviving the cancer were slim—and would only lessen with each passing day—O’Donnell urged him to undergo immediate treatment. The oncologist told Matzke that once melanoma invades an internal organ like the lung, the invariable outcome is death—usually within months—without immediate treatment. Even with treatment, his outlook was guarded. Only half of all melanoma patients with lung metastases are alive 30 months after surgery.
But Matzke didn’t follow his doctor’s recommendation. Instead, he took a month off to strengthen his body for the treatment that he knew would most likely be a grueling ordeal. He went on long hikes in the mountains, he ate healthy foods, and he meditated. He also spent a lot of time picturing himself healthy and visualizing good strong blood cells destroying the cancer in his body.
Matzke later flew back to Vermont, where O’Donnell repeated the chest X-ray to document the size and location of the tumor before starting treatment. But instead of the large cancerous lesion in Matzke’s lung, he saw . . . nothing. O’Donnell recalls, “When John came back a month later, it was remarkable—the tumor on his chest X-ray was gone. Gone, gone, gone.”
Call it remarkable, call it miraculous—such spontaneous remissions are as fascinating to physicians and scientists as they are rare. Doctors would like to understand cases like Matzke’s, who was given just 18 months to live but would survive another 18 years. And although a recurrence of the cancer—this time in his brain—would eventually claim his life on November 8, 1991, the fact that his lung tumor disappeared completely begs for an explanation.
Pinning down spontaneous remissions has been a little like chasing rainbows. It’s not even possible to say just how frequently such cases occur—estimates generally range from 1 in 60,000 to 1 in 100,000 patients. Many cases, when subjected to close scrutiny, prove not to have been remissions at all. According to Stephen Barrett, a retired psychiatrist who operates Quackwatch, a number of people claiming to have had spontaneous remissions or to have been cured by alternative treatments never had cancer in the first place. Barrett, who has tracked claims of cures through alternative therapies, says some people were given mistaken diagnoses. Other claims, he says, are outright scams, used to promote books and videos that purport to share the secret of curing cancer or AIDS.
But genuine cases do exist, and throughout the history of medicine, physicians have recorded cases of spontaneous remission. Such cases involve not just cancer but conditions like aortic aneurysm, a deadly ballooning of the heart’s major artery; Peyronie’s disease, a deformity of the penis; and childhood cataracts. These cases cause doctors to scratch their heads in wonder at what brought them about. But most of the attention on spontaneous recovery continues to focus on cancer, which takes the lives of over half a million people in the United States alone each year.
Although researchers say it is impossible to determine from a single patient what factors contributed to a spontaneous remission, Matzke’s case provides a tantalizing clue that the immune system may sometimes be at work. During his month of meditation and healthy living, white rings developed around his skin tumors, causing what doctors call a halo sign. These findings are considered evidence that the immune system is attacking melanocytes, the pigmented cells in the skin that are the source of this cancer. While most doctors say it is impossible to know just what causes the immune system to kick suddenly into action and induce a remission in any individual patient, Matzke’s case underscores questions that researchers would like to answer: Did his month of hiking, healthy eating, and meditating somehow strengthen his immune system? Did some as yet unidentified factor make his lung tumor mysteriously disappear?
