ConnectIONS Live

This recording is available to the public until April 3, 2026.

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Spontaneous Remission: From Medical Mystery to Research Tool

Recorded on March 20, 2026

Have you ever heard of someone whose cancer disappeared without conventional treatment—and wondered if it was real, a misdiagnosis, or something science couldn’t yet explain?

For decades, spontaneous remissions have existed at the edges of medicine: documented, debated, and often dismissed as anomalies rather than explored as clues. Yet within these rare cases may lie patterns that could reshape how we understand cancer, healing, and what the human body is capable of. At IONS, we take these cases seriously—not as miracles to prove, but as phenomena worth investigating with rigorous scientific attention.

In this ConnectIONS Live event, we launched the Spontaneous Remission Database, a new resource designed to transform scattered cases into an easy-to-search tool.

Physician Joshua Weiss, MD, Chief of Clinical Design and Transformation at Brant Community Healthcare System, and IONS Scientist Garret Yount, PhD, shared the evolution of this project—from its origins in patient stories to its current form as a hypothesis-generating platform. You’ll see a live walkthrough of how patients, researchers, and clinicians can explore the database, and a conversation about how organized scientific attention to anomalies might open new questions in cancer research and healing.

Whether you’re a patient, caregiver, clinician, or simply curious about the edges of what’s medically possible, this gathering offers insight into how science can meet mystery with rigor and possibility.

PRESENTERS

Dr. Joshua Weiss completed medical school at the University of Manitoba, and completed his residency training at McMaster University. Joshua also obtained his Master’s in Behavioral and Decision Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. He developed his unique approach to chronic medical and mental health conditions under the tutelage of North America’s foremost leaders in lifestyle medicine and group psychotherapy. He began work on IONS’ Spontaneous Remission Bibliography Project in 2012, with the dual intentions of both updating this incredible resource and also making it more accessible to patients and their healthcare providers. Joshua founded the ‘Life Medicine’ Clinic in 2017, now located in Toronto, Ontario (www.lifemedicine.ca). He is an Assistant Clinical Professor (Adjunct) in the Department of Family Medicine at McMaster University as well as the Chief of Clinical Design and Transformation at the Brant Community Healthcare System.

Garret Yount, PhD, is a molecular neurobiologist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) where his research focuses on laboratory-based models of exceptional human abilities. He obtained his BS from the Department of Molecular & Cell Biology at the Pennsylvania State University and his PhD from the Department of Neurobiology & Behavior at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He began his formal studies in consciousness research with a small grant from the Institute of Noetic Sciences in 1995, which allowed him to work with biofield practitioners and spiritual healers in the laboratory. Since then, Dr. Yount has conducted carefully controlled laboratory experiments with spiritual healers and biofield practitioners from around the world, including China, Brazil, Canada, USA, Japan, India, Russia, Hungary, and Sri Lanka, and was fortunate to be among the first scientists to be awarded a Research Project Grant (R01) from the National Institutes of Health to study energy healing. He is the author of many peer-reviewed scientific papers and the book Why Vibes Matter: Understand Your Energy and Learn How to Use it Wisely.

We are pleased to share the following resources mentioned in the webinar:

Explore the Spontaneous Remission Database
https://spontaneousremission.noetic.org/