Spontaneous Remission of Small Cell Lung Cancer Without Treatment (2021 Case Report)

An 80-year-old South Korean man with a 50-pack-year smoking history presented with hemoptysis and hoarseness. Chest X-ray and CT revealed a hilar mass with mediastinal lymph node involvement. Video-assisted thoracoscopic surgery (VATS) confirmed limited-stage small cell lung cancer histologically. The patient declined chemotherapy and radiation therapy and consumed beetroot juice daily.

52 months later, he returned with dysphagia. CT imaging showed complete disappearance of the previous SCLC lesion with no new disease. This case was published in Thoracic Cancer (2021) as one of only a handful of documented cases of complete spontaneous SCLC remission without treatment.

Why This Case Belongs Here

This is a secular case — the authors make no supernatural claim. It belongs in this dataset because it documents the kind of complete, biopsy-confirmed tumor disappearance that is sometimes attributed to miraculous intervention, showing that such events can occur through unknown natural mechanisms.

Mechanism

The authors propose two candidate mechanisms: immune activation triggered by the surgical biopsy trauma (a known phenomenon in rare cases), and possibly dietary supplementation. Neither is confirmed. The case illustrates the fundamental epistemic problem in evaluating all cases in this dataset: "medically inexplicable" does not mean "naturally impossible."