Thrive to 105

Being an information junkie has its drawbacks, but right now it definitely is working to my benefit.  There is SO much information to be had if you’re open to knowing more than what you can get in a 15-minute visit with your surgeon or other doctor.

In their book called, Getting Well Again, Carl and Stephanie Simonton outline their research and an actual six-week program for helping those who are sick to use their minds as an aid to their healing process.  It’s a “step-by-step, self-help guide to overcoming cancer for patients and their families”.  Carl is an oncologist; Stephanie a psychiatrist…a powerful combination for the kind of work they’ve been doing for over three decades!

Part One of the book is titled:  The Mind and Cancer.  The first chapter is: The Mind-Body Connection; A Psychological Approach to Cancer Treatment.  It starts out dealing with the will to live, talks about the “whole-person approach” to treating cancer and discusses putting theory into practice.  My big takeaway from this chapter was:

It is our central premise that an illness is not purely a physical problem, but rather a problem of the whole person, that it includes not only body but mind and emotions.  We believe that emotional and mental states play a significant role both in susceptibility to disease, including cancer, and in recovery from all disease.  We believe that cancer is often an indication of problems elsewhere in an individual’s life, problems aggravated or compounded by a series of stresses six to eighteen months prior to the onset of cancer.  The cancer patient has typically responded to these problems and stresses with a deep sense of hopelessness, or “giving up”.  This emotional response, we believe, in turn triggers a set of physiological responses that suppress the body’s natural defenses and make it susceptible to producing abnormal cells.

WOW! As so many who are diagnosed with cancer must feel, I wondered “why” and “how” when I first heard the ‘c’ word.  But it made a lot of sense after reading the very detailed explanation in this book.  Eighteen months prior to my diagnosis (or possibly 24) I had the whole laundry list of events in my life that cause the most stress: I moved, I got married, I lost my job, my stepmom died, my relationships with the people I loved were strained, I got divorced.  At times I did feel a sense of hopelessness.  It makes so much more sense now.

Now understanding how the cells can become “abnormal”, it isn’t a hard segue to start wondering if it isn’t possible…with the right kind of physical and mental forces applied…to transform them into “normal” cells again.

We shall see!

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