The reason I love Caryle’s data so much is because these are not the theories of a scientist, but the reported beliefs and feelings of a group of people who have actually achieved the scientifically unachievable – recovery from a serious cancer. What is striking about these findings is the importance of belief – whether it be in one’s own power to heal through self-help, or belief in a higher power to heal, or in the power of prayer or believing that one is going to live and recover fully.
This is what I have witnessed again and again in my 20 years of working with over 20,000 people to recover their health after cancer. From often very sceptical beginnings, two things most frequently ended up astonishing those who apply themselves to the holistic integrated healthcare approach: the first is just how much help is available through prayer and spiritual healing; the second is just how powerful a person can be once he or she begins to use and harness the power of his own mind.
This can be achieved through pure belief, hypnotherapy or the use of your own creative will through visualization and affirmation. In these practices, you literally see in your mind’s eye or choose in words the reality you want for your future. This is another reason it is so important not to remain passive, waiting for either orthodox or alternative medicine to cure you, but to instead get yourself firmly in the driving seat, choosing that the illness will go from the body and visualizing yourself going on into the future, growing old disgracefully!
It also suggests that, if you are currently closed to or sceptical of the power of your own mind or of the help that is available through spiritual healing or prayer, it would be wise to suspend disbelief and at least try to explore such forms of help before dismissing them. They could ultimately provide the vital key to your healing, as has been discovered by so many former sceptics I have worked with.
So, the keys are:
• cultivate a strong belief in your own power to self-heal
• cultivate a strong belief in the power of your doctors and their treatments to cure you
• open yourself to the possibility of healing through spiritual healing and prayer
• use hypnotherapy, visualization and affirmation to choose health and recovery, seeing yourself healed, free of disease and well and happy in the future.
Dr Stephen Greer: The Role of a Fighting Spirit and Alleviating Depression
Before Caryle and Ian’s work, back in the mid-80s, psychosocial oncologist Stephen Greer published his work showing how the very different survival times among women with breast cancer depended on the coping style they adopted within a week of the initial diagnosis. The coping styles he defined were:
• a fighting spirit – taking an active stand against your cancer and believing fully that you can affect your survival
• denial - pretending to yourself and others that nothing is seriously wrong
• stoicism or fatalism – leading to becoming resigned to what is happening
• helplessness and hopelessness – becoming anxiously preoccupied, or collapsing.
His findings showed that those with a fighting spirit fared far better than those in the other three categories both in terms of quality of life and overall survival. Those in denial did next best whereas those who were resigned, depressed and anxiously preoccupied did least well of all. At the 13-year point, 80 per cent of those who had started with a fighting spirit were still alive versus only 20 per cent of those who had collapsed into helplessness. Worse, those who had psychologically collapsed had died quickly, within two years of diagnosis. This means that the average survival rate of 60 per cent for breast cancer at five years masks a huge difference between those who do very much better than expected because of a positive belief in themselves compared with those who do very much worse because they do not.
As this difference in survival rate is bigger than that seen with any medical treatment for breast cancer, Dr Greer realized it was very important to identify those who reacted negatively to their diagnosis and help them to change psychologically so that they could begin to believe in themselves more and become less depressed. Through the use of cognitive behavioural techniques, such patients gained self-esteem and confidence, and began to believe they could survive. Lo and behold, his later studies on the survival rates among these women showed great improvement.
The lessons here are:
• It is vital to feel empowered and believe in your ability to heal yourself
• It is vital to lift your depression
• It is vital for healthcare professionals to provide extra psychological help to improve the coping styles of those who have responded by becoming helpless and anxiously preoccupied by their illness.
Dr Candace Pert: The Scientific Basis for the Mind – Body Connection and the Need to Express Emotion
While both Hirschberg and Greer were gathering their data, huge breakthroughs were being made in the laboratory as the science of PNI, or psychoneuroimmunology, was rapidly expanding through the pioneering work of Dr Candace Pert. She studied the connection between our states of mind, the nervous system, the neuroendocrine system, and the function of the immune system and other healing tissues of the body. It all started with her discovery of the receptor for an opiate secreted in the brain. This naturally occurring opiate was later discovered and identified as endorphin (known as enkephalin in the US). This was a breakthrough, as endorphin was a new kind of messenger molecule different from the kind of neurotransmitters we had known about before. Endorphin was the first molecule to be identified as a neuropeptide or informational substance, and further informational substances were found to be present in all tissues of the body.
This finding started an avalanche of discovery so that, by the mid-1990s, a further 200 of these substances had been identified, secreted in response to different feelings and thoughts, and able to radically affect our tissue functioning. As the PNI findings began to link up with the medical studies, it became clear that those who are chronically stressed or lonely had depressed immune function – with both lower numbers and far lower activity levels in the immune cells. Similar findings were made in those with low self-esteem and those who chronically repressed their feelings. It was even found that the blood cells in depressed people actually carried less oxygen than those who are happy. Dr Pert had discovered that unexpressed emotions can become lodged in the body’s tissues in the form of ‘molecules of emotion’ inhibiting organ function.
The lesson here is:
• Stress over which we have no control, loneliness, grief and