Readings from the cancer literature!

The following is a selection of readings from the health and cancer literature that have collided with my consciousness. I would welcome for inclusion any extracts (max: 300 words) that any of you might like to offer.

The following readings are simply extracts from books - generally speaking books relating in some way to cancer. The quotations have been selected usually on the basis that they provide a moment of well-expressed clarity concerning an issue relevant to people with cancer.

If you have been diagnosed with cancer, these readings may help you to focus on ideas or books that may otherwise have passed you by.

If you have lived with cancer - one way or another - for any length of time you will have your own extracts that speak to you. Why don't you share them. For copyright reasons these extracts should not be more than 300 words. Please cite the author and the work where the quotation appears.

If you are a publisher and you feel I have contravened your copyright with respect to any of the readings below, please let me know and I will delete the offending quotation.

Jonathan: readings 1-5

Jonathan: readings 6-10

Jonathan: readings 11-15

Jonathan: readings 16-20

1. Some extracts from Dr Larry Dossey's book: `Healing Words'

i) a quotation from Sir Alfred Pearce Gould (1910)

"My present purpose is not to vaunt a new remedy but to state a fact - that cancer, even when advanced in degree and of long duration, may get better, and does sometimes get well. There is cure of cancer, apart from operative removal."

ii) two personal experiences

a) "One night following a lecture I gave on health and healing, a woman came forward to speak to me. Clearly shy, she had held back until the auditorium was nearly empty. Looking around to make sure no-one else was listening, she said almost in a whisper that thirty years ago she had been diagnosed with metastatic cancer. What did she do to get rid of it? Nothing, she revealed. She went on to say that nobody wanted to hear her story; that people like her never get interviewed on `Oprah' or `Donahue' which seem interested only in those dramatic cases where people do heroic, colorful things."

b) "I recall a case that most physicians will find familiar from their own own experience. A poor, uneducated woman came to the emergency room with an obvious breast cancer in an advanced stage. It was ulcerated, as large as a grapefruit, infected, and had spread to the lymph nodes in her armpit, neck and elsewhere. "How long has this been present?" I asked. "Fifteen years," the poor woman said. I was shocked..."Why have you not seen a doctor to have this treated?" " Because if I did," she said, "The doctor would cut it. This would let air touch the cancer, which makes it `run wild' and I would die." Her presentiment proved true. The woman had surgery and died shortly thereafter. Why was she able to live fifteen years from the cancer's first appearance with no treatment whatsoever?...She seemed to be saying that as long as nothing was done, her fate was not fixed. As long as her fate remained shrouded with unknown, she had a chance, but looking, observing and doing would create a downhill, fatal course."

iii) From a letter to Dr Larry Dossey from Dr Jean Achterberg

"[She has] survived five `healthy' years with lung cancer. She drives everyone crazy because she's not doing it right. She's in `denial', she has no social support except therapy groups, she won't go back to work, she has no insight (they say), no reason to live (that anyone can identify with), punitive parents who still beat up on her emotionally, etc. etc. And, she has no imagery that I can figure out, is too anxious to relax or meditate, eats terribly. She's proud of herself, she decides her own medical treatment, wouldn't let them remove her lung...She comes in to see me every week. She teaches me things, and keeps me from getting too arrogant about my advance knowledge. I love her."

(Jonathan's comment: This story gets its reverberations from the fact that only 8% of people with lung cancer live 5 years or more)

2. `The modern career scientist's business is one in which success is measured by the number of papers published...Unfortunately, it is much easier to get a paper published if it does not challenge the official orthodoxy. As a result, few career scientists are willing to look at issues that cast doubt on established beliefs...These factors lead to stagnation and to the appearance that scientific progress is the slow, painstaking acquisition of small bits of knowledge...For the most part, science today has lost its most essential aspect - the spirit of adventure.' (Robert O. Becker,M.D., Cross Currents, the Promise of Electromedicine)

3. `I am now in my ninth year of living with cancer. At least once a day I think of my lump getting smaller and I talk to it. It is like a barometer in my body. It gets hard and angry when I am doing too much. It is soft and pliant when I am relaxed. I am no longer on tamoxifan, as it was not doing anything for me except to make me retain water and generally cause discomfort...I am thankful to my husband Peter for his loving support. There were times when I wondered which of us had the cancer. He was totally committed to helping me recover.' (Sumi Jenner, from Fighting Spirit, the stories of women in the Bristol breast cancer survey)

4. `The first thing I found was that up to 1900 the relationship between cancer and psychological factors had been commonly accepted in medical circles...Dedicated nineteenth century physicians working with cancer patients had none of the sophisticated instruments and devices we have today...they had to listen to their patients in order to learn what was going on. And in this listening, they heard about the patient's feelings and history. The factors of great emotional loss and of hopelessness occurring before the first signs of the cancer were so repetitive and frequent that they could not be ignored...[after 1900] this viewpoint began to disappear very rapidly from the textbooks and journals...The psychosomatic viewpoint had been going more and more out of fashion for fifty years. Further, surgery that was both painless and antiseptic had been developed in the previous fifteen years and was now making its big bid as the way to deal with cancer...Radiation, coming along shortly thereafter as a therapy method, reinforced this concept of cancer as a local body problem....The situation has now changed completely. Since 1955 literally dozens of studies have shown conclusively that the emotional life history often does play an important part in determining an individual's resistence to getting cancer and in how a cancer develops after it appears. It is certainly not the only factor and does not play a part for every person with cancer by a long shot, but every cancer patient's emotional life history should be considered." (Lawrence LeShan, Cancer as a Turning Point)

5. `I am reminded of two cases that came to my attention more than a decade ago. Two men, both about the same age, both married and the fathers of children, developed leukemia practically simultaneously. One of the men passively accepted his condition, putting his fate completely in the hands of his physicians. He endured massive chemotherapy without complaint, maintaining the attitude that the doctors knew best. The other patient completely rejected the entire situation, refused chemotherapy, and threw dishes and glassware against the wall at home. Both patients had sought help from the same physicians who prevailed on the first patient to 'counsel' the second to accept chemotherapy. But his efforts were of no avail. The first patient responded poorly to the chemotherapy and was finally given experimental drugs, which didn't help. He died within two years of the onset of the cancer. The second patient is alive and well today.' (Robert O.Becker, M.D., Cross Currents, the Promise of Electromedicine) [Back to top]

6. `It's interesting to note that one effect of our current health-care laws is to block the flow of information. I can sell just about any health product I want, as long as I don't tell you what it's supposed to do, or why I think it will work.' (Dean Black, Health at the Crossroads)

7. "One of my favourite peanuts cartoons has Charlie Brown saying to Lucy'I thought you'd achieved inner peace?' Lucy replies, 'I have inner peace but I haven't lost my outer obnoxiousness!' Conversely, many of us project outer peace whilst we experience inner obnoxiousness... Clearly I didn't sit down consciously to figure out ways of making my body sick to achieve some underlying aim. Later in my life, I didn't think, 'Ah yes, a good dose of leukemia with a short prognosis is just what I need right now.' Yet I firmly believe, at some more subtle level, that the particular disease and prognosis were precisely tailor made for me. By that time in my life I was already adept at using my body to manifest illness as a coping mechanism. And, as with so many people, the six to eighteen months before diagnosis were particularly stressful, with the suicide of one of my brothers, a geographical move to another country and separation from my husband ... It's often said, 'People don't change.' I believe that statement is made only by people who don't welcome change in themselves ... When we make a firm commitment to life and to experiencing our connection with the flow of power and love in the universe, extraordinary and unexpected events begin to unfold. Greater peace, equanimity and joy are experienced even in the midst of disease, and the experience of these states creates the perfect environment for physical healing to take place...Leukemia was the best thing that ever came my way because I learned much more about myself much more quickly than I ever could have without it." (Petrea King, Quest for Life)

8. "On November 17th, 1887, I was requested to see a gentleman resident in London who was said to have a very large tumour in the abdomen and no efforts to cure it had been spared....There seemed no chance of a cure and an operation had been declared to be impossible.......the final outcome of all the deliberations was that it was cancer, or at any rate a tumour connected with the spleen which was or had become malignant in its nature, and that the result must necessarily be fatal...I think any practical physician or surgeon will concede that a more hopeless case to cure by medicines is hardly to be found...

"My own plan in difficult cases that seem so hopeless is to lay firmly hold of some point that may serve as a reasonable therapeutic starting point whence to carry out a cure. As a start there is here the traumatic element in the case, that is positive, and my own favourite and well-tried anti-traumatic is Bellis Perrenis... Bellis Perrenis as an anti-traumatic and also Ceanothus Americanus as splenic, presented themselves to my mind, but which? Candidly confess, I thought the good man doomed but determined to try and save him, and not knowing which of my two remedies was the more likely to do something quickly, (for the case was urgent - patient's friends had already taken a last look at him as they thought) I gave the two in alternation, and much did I subsequently regret this double shot, for the use of two medicines at one time teaches next to nothing. Bellis o and Caenothus 1X were given in five drop doses every four hours in alternation....The result of this medication was that after a while patient could turn over in bed, then he could get in and out of bed by himself and in 17 days from beginning the medicine..[the] patient came to my West End rooms in a cab with his wife. [Dr Burnett then describes various changes in the case and changes of medication] He did not need any subsequent treatment and he came to say goodbye on June 24th 1888. He had lost the tumour and the enlargement and induration of the lymphatic in the left side, and he was rapidly gaining flesh and strength...The cure was complete and permanent, which I know, patient turns up in my rooms every three months for his own and my satisfaction. Such a case is an oasis in the desert of a physician's hard life." (J. Compton Burnett M.D.,"Curability of Tumours by Medicines")

9. (A description of the case affecting a 71 year old nurse, Muriel Bourne-Mullen, a devout Catholic who `always prayed with fervour') "...in 1987 she discovered she would be needing intercession, a lot of it, if she was going to live more than six months - the median survival time, her doctor told her, for her untreatable metastatic liver cancer. They'd tested, poked and prodded for weeks, then `came to my bed, pulled the screen around, and said, `We're sorry your cancer has spread to the lungs," and told me that treatment would be quite unnecessary.' Muriel had been a cancer ward nurse....She at first took the news of her own illness calmly, then sank into a bleak depression, staring out of the window saying goodbye to life - goodbye to the gentle waving of the leaves, goodbye to her husband of forty years, goodbye to her children, and worst of all, to her adored grandchildren. But after her entire family gathered around her that Christmas, crowding into her council flat from as far away as California, she felt heartened and began to rally. As she had all her life, she turned diligently, passionately to prayer. She beseeched St Jude, patron of lost causes...she prayed to be forgiven, prayed for the return of health, prayed for the cancer to `disappear and go away'...After Christmas, she inexplicably began gaining weight. Her tumour shrank down, then finally disappeared, a fact confirmed by x-rays, biopsies and scans. Her lungs completely cleared. The tumours that had occupied both quadrants of her liver were mutely attested to by scar tissue...her doctor urged her to undergo a liver transplant, a proposal she indignantly turned down flat. `I was perfectly hale and hearty, love, I told him there was nothing the matter with me and that would be quite unnecessary.' (Caryle Hirshberg & Marc Ian Barasch, Remarkable recovery)

10. "I was recently called by Howard, a gentleman who'd been told by his doctor he'd be dead in three months. He went home, sat down in the living room and told his wife to cancel his dental appointments. His wife said, "I'm not having you sitting around the living room for three months dying." He came to me all the way from Montana. I said, "Anyone who comes here from Montana is not going to die in three months. You're different. You're a fighter." Eighteen months later Howard is still alive…His doctor said, "Boy you're lucky." He said, "It's not luck. It's hard work." But he said the thing that turned him round was my saying, "You're different." I try to help people realise that it's the process of moving towards a goal that's important. As we change…the body benefits. The process is the product." (Bernie Siegel, MD Love Medicine & Miracles)

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11. Greenberg: When a checkup shows a problem, what type of therapy do you start with?

Corsello: The first thing we do is look at the patient's life-style and nutrition habits. ...Most of our patients and, I suspect, most people on a conventional American diet, have some degree of bowel dysfunction, mostly constipation. It is pathetic to hear time after time, people stating that they move their bowels two or three times a week...When I tell my patients that I expect an easy bowel movement once or twice a day, they shatter...80 percent of our immune defences are located in the intestinal walls. It stands to reason that cleaning the bowels regularly is the first step in any medical preventive program. Helping the intestine to obtain a balance among the different types of what are called intestinal flora is the next step. The good intestinal flora - bacteria - such as lactobacillus acidophilus and bulgaricus and others are most important in this balance of power. These good bacteria protect us against invading bad bacteria that produce illnesses...The next step, and the one I begin almost immediately, is, therefore, to change the diet and give Lactobacillus acidophilus and other effective repairing cultures, such as good yoghurt. We also introduce a special salad dressing, a combination of good, top quality olive oil (cold-pressed extra virgin oil) and cold-pressed, organically grown flaxseed oil. We generally combine the two in equal parts and ask patients to add a whole bulb of garlic and squeeze 2,000-3,000 IU of top quality vitamin E to impede oxidation. (she goes on to describe the need for magnesium, B-complex, zinc and vitamin C supplementation)

(Serafina Corsello, M.D., interviewed by Kurt Greenberg in Challenging Orthodoxy)

Jonathan's Comment: Although Dr Corsello was not talking about cancer - her speciality is chronic illnesses, almost everything she recommended is also considered to be very beneficial for cancer patients. The flaxseed oil (omega 3 oil) should, according to Dr Johanna Budwig be taken with low fat cottage cheese in as large a quantity as you can take. This, on its own, she claims, is sufficient to bring about a cure. Flaxseed oil is quickly spoiled by light.

12. `Let me give you an example: eight years ago, a man came to see me complaining of a painful chest cough. We X-rayed him, and it turned out that he had a large tumor between his lungs. He was admitted to the hospital, we took a biopsy, and the pathologists report diagnosed the tumor as oat-cell carcinoma. This is an extremely deadly, very fast growing malignancy. I told me patient that he must have immediate surgery, followed by radiation and chemotherapy. He was quite disturbed by the prospect of treatment and refused. I completely lost track of him after that. Eight years later, a man came to see me with an enlarged lymph node in his neck. I took a biopsy, and it turned out to be oat-cell carcinoma. Then I realised it was the same man. We took chest X rays and there was no trace lo lung cancer. Normally, 99.99 percent of patients would have died within six months, as many as 90 percent would not live five years even with maximum therapy. I asked him what he had done for the earlier cancer, and he told me he hadn't done anything - he had just decided he was not going to let himself die of cancer. And he may refuse treatment again with this second cancer.' (unnamed oncologist quoted by Deepak Chopra in Quantum Healing)

13. `Even good doctors shorten your life'

(a character in Solzhenitsyn's novel, Cancer Ward)

14. "We have found it of paramount importance that in order to progress we must recognise our ignorance and leave room for doubt. Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty - some most unsure, some nearly sure, but none absolutely certain.

Now, we scientists are used to this, and we take it for granted that it is perfectly consistent to be unsure, that it is possible to live and not know. But I don't know whether everyone realizes this is true. Our freedom to doubt was born out of a struggle against authority in the early days of science. It was a very deep and strong struggle: permit us to question - to doubt - to not be sure. I think that it is important that we do not forget this struggle and thus perhaps lose what we have gained. Herein lies a responsibility to society...Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on. It is our responsibility to leave the people of the future a free hand. In the impetuous youth of humanity, we can make grave errors that can stunt our growth for a long time. This we will do if we say we have the answers now, so young and ignorant as we are. If we suppress all discussion, all criticism, proclaiming `This is the answer, my friends, man is saved!' we will doom humanity for a long time to the chains of authority, confined to the limits of our present imagination. It has been done so many times before. It is our responsibility as scientists...to demand this freedom as our duty to all coming generations. (Richard Feynman, The Value of Science, published in `What Do You Care What Other People Think)

15. This poem is also by Nobel prize winning physicist, Richard Feynman and appears in the same essay as the last quote:

There are the rushing waves
mountains of molecules
each stupidly minding its own business
trillians apart
yet forming white surf in unison

Ages on ages
before any eyes could see
year after year
thunderously pounding the shore as now
For whom, for what?
On a dead planet
with no life to entertain

Never at rest
tortured by energy
wasted prodigiously by the sun
poured into space
A mite makes the sea roar
Deep in the sea
all molecules repeat
the patterns of one another
till complex new ones are formed.
They make others like themselves
and a new dance starts
Growing in size and complexity
living things
masses of atoms
DNA, protein
dancing a pattern ever more intricate

Out of the cradle
onto dry land
here it is standing
atoms with consciousness
matter with curiousity

Stands at the sea
wonders at wondering: I
a universe of atoms
an atom in the universe.

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16. `One of the most harmful illusions that can beguile us is probably the belief that we are an indivisible, immutable, totally consistent being...Subpersonalities are psychological satellites, coexisting as a multitude of lives within the overall medium of our personality. Each subpersonality has a style and a motivation of its own, often strikingly dissimilar from those of the others. Says the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, "In every corner of my soul there is an altar to a different god."

Each of us is a crowd. There can be the rebel and the intellectual, the seducer and the housewife, the saboteur and the aesthete, the organiser and the bon vivant - each with its own mythology, and all more or less comfortably crowded into one single person. Often they are far from being at peace with one another. As Assagioli wrote, "We are not unified. We often feel that we are because we do not have many bodies and many limbs, and because one hand doesn't usually hit the other. But, metaphorically, that is exactly what does happen within us. Several subpersonalities are continually scuffling: impulses, desires, principles, aspirations are engaged in an unceasing struggle."'(Pierro Ferrucci, What We May Be)

17. `Michael, a fourteen-year-old boy with newly diagnosed acute leukemia, was being treated with a protracted course of chemotherapy. The nurse assigned to his case, who was responsible for administering the intravenous drugs, discovered that one of his favourite interests was computers - that, in fact, he was a computer `whiz'. As his interest in computers grew, Michael had begun to develop a personal relationship with them. He even named all his components, as if they were pets.

Michael's nurse typically used a form of self-hypnosis during the infusion of the anticancer drugs to lessen discomfort, nausea and vomiting. The images she employed were those frequently used to facilitate relaxation - visualising a favourite scene such as a beach or lying peacefully before a warm fire. These were not acceptable to Michael. He implored the nurse to let him invent his own mental imagery and she agreed.

In his imagination, Michael would transform himself into his favourite computer and assume its emotional qualities, which for him were real. This included absolute tranquility and reliability. In this state, his body could perform the most difficult functions with the greatest of ease and at enormous speed. He visualised his body as an immensely intelligent `program' that was fully capable of integrating the potent drugs and dispatching them to the cancer cells where they would do their work with perfect effectiveness. He reasoned that, since computers never get nauseated, neither would he. At the end of each chemotherapy session he would 'save' and 'store' what his body had learnt, which he would 'open' and activate when the next treatment session began.

Michael experienced a complete remission from his acute leukemia and, years later, is disease free...His nurse asked him what it meant to be a computer.

`It means being powerful,' he replied. `It makes me feel strong and wise. I don't have to do everything myself - it's already in the program. I know everything is going to come out OK because my computer is smarter than I am and it can think faster too. Besides, it's fun.' (anonymous. Quoted in Larry Dossey M.D., Meaning & Medicine)

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18. `At a rehabilitation hospital in Chicago, a group of researchers tested the effects of a spoken message on patients undergoing back surgery. The patients were unconscious, under total anesthesia, and presumably had no awareness that a message was being spoken.

The commonest complication following surgery of this type is the inability to urinate voluntarily. This is treated by the temporary insertion of a urinary catheter. To avoid this, the researchers tried another solution. Toward the end of surgery, while the patient was still anethetised, the surgeon spoke to the patient by name and said: `The operation has gone well and we will soon be finishing. You will be flat on your back for a few days. When you are waiting it would be a good idea if you relax the muscles in the pelvic area. This will help you to urinate so you won't need a catheter.'

The results were impressive. Not a single patient given the suggestion required a catheter after surgery. More than half those in a control group, not given the suggestion, needed catheterisation.' (quoted in Larry Dossey's, Meaning & Medicine)

Dr Dossey's comment: `...these events show that healing can be brought about by a variety of people, even thjose who might never call themselves `psychic' healers, and that healing can be mediated by the unconscious, unaware part of the mind.'

My comment: if you're having surgery, why not make a tape of the message you want to hear and ask that it be played during the operation!

Dr Dorsey makes the point that computers would not make a good form of imagery for a man made redundant by computerisation! We each need to choose metaphors that make sense for us.

19. "One evening, after a lecture…a woman approached us. She said she wanted to share her story…Loretta told us of a two year battle with cancer that she had waged. "I fought it so hard. I was so exhausted I just didn't know what to do. I could feel death coming, so I began reading your book Who Dies? And started to say goodbye to all my loves and friends. But as I started to say goodbye to life, I was kind of shocked at how little I had ever lived. And even though it had seemed to me I was trying to stay alive before, it was only when I saw how much I had put on hold that I was pulled back into life." She said that as death approached she at last saw the value of getting on with her life. She spoke of how she had been so busy trying to get physically well that she had never paid attention to the places in her that had always been so distressed, so unhappy and perhaps forever ill. She felt very fortunate that death acted as a mirror in which she saw, `really saw', how precious life was. It was then her body began to heal…Now, three years later, she was thankful that she had become ill…"I was so asleep that I guess it took something big as death to wake me up." (Stephen Levine: Healing into Life and Death.)

20. The Prison of Positive Thinking

"Support groups are a safe haven for expressing the feelings that others may not want you to express. The pressure put on ill people to keep their spirits up and think only good thoughts isolates them. In a recent lecture, British psychologist, Lesley Fallowfield described how desperately alienating a man with cancer of the colon found the forced cheerfulness and superficiality that surrounded him.

"The fact that you've got the dreaded big C, that you've got to have an operation, wear a bag and you might die anyway, that's not the worst of it, you know. It's being treated like a changed person and not being able to talk about it. Everyone sort of clammed up or they were so overly nice it drove me crazy. I just wanted to be me; to cry about it, be angry about it, but no-one wanted to listen. They all just wanted me to be a good patient. I had to listen to them about how lucky I'd been that they'd caught it early, what a good surgeon Dr X was and don't forget all those endless conversations about the bloody weather or my nice flowers and cards when they changed the dressing. Did they really think they could make you feel better about it all? Then everyone who visited did the same sort of thing - the great big game of pretend. I just wanted someone to ask me how I felt. I didn't want to play let's pretend this nasty thing hasn't happened. It had and it was real for the rest of my life and no-one could help. I've never felt so alone." (David Spiegel, MD, Living Beyond Limits)

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