Radical Love and Cancer

I've been listening to the interviews on Shifra Hendrie's The Coming Era: Aligning With the Power of Your Core. Interview #3 was with Larry Crane, teacher of the "Release Technique". Being a hands-on guy rather than one who likes to lecture, Larry took a few callers through the Release Technique to demonstrate how it worked. The essence of the technique is radically loving oneself and others. One particular caller had a brain tumour and Larry took her through a process of accepting, loving, then releasing her tumour.

I mentioned this to my friend Ellen, who reminded me of the movie "The Divine Matrix", in which another woman, also suffering from a brain tumour, although not a malignant one, approached the tumour with radical love and acceptance. The implication made in the movie was that the tumour then dissolved.

This radical love and acceptance are the exact opposite of what we normally do to tumours, which is to try to cut them out or burn and poison them to death. The fight against cancer is seen as (and too often becomes) a fight to the death. But it is important to note that cancer is a part of oneself, which is why radiation and chemotherapy take such a horrendous toll on the body. In fighting cancer one is fighting oneself. But what would be the effect of radically loving and accepting that same self, extending that unconditional love to one's cancer as well?

What would be the effect of releasing all the negative feelings and grudges accumulated throughout a lifetime so that this love can thrive?

This is what Leigh Fortson, author of Embrace, Release, Heal advocates, and it's what Lester Levenson (on whose thought the Release Technique is based) did, in 1952, after he had a heart attack from which doctors said he would not recover. He went home and reviewed his life, and worked on releasing negativity and developing radical love and acceptance. He recovered and lived until 1994, another 42 years. He went on to teach that ultimately we are all seeking love and that the source of our suffering is that we all look for it outside of ourselves, from others, where we cannot find it, and not inside ourselves, where it lives.

In this blog I've been grappling with the question of miraculous cures and how they become possible. In Anatomy of a Miracle I quoted Anita Moorjani, who recovered from stage 4 cancer after a near-death experience, John Hill, who helped his mother heal from stage 4 cancer with qi gong, and "the Geordie healer", whose blog details his full recovery from lymphoma. "You must first love yourself", Anita Moorjani says. "Negativity is poison to our body," says David, the Geordie healer. "negative thoughts, feelings, anger, fear, keeping alive past hurt, extreme emotion, ego responses. Our preoccupation with negativity has a resonance that usually manifests dis-ease." In John Hill's meditations "you are breathing love from the center of creation to the infinite ends of creation, you are also breathing this love from the center of each cell in your body throughout the universe that is your body/mind/spirit." Healing is all about love.

The opposite of love is not hate, but fear. Cancer is arguably the one single word in our collective vocabulary that evokes the most fear. People diagnosed with cancer get on a treadmill of fear: even if they go into remission, the fear remains. I would argue that fear feeds cancer. Cancer thrives on fear. In fact studies have shown that stress helps cancer grow. If you go to a place of no fear and no stress, a place of love, your cancer has a lot less to feed on. Radical love is worth a try.

See also my post below "Why is meditation a good prescription for cancer patients" and corroboration for the mind-body-spirit link from a physician in "Revolutionary health message from a woman doctor".

Gathering momentum towards the tipping point

I just ran across a website called The Healers. It is the website of Dr. Craig Oster, who was diagnosed in 1994 with Lou Gehrig's disease (ALS). Instead of dying as expected within a few years after his diagnosis, Dr. Oster has soldiered on. He even earned a PhD in psychology while fighting the disease. He was admitted into a hospice in 2008 and then "kicked out" in 2009. The Healers is his vision. "There is always hope in life on some important level," the website says, "regardless of your situation or whatever has occurred in your life":

All humans have tremendous healing power, and we are here to help strengthen your own quest to realize to a greater extent the level of healing power that is within you. Are you ready to claim yourself as one of The Healers? Many people have been so brainwashed by the status quo medical establishment, big pharmaceutical companies and the media that they believe that their only hope for healing comes from the external sources of prescription drugs or some medical/surgical procedure ... Let’s focus on the tremendous powers within you and opportunities for orchestrating healing processes.

Dr. Oster has brought together fifty "advisors", a group

of holistic health experts dedicated to changing the way the world views healing and holistic therapies. Dozens of internationally renowned scientists, physicians, holistic health experts and integrative medical professionals have joined together in this never before seen association dedicated to breaking through establishment medical assumptions to bring the world a better and more complete understanding of how holistic healing can benefit everyone.

Years ago I read Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point, which is about how a thing or idea that is ridiculed, disbelieved, or not even a blip on a horizon can gain momentum and suddenly become huge. Well, to me this website shows that we are heading towards the tipping point on healing. Welcome to the coming new possibilities, everyone.

"The Beautiful Truth" - another movie about cancer and nutrition

I thank "Chris Beat Cancer" for bringing my attention to this movie. After the 15-year old protagonist, also called Chris, loses his mother, his father decides to home-school him and gives him Max Gerson's book on the Gerson therapy. Chris ultimately embarks on a cross-country tour to speak with scientists, doctors and cancer survivors to find out what's behind the book.

I found the movie informative, but I felt sorry for "the kid", who was likely still traumatized by the loss of his mom, and then had to go on this odyssey to find out that everything in the modern world is bad for you. And I didn't understand the dad's motivation in assigning him Max Gerson's book as a home-schooling project, given that the mom seems to have died in an accident and not of cancer. At one point in the movie "the kid" visits a company that manufactures coffins (the point being that Americans nowadays need larger coffins because they are so fat) and we see him climbing into coffins to test them out for size. This just seemed morbid to me.

At any rate, there is interesting information about things that are very bad for you, such as dental amalgam, aspartame and anything produced by Monsanto (who declined to give an interview) and things that are good for you, such as organic vegetables.

A New Year's Gift for You

Shifra Hendrie has put together another free teleseminar series, entitled "Quantum Healing, Consciousness and Soul: The Coming Era, Aligning With the Power of Your Core." The speakers include, among many others, Norm Shealy, Donna Eden, Richard Gordon (the founder of Quantum Touch), Gregg Braden, and Lynne McTaggart (author of The Field).

I have had the pleasure of listening to Shifra's interviews from a previous teleseminar series and I was impressed with her warmth and her ability to engage her guests. The interviews are deep and thorough. Listening is free; there is a cost if you would like to purchase downloads or transcripts.

The Right to Choose

Before Christmas I had a long written discussion with a British blogger named Josephine who sent and posted an irate letter to the London Evening Standard for "promoting a fundraising campaign set up in order to send a five-year-old girl suffering a rare form of brain cancer to the controversial Burzynski Clinic."

I do not know enough about Dr. Burzynski to be a supporter, but this posting, which claimed that the "Burzynski Clinic are exploiting [vulnerable patients] (and the well-meaning public) in an unscrupulous, unethical, even illegal manner" and charged that the Evening Standard was "effectively complicit" in this, needled me into a response.

According to the Standard the girl suffers from a rare and aggressive form of brain cancer, called a supratentorial primitive neuroectodermal tumour, for which she had already been treated with chemotherapy and radiation. I would presume that if the treatment she received had worked to satisfaction, i.e., the child were now in remission, the family would not be raising funds to go to the Burzynski clinic. Elsewhere on the web I read that this type of cancer has a worse prognosis than other childhood brain cancers.

The issue at hand, for me, was that Josephine and the commenters who supported her view seemed to be implying that this family and their child should somehow be deprived of the right to access the treatment the Burzynski clinic offered because it was unproven and controversial.

To me, that is simply wrong.

They were contrasting Burzynski's unproven and controversial treatment to the scientifically proven (and therefore superior) treatments offered by orthodox medicine, namely the same chemotherapy and radiation which the child had already received, which were apparently not successful in eliminating her cancer.

The chief defence given for the superiority of these treatments to Dr. Burzynski's is that they are "scientifically proven". Scientifically proven to do what? To shrink a cancer tumour by a certain percentage for a certain period of time, apparently. What happens on the day after? Or the day after that? And is there any proven correlation between shrinking tumours and long-term survival? Not necessarily. But this scientifically proven treatment is the gold standard, and it's the treatment everyone must have, even if the chances of 5-year survival are minuscule and even if the treatment guarantees horrific suffering and in some cases may even lead to death.

Can someone explain to me why it should be the preferred treatment? Or why people should be prevented from accessing other treatments, which may not be scientifically proven, but for whose effectiveness there exists a body of anecdotal evidence?

And just how scientific is scientific medicine, anyway?

Dr. John Ioannidis ("Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science", The Atlantic, November 2010) has made a career of doing meta-analyses of medical studies. After years of painstaking research he has come to the conclusion that a large percentage of these studies is misleading, exaggerated, or simply wrong. He discovered an "astonishing range of errors":

from what questions researchers posed, to how they set up the studies, to which patients they recruited for the studies, to which measurements they took, to how they analyzed the data, to how they presented their results, to how particular studies came to be published in medical journals.

When Dr. Ioannidis zeroed in on 49 of the most quoted research articles published in top medical journals, comprising the creme de la creme of medical research from the past thirteen years, he found that of the 49,

45 claimed to have uncovered effective interventions. Thirty-four of these claims had been retested, and 14 of these, or 41 percent, had been convincingly shown to be wrong or significantly exaggerated.

He has concluded that overall as much as "90 percent of the published medical information that doctors rely on is flawed". That's a shockingly high number.

Then we have Dr. David Eddy, written up in Business Week in an article entitled "Medical Guesswork". Dr. Eddy has been hard at work exposing the "dark secret" of modern medicine, which is that as much as 85 per cent of medical procedures are not backed by any hard science. "We don't know what we are doing," Dr. Eddy says of his own profession. "I've spent 25 years proving that what we lovingly call clinical judgment is woefully outmatched by the complexities of medicine."

When he tested doctors on clinical judgement, citing a "typical patient" and a "typical treatment" in their specialty, he found that doctors' predictions for the successful outcome of the treatment ranged wildly over the map, from 0 to 100 per cent.

He found a number of promising but unproven procedures that upon closer look turned out to be useless and even harmful, as for instance costly bone marrow transplants for women with breast cancer. I note that because these procedures are performed by trusted doctors, and not so-called "charlatans" who are out to fleece vulnerable cancer patients, they are widely accepted by the public and the people who receive them (and sometimes die from them), and are even lauded as cutting-edge, heroic medicine.

My intention here is not to lambaste doctors. Josephine pointed out to me that I probably would not be here today to "rant" at her from across the Atlantic were it not for their ministrations. I had to agree with her, given that I received certain vaccinations, a timely appendectomy, as well as many doses of antibiotics in my youth. Who knows where I would be without them. I also recognize that most doctors are conscientious, well-meaning individuals, who have no idea how much of the medicine they practice, which they spent years of their lives learning, is not science based.

What I am here to point out is that our so-called modern scientific medicine is likely about as infallible as the pope is, given that the pope is probably right at least some of the time -- yet many of those who follow it are far more fervent in their belief than the most fervent Catholic. They hold up "scientific medicine" as some kind of talisman of infallibility, which it most definitely is not. Both Dr. Ioannidis and Dr. Eddy suggest that in actuality less than 20 per cent of medicine is scientifically based. The rest is little more than guesswork and educated hunches based on anecdotal evidence -- the same kind of anecdotal evidence that is deemed insufficient to prove efficacy in the case of the Burzynski clinic.

Whether or not modern medicine has clay feet, a family who is faced with the loss of their child to cancer should have the right to research and seek out other treatments. If medicine had a magic bullet to save her, they would not need to.

Postscript January 2, 1 p.m. EST: I just finished listening to a news program on CBC Radio that included a segment on hope and cancer. A doctor whose name alas I cannot remember was quoted as saying that too much hope is not good for cancer patients. He opined that hopeful terminal cancer patients who were looking for a cure often opted for aggressive chemotherapy instead of palliative care. He said that he and his colleagues were seeing more and more patients dying from the side effects of their chemotherapy, going straight from their treatment to ER, and from there to the morgue. What a horrendous way to die and how odd to pin the blame on hope, rather than the dreadful, toxic treatments that are on offer! Again I ask, why should these people not have been allowed to seek out alternative therapies instead?

Researcher tackles "unexpected remissions"

I thank Sheila for this link, which made me want to whoop with joy.

Coming on the heels of Dr. Lissa Rankin's inspiring TED talk on what health truly is, and how healthcare should address it, Dr. Kelly Turner's research on what she calls "unexpected remissions" is giving me even more hope for the future of medicine.

I recommend reading her article, "When Cancer Disappears", accessible through the link above, but in the meantime here are the highlights:

1) Dr. Turner doesn't like calling "spontaneous remissions" spontaneous, because they may not be -- but they are certainly unexpected. A "spontaneous" or "unexpected" remission is when a cancer heals without allopathic treatment, or through other means after allopathic treatment failed.

2) Dr. Turner interviewed 20 people who experienced such remissions and 50 holistic healers all over the world for her research.

3) She summarizes her findings and outlines the beliefs and practices she most commonly found among those who healed. Her findings echo what I and my energy healing colleagues have been saying for years. Energy blockages need to be released. The lifestyle that contributed to the cancer needs to be changed. There is a mind-body-spirit interaction and an energy that connects all three. The will to live matters. And, as Leigh Fortson said in her book Embrace, Release, Heal, it is important for cancer patients to have choices and to feel in control of their treatment.

Dr. Turner, who is not a physician but a researcher in the field of Integrative Oncology, has a website on which she is collecting stories of "unexpected remissions". She is also at work on a book for cancer patients summarizing her research.

Revolutionary health message from a woman doctor

The time to watch this is before you need a doctor. Especially relevant to women!


This message needs to be shouted from the rooftops.