Is fighting cancer the right strategy?

My attention has lately been riveted by posters on the subway shouting "Join the fight!" and asking "Who are you fighting for?"

These posters are funded by the Canadian Cancer Society and they invite you to visit a website called "fightback.ca". On the website you are informed that "April is the month to fight back" and that "every three minutes another Canadian is faced with fighting cancer". The Society invites you to buy a daffodil in April to show your support, because the daffodil "is a symbol of strength and courage. A symbol of life. It says we will not give up. It says we will fight back. It says we will beat cancer. Join the fight."


We have been fighting cancer for a long time, with dubious results. Forty years ago President Nixon officially declared war on cancer, making "the conquest of cancer a national crusade." Thirty-seven years later, in 2008, a headline appeared in Newsweek: We fought cancer and cancer won. The thoughtful, well-researched article attached to this headline suggests that "After billions spent on research and decades of hit-or-miss treatments, it's time to rethink the war on cancer."

Indeed it is, not only because the war is being lost on multiple fronts, but also because it is being fought in and over the bodies of millions of cancer sufferers, who often end up as collateral damage. According to Ms. Begley, the author of the Newsweek article, the investment of two-hundred billion dollars in cancer research since 1971 has produced an estimated 1.5 million scientific papers, but no reduction in overall cancer deaths.

Most of the scientific studies funded by the campaign to beat cancer have had little or no impact on the lives of cancer patients in the real world. "Indeed, it is possible (and common)," Ms. Begley writes, "for cancer researchers to achieve extraordinary acclaim and success, measured by grants, awards, professorships and papers in leading journals, without ever helping a single patient gain a single extra day of life." Many exciting scientific findings turn out to be "interesting but irrelevant to patients," so perhaps throwing more money at more scientific research on the minutiae of cancer is not the right and only answer.

Cancer is a disease with many facets, and it morphs to find its way around the "weapons" thrown at it by science. "Just as cancer cells develop resistance to standard chemo drugs, so they are finding ways to elude the new targeted drugs such as Avastin, Gleevec and Herceptin," writes Ms. Begley. If one route to their proliferation is blocked, they will find another. According to oncologist George Demetri, "By the time there are 10 cancer cells, you probably have eight different cancers. And there are different pathways in each of the cells." That's how complex cancer is.

I would like to propose that what we want to do is not wage war on cancer, but find ways of "waging peace" with it. By that I mean we should not try to eradicate these rogue cells by every deadly means at our disposal -- often causing irreversible damage to the patient receiving the so-called treatment -- but instead aim to bring them back into alignment with the body. When we are waging war on them, they clearly outsmart us, and have been outsmarting us for decades. But what would happen if we spent our research dollars on "waging peace" instead? "Waging peace" is what energy healing therapies do.

Update Jan. 16, 2012: Also read my posts "Anatomy of a miracle", "Why is meditation a good prescription for cancer patients?", "Open letter to oncologists", "Using qi gong visualisations for cancer patients", and "Radical love and cancer".

The New "New Kid on the Block"

A while ago I referred to the Domancic Method as "the new kid on the block". After three years on the North American continent it has gained traction, with regular clinics through the Bioenergy Life Project, the brainchild of Zoran Hochstatter, who brought the method to America and the U.K. The method is easy to learn and straightforward, and practitioners report good results with many conditions, including frozen shoulder, thyroid irregularities, and even some cancers. It has no religious connotations of any sort and it successfully removes the mystique from energy healing.

The new "new kid on the block", somewhat awkwardly named the "Russian Organ Regeneration Method" (a.k.a. the "New Knowledge"), does the exact opposite. It hails, as you would guess from the name, from Russia, and its originators call themselves "spiritual scientists". The method has a non-denominational religious, or if you like, spiritual bend, in that it seems to work through a series of meditations that sound very much like prayer.

ROR is grounded in the recognition that we are all one with "All That There Is" and therefore co-creators of our reality. There are a series of videos on the method on Youtube in which people give testimonials of having regrown lost teeth and also internal organs that had been surgically removed. It may sound "far out", but having now attended a workshop on it with a friend, I wonder (along with my friend) whether what the Russians do is similar to what Dr. Issam Nemeh does quite successfully in his healing services in the U.S.: a sort of targeted prayer.

The Russian method was translated into German and then taught in English-language workshops in Mount Shasta and Thailand. The Thailand group also included some Australians. I thought this was highly symbolic of our new united world: a Russian method being taught by Germans to Australians and Americans in the far east. You can't get much more international than that. BTW the method is not only being translated, but also transposed, and going forward it may also be renamed. It will be interesting to track its evolution. My reading of the method is that its core concepts are quite powerful and that it will go a long way if those core concepts can be retained in translation. If you want to know more, take a look at the Organ Regeneration discussion group on Facebook.

Greg Braden video on Curing Cancer Using the Technology of Emotion

This video is from Youtube. It features a talk by Greg Braden on another video in which qigong doctors in China make a uterine cancer disappear in three minutes. I like his comment that when we don't know how something is done, it's a miracle, but when we know, it becomes a technology.



This may be another answer to the question posed by Dr. Oz to Dr. Nemeh.

Bill Bengston interview with Michall Jeffers

Revolutionary new study on breast cancer surgery

A new study has found found that for certain women with breast cancer, removal of cancerous lymph nodes is quite unnecessary, and may even be harmful.

One by one the old surgical shibboleths about breast cancer are falling by the wayside, first radical mastectomies, and now this. A doctor is even quoted as saying “I have a feeling we’ve been doing a lot of harm” by routinely removing lymph nodes that did not need to be removed and causing unnecessary suffering for thousands of women who developed complications such as infections and lymphedema.

The study has found that for women with early stage breast cancers "about 20 percent of patients, or 40,000 women a year in the United States — taking out cancerous nodes has no advantage. It does not change the treatment plan, improve survival or make the cancer less likely to recur."

Paradigm changing book on cancer coming from Sounds True

It's called Embrace, Release, Heal. Its author, Leigh Fortson, was initially diagnosed with cancer in 2006 and endured the usual round of brutal treatments, only to find out that her cancer had metastasized in 2008. She was at the point where she couldn't have any more radiation or surgery, and chemotherapy wasn't deemed appropriate. She was expected to die. And then she embraced a new regime, and lived, cancer free (read more and watch a short video).

She also found thirteen other cancer survivors whose stories were similar to hers, and wrote this book. Here is her mission statement from her website:

The time has come to recognize cancer as a message to recommit to a vibrant life rather than automatically subject ourselves to a slow and meaningless demise.

The book will be published by Sounds True in May. In the meantime you can peruse the table of contents, read some excerpts and follow the author's blog.

Why is this book paradigm-changing? Because it shows that healing is possible, and gives a full complement of possibilities discussed by experts in the field of alternative healing. Because it's changing the "morphic field" of cancer, and shining a bright light of hope into the darkness and fear that surround this dreaded disease today. I believe that looking ahead we will see more and more spontaneous remissions from cancer that no one will be able to explain -- simply because we will know that it's possible.

An answer to the question Dr. Oz posed to Dr. Nemeh on his show

Dr. Oz said in his interview with Dr. Nemeh that many of his patients told him they prayed for healing, and he wanted to know why their prayers were not always answered. He asked Dr. Nemeh in what way his prayers were different that made them more effective. And Dr. Nemeh replied that everyone's prayers were the same; everyone had the same access [to God] as he did. The only thing that mattered was their "state of mind".

Here is an elaboration. A lot of people pray from their head space rather than their heart space. They pray with thought rather than feeling. And at the same time that they send up the prayer they also send up doubt. What goes out is a double message: "I ask for this, but I don't really believe I'm going to get it." "I don't really believe that prayers work." Their thoughts create an interference pattern.

Modalities such as Matrix Energetics have demonstrated that there is such a thing as instantaneous healing, but it happens from the heart space. The Matrix mantra is "drop down (into the heart space), create intent, and let go (or 'let God')". As I watched the video of Dr. Nemeh "dropping" people in his prayer service, it reminded me of what I see in Matrix workshops, except in Matrix there is a lot of silliness and laughter, whereas Dr. Nemeh's healings happen in a church in the midst of great solemnity.

But regardless of where the healings take place, the mechanism seems quite similar. Dr. Nemeh drops down into his heart space, into his faith, and becomes one with God and with the person standing in front of him, and out of this joining of the three, healing happens. No matter how you look at it it's beautiful, it's possible, and it's entirely real. Dr. Nemeh seems very skillful at holding this healing space through prayer, and what he does could become quite reproducible if he could teach others to do the same.

Here are the links to Dr. Oz's interview with Dr. Nemeh: Part One; Part Two; Part Three. Dr. Oz asks the question in Part Three.