Mind in Cancer Therapy
By Walter Last
I am convinced that our mind and emotions are the deciding factor in the cure of cancer. In the following I like to share some of the reasons for my belief in the superiority of the mind.
In various clinical trials mind therapies have been shown to be much more effective than any of the conventional cancer therapies. To comprehend the overriding importance of the mind, consider the following examples from the book ‘Remarkable Recovery’ by Caryle Hirshberg & Marc Ian Barasch.
An elderly male with huge tumor masses all through the body, according to expert opinion, had been given less than 3 months to live. At that time trials with the alternative remedy Krebiozen were being started. Despite not being eligible to participate because of his short life expectancy, his enthusiasm about the remedy was so overwhelming that his doctor eventually let him unofficially participate in the trial.
A few days after his first injections his tumors had already halved in size and continued to reduce until they had virtually disappeared and the man felt completely healthy and well. However, 2 months later he read a report in a newspaper that the trial was a failure and Krebiozen was useless. Immediately he fell ill and relapsed with his tumors quickly re-growing to their previous size.
His doctor was so astonished by these strong responses that he decided to make an experiment. He told the patient that the first trial had not worked because the remedy was too old. Now he was waiting for a fresh supply that would be double strength. This time, after the injections, the tumors disappeared even faster than the first time and again the patient was completely healthy and well.
However, instead of any drug, the doctor had just injected water. Again, a few months passed and then the newspapers carried stories that the F.D.A. had declared Krebiozen to be completely useless and a fraud. As rapidly as he had recovered, the patient deteriorated once more and this time his doctor let him die.
One might think that such a strong mind effect must be very rare but consider this: in a chemotherapy trial one third of the placebo patients lost their hair. In this trial only half the participants had received chemotherapy and the other half a harmless substance that they believed to be an active drug. This means that the hair loss in one third of the placebo patients was entirely due to their belief. This finding is confirmed by one of those rare placebo trials in surgery. After 'real' operations for cardiovascular disease 32% of patients reported satisfactory results. However, a control group that had only a pretend surgery reported 43% subjective and objective improvement.
One third is a figure that agrees with results from other trials as the approximate size of the placebo effect. I take this to mean that fully one third of patients will either die or recover just because of their belief. This applies equally to conventional medicine as well as to natural therapy. Those who completely believe that they will get well will do so regardless of the therapy used, and those who doubt or are fearful will receive
little benefit from any therapy. I am convinced that this is the main reason why one patient is cured by cancer surgery and another with the same condition dies afterwards.
Perhaps the main question for a cancer patient should not be which therapy to use, but rather how to become a true believer. This means it is less important to find an objectively effective therapy but rather the therapy in which you have absolute faith that it will lead to a cure.
However, before you decide to believe in eating a piece of cake every Sunday as your preferred cancer cure, there are a few other observations to take into account. For starters, whatever you do must be totally convincing to your subconscious mind. Just believing something on the conscious mental level is by far not enough. If your subconscious mind is not convinced that something will cure you, then it will not work.
The subconscious mind is most easily impressed by something that inspires awe, by authority, by ritual, the unusual and especially by enthusiasm - whatever impresses you as a potential cure, embrace it enthusiastically. Anything that you may just try to see if it works is not likely to work.
Enthusiasm is the necessary emotional bridge between the subconscious mind and our etheric blueprint. Therefore, the full chain of command to heal your body starts with a decision of the conscious mind that passes the message on to the subconscious mind. If the subconscious mind accepts it and the conviction is strong enough, then it will generate enthusiasm in the emotional body. This, in turn, frees and directs the energies at the life-force level that directly influences the cellular level. If one link in this chain from conscious mind to cellular level is missing, then it cannot work.
Another observation is that a faith cure will only last if the originating causes have been removed. If your body is still polluted with toxins, the cancer microbe continues to defeat the immune system and you have not addressed the emotional issues that are part of your ‘cancer personality’ then there is a good chance that the disease will eventually return. Most important in this regard is to discover and heal the emotional shock that triggered the cancer in the first place. By doing this, Dr Hamer claims a 95% cure rate with all cancers.
For most cancer patients it will be very difficult to find a simple therapy in which they can sufficiently believe to produce a miracle cure or spontaneous remission. Adopting a holistic approach to overcome your cancer, on the other hand, will allow you to increase the strength of your faith in many small steps as you rebuild your health and gradually remove the original causes of your condition. This road is available to everyone and leads to a lasting victory over cancer.
To show how simple natural methods can be very effective in overcoming advanced cancer, I like to mention an example from the book The Food and Health of Western Man by Dr J. L. Mount. In five reported cases of bowel cancer, surgery revealed that
metastases had already spread all over the body. Therefore, these patients were just closed up again and sent home to die. But instead of doing that, independently of each other, these five changed their diets and from then on ate only homegrown organically raised food.
When they finally did die 21 to 30 years later, no traces of cancer could be found in post-mortem examinations. Such cures without medical intervention are regarded as 'spontaneous remissions'. It should be comforting to know for those with advanced cancer that spontaneous remissions can be induced with such simple natural methods. However, while not mentioned in this book, I suspect that there was another important factor at work: these five had made peace with themselves and the world.
The emotional and spiritual dimension
Medical treatment focuses solely on the tumor. However, I believe that for any lasting cancer cure the emotional level needs to be cured as well, and in very advanced conditions the spiritual dimension may well be the deciding factor. Cancer sufferers have used a wide variety of different methods to cure themselves from all kinds and stages of cancer. My understanding is that regardless of the method used, only those were successful who totally believed in what they were doing and, for lasting results, also had removed the biological and emotional factors that triggered the disease in the first place. In addition, many patients recovering from advanced conditions experienced a "spiritual opening" or the start of a spiritual journey.
Ultimately it may not really matter when or from what we die. Rather, it is important that we have lived our life to the fullest, and fulfilled the purpose for which we came into this world. If we live with this perspective, then cancer does not really matter any more. Many former cancer sufferers later said that cancer was the best thing that ever happed to them because it helped them to find a new and more fulfilling spiritual life.