breast cancer need urgent advice and support :(

Hi Filipe, I'm so sorry that you are having to deal with this. It's so clear how much you love your wife and how guilty you feel for possibly having hurt her.

Cancer is a very difficult topic to discuss because feelings about it are so strong. I would bet that everyone reading this knows someone whose life was ended by cancer.

Ellen is a beloved member of this forum and you do not have the right to tell her where she can or cannot post. Over the years, she has posted 1,128 time, primarily helping others, including an inspiring success story entitled Recovery from 20 years of fibromyalgia and a lifetime of migraines. Her posts have been "liked" a whopping 1,374 times, touching many different members. She was reaching out to you in compassion and while you do have a right to ignore that, you do not have a right to attempt to shoo her away or silence her.

To anyone reading this, I am the founder and administrator of this forum and this site. Two values that are core to this forum are Freedom of Thought and Freedom of Expression.

Wikipedia defines Freedom of thought as follows:

Freedom of thought is the freedom of an individual to hold or consider a fact, viewpoint, or thought, independent of others' viewpoints. It is different from and not to be confused with the concept of freedom of speech or expression.​

In contrast, Wikipedia defines Freedom of Expression as follows:

Freedom of speech is the political right to communicate one's opinions and ideas. The term freedom of expression is sometimes used synonymously, but includes any act of seeking, receiving and imparting information or ideas, regardless of the medium used.

Governments restrict speech with varying limitations. Common limitations on speech relate to libel, slander, obscenity, pornography, sedition, hate speech, incitement, fighting words, classified information, copyright violation, trade secrets, non-disclosure agreements, right to privacy, right to be forgotten, public security, public order, public nuisance, campaign finance reform and oppression.​

The above quotes can be summarized by the famous quote, sometimes incorrectly attributed to Voltaire: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." (Just to be clear, because emotions are high, I'm not saying that I disagree with you - just that I love that quote.)

With that as background, it is the policy of this forum that we do not have a litmus test or political correctness regarding beliefs about mindbody phenomena here. People have every right to express whatever opinions they want about mindbody phenomena. Everyone on this forum has a passionate interest and belief in TMS and also has the right to express their opinion about mindbody phenomena in a respectful and non-harassing manner.

With that said, I'd like to note that it seems that emotions have gotten high in this thread. As I sometimes do, I've locked this thread for a brief period of time to give people a chance to process what they've read and find their best selves to put forward.

I will unlock the thread soon. Whatever happens, I wish the very best for you and your wife. Cancer can definitely be beaten and research about it is progressing very rapidly.

Discussions go best when everyone has the facts at their disposal, so I'm going to share some references that I encourage people to track down. The name most associated with Mindbody approaches to cancer is Bernie Siegel, MD. He was most popular in the eighties, but a TMS Therapist I am friends with said that they found his first book hugely hope-giving when they successfully dealt with their breast cancer. (I've actually known three TMS Therapists who had cancer.)

While Dr. Sarno does explicitly say that Cancer is not a TMS equivalent on page 4 of The Divided Mind, he does say that "unconscious emotions may play a role in causation, but are not the only factor. [emphasis in original]." (category 1 on p. 4 of TDM is TMS and its equivalents, corresponding to chapters 3-7 in MBP. Category 2 on p. 4 of TDM are disorders in which emotions may play a role, corresponding to the chapter of the same name in MBP (chapter 8). See this page for a more detailed taxonomy.) He also devotes just over three pages of The Mindbody Prescription (starting on page 133) to cancer in a chapter entitled "Disorders in which Emotions May Play a Role."

In opening the three pages on cancer in MBP, Dr. Sarno writes, (p. 133)

Many studies and observations through the years have suggested the possible role of emotions in the etiology and course of cancer. For anyone interested in this subject I suggest reading the work of Lawrence LeShan, Kenneth Pelletier, Carl Simonton, Steven Locke and Lydia Temoshok. Dr. Locke’s book The Healer Within (written with Douglas Colligan) has an excellent review of the work that has been done in this field over the years.​

I have a copy of The Healer Within, but its copyright date is 1986 and it appears to be out of print. It takes an approach called "Psychoneuroimmunology" (PNI) which says that chronic stress can depress the immune system. Because the immune system is the body's natural defense against cancerous cells, when the immune system is depressed, susceptibility to cancer increases. Luckily, there is a newer mindbody book about PNI by Gabor Mate, MD, called When the Body Says No: Exploring the Stress-Disease Connection. When the Body Says No was published in 2003, 5 years after Mindbody Prescription, so Dr. Sarno didn't have a chance to endorse it in MBP. However, When the Body Says does have two chapters about Cancer, including one called "Is there a 'Cancer Personality'?", which certainly sounds intriguing. I think of When the Body Says as an updated version of The Healer Within, incorporating 16 years of new research into psychoneuroimmunology. Dr. Mate is really a terrific writer who includes many references to scientific articles, so he's someone I and many other TMSers recommend.

Like I said, I'll unlock this thread soon, but I thought I'd share those references in the interim (most of the books can be downloaded immediately on Amazon Kindle). I think discussions go best when everyone has the facts at their disposal.

The last thing I'd like to say is that as TMSers, it is very easy for us to be very hard on ourselves. I tend to be hard on myself, and I'm wondering if you are, too. It's clear how much you love your wife and I just hope you aren't blaming yourself for what is happening to her. I'm sure that you did the best you could have, and if your TMS was tough on her, her support of you was a gift that she gave to you because - while things may not have been perfect - on the deepest level, she believes in you and loves you back. So please practice compassion toward yourself. Pay attention to the emotions that may be swirling inside of you and try to be mindful of them. Even if you don't want to do this for yourself (and I hope you do want to do it for yourself) you will be best able to take care of her if your own reservoir of rage isn't overflowing from pressure you are putting on yourself and sadness about your imperfect moves in the past isn't overwhelming you.

Wishing you the best...

 

I had planned to keep the thread locked for a couple of hours, but now I'm beginning to think that that won't be necessary. I'm going to go ahead and unlock it to see how things go.

Please keep things civil, folks!

 

Hi filipe, no worries! My job is just to cool things down periodically and set a couple of rules so people know what is and isn't okay. It sounds like you are fine with that, so we're good.

In my recovery, the most important thing was resuming physical activity. A couple of years later, I got a rash on my right shoulder and I swore it was TMS. I went to a doctor who said it was ringworm, but he also said that the goop he gave me would heal it within two weeks. When it didn't and I went back, he said it was just scar tissue and that it wasn't a problem. It got worse, so I knew he was wrong and once again decided it was TMS. I accepted the diagnosis completely and even brought it up in a presentation I did about TMS in New York. However, I just persisted, itching every day.

About nine months later, I gave up and decided to try another type of goop. That stuff knocked it right out. Go Lotrimin Ultra! I'm just glad that it wasn't a tumor instead of just a little rash that I had ignored. I 100% respect your right to disagree (feel free to tell me 100 reasons why I'm wrong, as long as you do it nicely), but my feeling is that if it had been a tumor and I had ignored it while it metastasized, that could have meant the end for me.

(I'm also glad that I didn't give the ringworm to my little nephew who was just a couple months old at the time and who I got to visit with.)

I'm also hurting a bit myself these days and that may have been part of what made me react strongly. Someone who I really care about recently passed away. She had diabetes and wasn't properly taking care of her diabetes. I told her to do what her doctor ordered, but she was an incredibly stubborn person and I knew it was no hope. She was furiously doing deep psychological work because she believed so deeply in TMS, but her mental state only seemed to deteriorate and I stopped hearing from her as often. You'll probably know who I'm talking about when I say that she recently died of a heart attack, but let's keep it vague.

I keep wondering whether it was not taking her diabetes medicine that lead to her heart disease? Diabetes is a well established risk factor for heart disease:
https://www.google.com/search?q=diabetes+and+heart+disease

As I mentioned before, I expect to be serving this community for the rest of my life. There is a certain sadness that comes with serving people in pain for many years. And I know that, going forward, along with my concerns for another kindly lady (SG), this diabetic's story will be one that I will never forget.

What I want to say is that I don't want to add your wife's name to the list. So, while it sounds like you will probably rely on alternative treatments such as German New Medicine (which is 100% your right), please support her if she wants to take conventional treatments as well.

Every TMS doctor is clear that accurate diagnosis is the first step to rule out anything serious (or structural or organic). I agree with Dr. Sarno that unconscious emotions may play a role in causing cancer. However, once the cancer has started dividing, it seems to be able to grow independent of the mind's influence. The word for cancer comes from the Latin word for crab, and I think of a cancer as being like a crab, eating your other tissues as it grows.

It turns out that this crab can even exist apart from your brain, mind, and body, in a Petri dish (in a lab):
http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/C/CancerCellsInCulture.html
And apparently, cancer cells aren't even that hard to grow. According to the last link, "Normal cells are exceedingly fussy about the nutrients that must be supplied to them in their tissue culture medium. Cancer cells ... can usually grow on much simpler culture medium." (see also this how-to manual for culturing cancer cells outside of a body.) There is even one widely distributed strain of cancer cells, known as HeLa cells after Henrietta Lacks, from whom they came, which have been around ever since 1951.

My point here is that if cancer cells can live in a Petri dish, then they aren't dependent on anything from your brain or your mind is doing to survive. They are like that crab I mentioned, living independently inside the body and not dependent on the mind. The mind body connection can be used to fight cancer via the immune system (Psychoneuroimmunology - PNI - that I mentioned in an earlier post), but once the cancer cells are going, it may be required to simply cut the cancer cells out, like cutting the crab out. Radiation or chemicals may help because the cells are dividing so quickly.

Another way of saying it is that if cancer cells can live in a Petri dish, disconnected from a mind and fed only by blood serum from a calf, once a cancer has started then it is more of a body phenomena than a mindbody phenomena. Meditation, hypnosis, yoga and other things may help, but I know that once a cancer has started, I would take full advantage of modern medical science.

Anyway, those are just my two cents.

 

Dr. Sarno is a proud advocate of scientific medicine and was very clear that he did not support physically based "alternative medicine" treatments. In The Mindbody Prescription, he wrote:
Most alternative medical treatments achieve whatever success they enjoy through the placebo effect. If the placebo phenomenon did not exist, neither would most of these treatment methods. They are potentially helpful but they do not cure because the placebo effect is almost invariably temporary. Since most of the musculoskeletal disorders are manifestations of TMS, any treatment method that focuses on the body will perpetuate rather than halt the pain process. So, paradoxically, though the unconventional treatment may give temporary (usually partial) relief, it will often guarantee the continuation of the underlying process because it keeps the patient’s attention focused on the painful body part. I do not approve of most alternative methods of treatment for this reason. The diagnosis and treatment of TMS is not an example of unconventional or holistic medicine; it is good clinical medicine.

I think Dr. Sarno's point is 100% correct and can't support these unsubstantiated physical approaches.

The producer of the "Forbidden Cancer Cures" documentary is named Massimo Mazzucco. He has also produced three documentaries about how he claims that the September 11 attacks were "an inside job." I find that idea absurd and offensive. He has also made documentaries about alleged conspiracies related to Robert Kennedy's assassination and UFOs. I'm not kidding:
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massimo_Mazzucco
I wouldn't trust him at all.

Wikipedia has the following to say about Gersom therapy: "The National Cancer Institute evaluated Gerson's claims and concluded that his data showed no benefit from his treatment.[1] The therapy is both ineffective and dangerous.[2][3]"

Similarly, Wikipedia mentioned several studies of Hoxsey's treatments that were conducted by top institutions that found no benefit to the treatment. The American Cancer Association, National Cancer Institute, Sloan-Kettering, and M. D. Anderson have all weighed in against it. But in the portion I saw, Mazzucco neglected to mention this in his film. Why?

He sounds like a quack talking about quack treatments and making money off of DVD sales. He even got involved with someone who claimed that cancer was a fungal infection and then tried to cure it using baking soda. This person eventually went to jail for manslaughter. From Wikipedia:
Some criticism was directed to Mazzucco after his decision, starting September 2008, to publicize an alternative cancer therapy based on Sodium bicarbonate and proposed by Italian ex-doctor Tullio Simoncini. Said therapy is currently unproven, and Simoncini was expelled from the Italian Medical Association after he was tried and found guilty of fraud and manslaughter, since a patient died, allegedly as result of Simoncini’s treatment.[5][6][7][8]

One can still get some of these treatments in Mexico, where companies don't have to prove the effectiveness of their products before setting up shop. We hear about TMS because people's lives are so transformed that they share their stories. If there were some great cure for cancer down in Mexico, we all would have heard about it. People would be setting up nonprofits and eventually some rich person would be saved and give millions, really accelerating progress.

But we don't hear about it. Why? Because its a fraud.

Even if you don't believe that, please do note that this thread is getting off topic. This forum is about mindbody phenomena, but many of the treatments being discussed are primarily physical. Let's get the thread back on topic please.