Page 52#12. Second pillar - You must clean up your emotions
The first reference I know to emotions and cancer comes from the great Roman
doctor – Galen: “Cancer does not strike happy people” (well, actually, he said
cancer was caused by an excess of black bile = melancholy!) The dogma of black
bile as the source of cancer reigned for over 1500 years after Galen wrote his
treatise.
Surprisingly, he was right! Nowadays we don’t think of the four “humors” (black
bile, yellow bile, blood and phlegm) but certainly negative emotional humors and
cancer go hand in hand.
A defining study was carried out by Stanford psychiatrist David Spiegel, who
set out to examine just to what extent the mental state of a patient influenced
the survival outcome of 86 women with advanced breast cancer (advanced is a
euphemism for close to death). Spiegel, like most doctors, did not believe that
attitude had any effect on the disease at all.
But he was shocked to find that, after reviewing the results at the 10-year mark,
that the women who had weekly support psychotherapy lived TWICE as long as
those who did not. That’s better than ANY chemotherapy or other conventional
treatment. Yet doctors never mention it.
Other research has only confirmed this important principle. For example a
carefully conducted study carried out at Yale in 1987 found that breast cancer
spread fastest among women who had “repressed personalities” (meaning
feelings of hopelessness and the inability to express anger, fear, and other
negative emotions).
However this re-examination of emotional issues mustn’t be used as a ridiculous
guilt trip. The aforementioned David Spiegel tells how he was telephone by a
woman in great distress. She had gone to a “cancer support group” because
of her desperately sick child. There the members had stared accusatively at her
and told her she needed to realize first of all that “every child with cancer is an
unloved child”. This kind of abusive and judgmental nonsense, which so often
circulates at so-called support groups, is clearly worse than unhelpful. It’s wicked
and false.
So it’s not true that “any” support therapy is going to be helpful.