Greg Anderson - Breast Cancer: 50 Essential Things You Can Do

First published in 2011 by Conari Press, an imprint of

Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC

With offices at:

665 Third Street, Suite 400

San Francisco, CA 94107

www.redwheelweiser.com

Many of the characters in this book are composites of real people.

They are not intended to portray specific individuals unless named.

Copyright 2011 by Greg Anderson

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from Red Wheel / Weiser, LLC. Reviewers may quote brief passages.

ISBN: 978-1-57324-536-4

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on request.

Cover design by Nita Ybarra

Cover photograph Austin Kulp / Cancer Recovery Group

Interior by Dutton & Sherman

Typeset in Goudy Old Style text and Palace Script, Requiem, and Serlio Display

Printed in Canada

TCP

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1992 (R1997).

This book is dedicated to my wife, Linda. Your unconditional loving sustains me.

E very now and then a book comes along that truly resets the grid for how we think and how we behave. When it comes to breast cancer, this is one of those books. As I read through it, I kept thinking, At LAST, a book that tells women with breast cancereither newly diagnosed or with a recurrencethe whole truth. On every levelbody, mind, and spirit. And then gives them a concrete way to access their own healing power. Eureka!

So many things are right about this book. First and foremost, Greg Anderson knows exactly what he's talking about. He has personally helped over 19,000 individuals design their best integrative treatment plans that incorporate social supports, nutrition, massage, meditation, and other approaches to their care that involve their whole being, their person, and not just their disease. He has been there himself. Diagnosed with terminal lung cancer many years ago, Greg accessed his inner ability to heal, has been cancer free for decades, and now teaches others what he has learned.

Interestingly enough, lung cancerlike breast canceroccurs in the area of the fourth chakra, commonly known as the heart chakra, the part of the body most closely associated with giving and receiving whole-heartedly, releasing grief and resentment, and allowing in full partnership and joy. This similarity tells us that Greg knows very intimately the kind of emotional healing that is required for those who have breast cancer.

There's another important point I want to stress about this book. It could not have been written by a doctor who treats breast cancer. Why? Because the practice of medicine is overly focused on drugs and surgery, and the belief system that runs conventional medicine is that the tumor (or the germ) is the enemy, and the enemy must be eliminated by any means possible, however toxic. This belief is so engrained in current medical practice that to step outside and suggest other treatments is to risk professional censure or even the loss of one's license or hospital privileges.

In conventional medicine, the body's innate ability to heal itself is virtually ignored. And the role of nutrition in general and vitamin D in particular are misunderstood or simply not addressed. I recall very vividly that back in the early 1980's, when I'd counsel a breast cancer patient about her diet, I'd have to close my door so that my colleagues wouldn't hear me engaging in what was, at that time, medical heresy. Yes, just diet! That might surprise you, given that nutrition is more widely accepted as a legitimate science now. (Which is not to say that an institutional medical bias against it doesn't remain.)

Yet it is still entirely too perilous for a doctor to talk to a patient about the role of her emotions and her relationships in her state of health. It is still taboo to stand at the bedside of a breast cancer patient and suggest that her cancer may, in part, be associated with an unmet need for nurturance or for expressing a loss that has not been acknowledged. This is considered blaming the victim, because doctors are simply not taught how to deal with their own emotions, let alone those of their patients.

This fear of victim blaming keeps doctors from even mentioning the role of the human spirit and emotions in diseases like cancer. I'm not suggesting that anyone should be blamed for becoming ill. But that doesn't mean we should deny that disease has emotional links and that working through difficult emotional material is a critical component of healing. This keep emotion out of it mindset that pervades the teaching and practice of medicine robs us of our true power to healby pointing us in the opposite direction of where true healing lies.

Clearly there is nothing to be gained by a stance that includes blame in any way. And one must have a relationship with her healthcare practitioner that is based on empathy and compassion before it feels safe to uncover emotions as uncomfortable as guilt, shame, resentment, or anger. But the first step in the healing process is validation of the role of emotions in the first place! As Marshall Rosenberg so brilliantly points out in his work on nonviolent communication (www.cnvc.org), our emotions are designed to help us get our needs met. Unfortunately, many of us have been shamed or blamed for having legitimate needs from early childhood. This includes the need for enough sleep, recognition, love, touch, and so on. Unmet and invalidated childhood needs can stay locked in our bodies for years, with each producing an overabundance of stress hormones. These stress hormones, in turn, set the stage for later disease.

The famous ACE (Adverse Childhood Experiences) study from Kaiser Permanente provides very powerful documentation of how unmet childhood needs set the stage for illness. This study found that adverse childhood experiences are vastly more common than is recognized or acknowledgedand they often map directly to disease. Slightly more than half of the 17,000 middle-class, middle-aged study participants in the ACE study had grown up in dysfunctional alcoholic homes, homes with a depressed or mentally ill person, or homes in which they had experienced sexual, physical, or emotional abuse. These individuals, with unmet needs for things as basic as physical safety, were far more likely to incur greater pharmacy costs, doctor visits, emergency room visits, hospitalization, and premature death.

The ACE study certainly validated my own clinical experience. Back in the early 1980's I found that nearly every woman who came to see me with severe PMS, for example, had come from a home in which alcohol, mental illness, or other dysfunction was present. Severe PMSas well as most other illness to some degreeresults from the biochemical effect of chronic stress and subsequent poor lifestyle choices. I've often been reminded of the observation of Lewis Thomas, the former director of the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, who wrote, I have come to believe that cancer is the physical metaphor for the extreme need to grow.

Not surprisingly, those doctors who are brave enough to mention the role of emotions in healing and also tell the whole truth about overtreatment often face the censure and criticism of their colleagues. Because Greg is not a medical insider, he is free to tell the whole truth about things that most doctors are reluctant to admit. One of those truths is that breast cancer is often drastically overtreated in ways that can adversely affect a woman for the rest of her life. Lymphedema of the arm and radiation damage to the heart and lungs instantly come to mind. Anderson fearlesslyand compassionatelytakes the time to explain why and how this sort of overtreatment is allowed to happen. For example, he explains how the bone marrow transplanta brutal treatmentcame to be accepted as the standard of care for certain kinds of breast cancer back in the 1990's despite inadequate data on its efficacy. (I had a number of patients barely survive the treatment itself.) he also tells the truth about the political maneuverings that got the insurance companies to cover it and other undertested and often health-threatening treatments.