Cancer?

Experts say the big causes of cancer are tobacco, diet and obesity, lack of physical activity, and environmental pollutants. Only a small percentage of cancers, approximately five to ten percent, are entirely hereditary. So, there's evidence that we do it to ourselves.

There's another reason that we can hang our cancer development on. Our thinking, and our ability to acquire knowledge. A number of our authors are highly trained in the field. Some to mention include Doctors Joan Borysenko, Bernie Siegel, and cancer survivors such as Paul Pearsall. Also, humorist C.W. Metcalf explains a great deal of his work with cancer patients in his program, Lighten Up.

Personally, I do not take this exploration into cause and cure lightly. Having known many, and losing my mother to brain cancer, experience has taught me well of the plague that we have come to know.

For our purpose here, let's look at some of the trends. The word Cancer in all published books wasn't mentioned to any measure until the late 1800's...then, the word exploded through the roof around 1960 and off the charts by 2000. However, cancer in some form has been around for centuries. Hippocrates, the father of western medicine, described several kinds of cancers four hundred years BC. Here lies the beginning of our correlation to knowledge and cancer incidence becoming more and more prevalent.

As we humans with our unique ability to learn stuff began to acknowledge cancer, the disease began to grow. It's as if we opened Pandora's box, let the genie out, and bam, the thing grew rapidly like some B movie horror monster blobbing its slimy way up from the depths. Could it be that our subconscious genie gives us what we think about? As our cells continue to replicate and grow hair, fingernails, and such, could we say that the smarter we become, the more we think about cancer, the more aggressive the thing gets. Our collective conscious could be working against us as we agree with the news reports, hang on to everything the Doctors reveal, until we give so much life to cancer we become the cheerleaders of doom and gloom.

Fast forward past the ancient Greeks and the Age of Pericles to the age of the ever conscious Baby Boomers and what have we done? Back in the 1970s, as K.C. and the Sunshine Band was getting down, a relatively popular alternative cancer treatment was specialized. It was, get this, talk therapy, based on the idea that cancer was caused by a bad attitude. People with a "cancer personality"—depressed, repressed, self-loathing, and afraid to express their emotions—were believed to have manifested cancer through subconscious desire. Some psychotherapists said that treatment to change the patient's outlook on life would cure the cancer. This is not to simply blame the victim for having caused the cancer by "wanting" it. Nor, are we saying that just warm fuzzy thoughts will cure the demon. This is more a cautionary tale to help us prevent diseases of all kinds by generating an extremely self confident, positive, and helpful subconscious. The life force generated by our subconscious can be our very own miracle worker, if we learn to let go.

As we continue to learn more each year, let's learn from cancer survivors who beat the odds. In other articles I have mentioned others such as J.W. Marriott who received the death sentence from his doctor when he was only thirty-five and out lived the diagnosis over five decades. While the scientist in their labs poke and prod into cells an un-ravel strands of DNA, we should be studying the words we are feed our subconscious. The smoker dies a little with each inhale, and we too may die just a little bit with each thought of hopelessness.