MINIMIZE TREATMENT SIDE EFFECTS

Conventional wisdom holds that cancer treatments are ineffective and have drastic side effects. Don't believe it. Conventional wisdom needs to be challenged.

Here's the truth: Cancer treatments are becoming more effective every day. Treatments are also becoming more disease- targeted, affecting fewer healthy cells. Plus several new drugs hold promise for lessening the severity of many of the negative side effects.

Vitally important is the mind's role in combating side effects. In an experiment of a new chemotherapy, part of the group was given saline solution, sterile salt water, as a placebo. Fully 30 percent of this group lost their hair! It is common for patients to experience nausea, not during or after treatment, but on their way co treatment, known as anticipatory nausea. Add to this the legions of examples in which the same treatment results in radically different side effects for different patients, and what do you get? Even allowing for physiological differences, the mind is at work; our beliefs are turned into biological realities.

During one Cancer Recovery Workshops, a patient named Carol, a nursing home administrator, was asked to draw a picture illustrating her body, her breast cancer, and her treatment. A few minutes later she returned with a drawing of a huge devil injecting a charred and smoldering breast with a large syringe of poison. At that same seminar, Rhoda told us that she initially refused both chemotherapy and radiation because she saw them as highly toxic, more threatening than cancer itself. When I asked Rhoda to draw a similar picture, both of her chemotherapy and her radiation therapy, she returned with drawings of chemotherapy as acid eating through a tabletop and radiation therapy as a beam of light that was blinding her vision.

The implications of these images are significant. Negative perceptions of treatment stand in the way of the body's ability to respond favorably. Whenever a patient sees treatment as a friend; a more positive perception starts to work favorably with the treatment. The best way to make treatment a friend is to make certain you "own" the treatment program, knowing that this is what you consider to be the very best treatment at this time.

You can program yourself for the most positive outcome possible by using a type of visualization that athletes have successfully employed in training. After evoking the relaxation response, picture yourself sitting in a chair or lying on a table having your treatment administered. In your mind's eye, see the cancer shrinking. Feel your strength returning. At the end of your imaginary treatment, you feel good and ready to enjoy the gifts of renewed health and greater well-being.

If you do this frequently prior to starting treatment, and especially in the middle of a course of treatment, your body will respond to the actual treatment with maximum capacity and minimal side effects. Like an Olympic athlete, you will be living the event in your mind first. Evidence suggests this helps the body get the message as to how it is expected to respond in the actual situation.

An Important Thing You Can Do

View your treatment as a friend who is there to help you. Take time to "image" your treatment dramatically helping you. Envision yourself as well, free of any treatment side effects, and re-turning to radiant health.

The steps in this section are basic and fundamental mind/body principles. There's much more to healing with the mind. You may want to continue your training with more reading, attending seminars and workshops, and perhaps personalized instruction.