Choosing to Heal

Janet gave me a copy of this highly acclaimed book at our conference in June, and even though it is 10 years old, it is a gripping and important read that takes the lid off the cancer establishment while describing in detail her own harrowing experience. Her own background is as a performing musician, teacher and composer and now a practitioner of NLP. The book is in four parts, relating her personal story, then moving on to the politics of cancer, understanding it as a systemic disease and promoting a more holistic view of health.

An important background to the whole situation is the 1939 Cancer Act that binds doctors by law to offer only surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy as the standard treatment. There are corresponding laws in other countries, and those offering alternative treatments are often hounded, have their businesses closed down and in extreme cases can be assassinated. This system goes hand in glove with the pharmaceutical industry and its dominance of medical systems – Janet quotes the sale of chemotherapy drugs as increasing from $3 billion in 1989 to $13 billion in 1998 - sales of the top 10 cancer drugs in 2015 totalled more than $40 billion. The philosophy behind this is essentially mechanistic and impersonal, focused more on curing than healing and failing to realise that health and disease are systemic and that the body needs support to carry out healing processes. Our bodies have become industrialised, and the patient is seen as a passive and hopefully compliant bearer of disease.

The result is that many patients like Janet find themselves railroaded into precipitous treatment by the experts who genuinely think they are doing the right thing, given their training and the legal restrictions. Janet first followed the orthodox route of mastectomy and chemotherapy, only gradually finding out that the average effectiveness of chemotherapy is between 10 and 15% - it is in fact an indiscriminate all-out attack on the immune system, and there is tremendous pressure to conform. People have to show great courage, like Janet, in striking out on a different path and following their instincts and intuitions about how health and the body actually work. She goes to see Dr Fritz Schellander, who was a Network Member, and he recommends a treatment in Germany by Dr Waltraud Fryda, which she immediately takes up. One of the most interesting aspects of her restorative work is the observation that many breast cancer patients have low adrenaline as a result of prolonged stress. The main components were diet and daily injections, with the underlying understanding of cancer as a systemic condition that has taken time to build up and will take time to heal. Janet describes the details from her journal, and perhaps the most important psychological point is her sense of empowerment reflected in the book's title, Choosing to Heal.

For those unfamiliar with the politics of cancer, this section will be a revelation, dealing as it does with mammography and radiation, Tamoxifen and similar chemotherapy drugs and quoting the stories of a number of other women. Mammography seems a pretty brutal and painful procedure, which she describes, and in her case it seems probable that the mammogram played a role in the rapid appearance of her lump. Risks are played down and some experts like Michael Baum have become outspoken critics, and it seems that between 10 and 30% of breast carcinomas are in fact missed. Even more worryingly, a Canadian study found that death from breast cancer for women undergoing mammography was 36% higher than those who received only a physical examination. We know that chemotherapy drugs are by definition cytotoxic, and severe risks are involved in taking this route to a cure, and the WHO formally designated Tamoxifen as a carcinogen.

The medical establishment is steeped in a mechanistic view of the body, and does not accept the effectiveness of treatments such as demonstrated by the Gerson Therapy and other ecological and holistic approaches. This is the essence of the philosophical division between mechanistic and holistic approaches that understand the body and disease as systemic and best understood in process terms, including psychosomatic factors. Holistic approaches also stress lifestyle and prevention and are focused primarily on the promotion of health, while the orthodox system is embedded in extensive financial and political systems. One example was the lobbying by the American Medical Association against research into nutritional cancer therapies, which contributed to the defeat of a bill in the Senate. This kind of suppression not only of research, but also of alternative treatments is one of the greatest scandals of our time, and we need a revolution to put health first and financial and political interests second; however, no one with power ever gives it up willingly, so this will involve a sustained grass roots campaign - perhaps aided by the ever-increasing cost of drugs to national health systems.

The latter part of the book contains a great deal of good advice on health in general and cancer treatment in particular. Janet concludes that 'the health of the adrenal, hormonal (endocrine) and immune systems is a golden key to unravelling this disease.' (p. 159) - and this includes the removal of stress and detrimental environmental factors that can promote the reversal of the disease. This is a passionate, well-informed and highly significant book - better read by women in particular while still healthy, but essential for those coping with their own cancer.