Imagery Uses for Cancer Treatment
Imagery For Cancer Treatment
If you have been diagnosed with cancer, and you want to have the best chance to survive it, then the Fighting Cancer From Within Book and CD Set is for you. The way you use your mind can make a huge difference in what happens to you; the evidence points to effects that range from improving your emotional well-being to reducing adverse effects of treatments, to surviving, even thriving, through the experience.
This self-study program will teach you techniques that can help you relax, reduce stress, relieve pain, and reduce adverse effects from treatments. It win also teach you methods that have been shown to stimulate immunity and other healing responses of the body, as well as methods for making difficult decisions and using your resources to best effect whether your goal is cure or comfort.
For the past thirty years I have helped people with cancer harness the power of their minds to fight their disease, find their strengths, make the best of treatments, and meet the challenges a significant illness brings. While many of the skills you will learn here have other uses in life, my focus will be using them to meet the challenges of cancer.
When you are diagnosed with cancer, you can find yourself over-whelmed with emotions at a time when you most need to keep your wits about you. I aim to teach you to reconnect with your own inner strengths and resources so you can make the best use of them when you most need them.
Cancer is many diseases, and the first thing most newly diagnosed people need to know is that having cancer does not mean they will die from it. More than 50 percent of cancers diagnosed today are curable through conventional medicine alone, and as many cancer patients get well as succumb to their illnesses. While you are alive you have hope, and you have options. You have will, imagination, and powerful natural healing abilities within you that you can stimulate by the use of your mind.
There are many ways to cope with or fight cancer, and the Fighting Cancer From Within Book and CD Set will help you find the best ones for you. The major tools we will be working with are your attention, your intention, your will, and, most important, your imagination. I intend to help you learn ways of thinking that can tip the balance of health and illness in the direction of healing.
Cancer Care 101: Treating the Illness,Treating the Person
In cancer care there are two complementary goals of treatment. One, the usual medical goal, is to kill cancer cells and tumors, or reduce their numbers and their ability to grow, reproduce, and spread (metastasize). The other, perhaps best called the healing goal, is to support the well-being and resistance of the patient. Here I use resistance to stand for all the mechanisms, known and unknown, that protect us from the development and dissemination of cancer.
Conventional medical care for cancer has for many years concentrated on destroying tumors without paying much attention to supporting the patient as a whole person, with innate healing capacities. Until recently, most people put themselves in the hands of an oncologist (cancer specialist) and did what they were told. While you almost certainly need a good oncologist to prescribe and monitor your medical treatment, there is often much more to surviving cancer. Charles Smith, M.D., is a prominent urologist who specialized for years in treating men with prostate cancer, and then developed aggressive prostate cancer himself. After going through treatment, he wrote:
“Cancer is not just a lump in your body that can be cut out or killed by radiation or drugs. It alters every aspect of your life. Time and time again patients would tell me this. Some would even say that, in the end, it was the best thing that ever happened to them. Statements like this make no sense to a physician who is solely focused on the details of surgery, radiation therapy, or ablation. I have come to the conclusion that you, as a patient, cannot simply allow the management of your cancer and your life to be limited by the narrow views of the physicians you encounter.”
Dr. Smith points to a major problem with the conventional approach to cancer. While it aggressively attempts to eliminate cancer cells, it does little or nothing to promote the health, vitality, and well-being of the person who is fighting that cancer. A poorly nourished, poorly supported person with cancer, overwhelmed by emotions, is likely to have a much more difficult time than one who is better nourished, better supported, and better balanced emotionally.
Supporting your innate healing abilities can only help you make the best use of any treatment you choose, and, alternatively, neglecting them is likely to make it more difficult for any treatment to work. Supporting your health and eliminating your disease are two complementary approaches to healing that support and strengthen each other. In my experience, neither one works as well as both together.
You can use guided imagery to see if there are any changes in your life that would support your own healing more effectively. Is there “dead-wood” in your life — areas where you put energy that does not produce something of value to your well-being? Can you eliminate any of it? Are you giving yourself good nutrition and enough water on a regular basis? Is there an appropriate balance of joy and rest for you? What could you do to make that balance more enjoyable for yourself?
Supporting your health makes it easier to tolerate treatments that can sometimes be difficult, and that in turn increases the likelihood that the treatments will work as desired. Methods of supporting your health and enhancing resistance to cancer generally fall into three categories: (1) nutritional support, ranging from improvement of diet to sophisticated individualized programs of nutritional supplementation with vitamins, minerals, herbs, essential fatty acids, and natural biological response modifiers; (2) mind-body approaches, ranging from support groups to counseling, to meditation, stress reduction, and guided imagery practices, and body-mind practices such as yoga, chi gung, tai chi, Jin Shin Jyutsu; and (3) systematic approaches with time-honored healing systems, such as traditional Chinese medicine or Ayurvedic medicine.
While the methods differ, their goal is the same — supporting and stimulating the vitality and function of the innate healing systems of the body, mind, and spirit. This idea is an ancient one, which perhaps we lost sight of in our enthusiasm for what modem medical treatment might be able to do. In traditional Chinese medicine this is known as fu zheng therapy. Fu zheng translates as “supporting the righteous.” In China, fu zheng is not the sole therapy for cancer, but it is a useful complement to both traditional and modem means to eliminate tumors and cancer cells. Many studies have shown that good nutrition, herbs, acupuncture, and mind-body approaches are all effective in reducing adverse effects from conventional treatments, and very likely in improving treatment results.
The Fighting Cancer From Within Book and CD Set will show you how to use guided imagery for this purpose. Guided imagery has become quickly and widely accepted as a useful adjunct in the treatment of people with cancer due largely to its ease of use, low cost, and rapid psychological benefits. It has been shown to increase both the numbers and aggressiveness of natural killer cells when practiced over time, has been shown to reduce complications from surgery, relieve pain, and reduce adverse effects of chemotherapy. Imagery is a psychological and medical intervention likely to increase your odds of recovery.
About the author:
With over 35 years of experience in guided imagery for health, Dr. Martin Rossman is a nationally-recognized leader and innovator in the field of imagery for self-healing. The author of two classic books on guided imagery, he founded The Healing Mind in order to make high level instruction in guided imagery for self-healing affordable and accessible. The Healing Mind’s unique self-guided CD programs Fighting Cancer From Within Book and CD Set, and 30 other guided imagery programs, along with research, commentary, and links can be found at www.thehealingmind.org.
Copyright © 2006 Martin L. Rossman, M.D.
by Joseph Kish
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