Monday, August 24, 2009

Buying the Pharm

It’s the middle of the night and I’m up and writing because I can’t sleep with the pain, also, my mind has been churning with new realizations; maybe I will get some peace if I write it all down or maybe it will just be a better way to spend my time.
After 18 months of doing amazingly well with brain cancer (glioma multiforme blastoma), the tumor is back; same tumor, same place. Well it’s probably the same tumor and it’s certainly in the same place. I’m on-call for neurosurgery; could get called into the hospital tomorrow morning or it might be any time over the next two weeks.
I’ve had four seizures in the past three weeks and they have been no fun at all. They leave me feeling physically and mentally depleted and the pain has been hard to handle, also, it’s shaken-up my family and nobody feels confident leaving me by myself.
I’m on Epilim as an anti-seizure medication, dexamethasone to reduce the swelling in my brain and a cocktail of other medications that are leaving me with a woozy ringing in my mind-- and to top it all off, I’ve got a snotty cold.

Anyway, my intention in this essay isn’t just to moan but to give you the benefit of my observations and further realizations about beliefs and health. If you are familiar with my writings you will know that I promote the idea that we are each personally responsible for our experiences; that we attract or create experiences through our knowing or unknowing adoption of beliefs. So by now you will probably be wondering how, or why, I’ve attracted another round of this experience called ‘brain cancer’— well I sure am wondering.
I was kind of hoping that I had learned all I needed to know from the previous manifestation of the brain cancer experience and that my life held some new, possibly more pleasant, experiences. No, it’s got a different version of the same experience, only this time I will have to do it without chemotherapy or radiotherapy (no funding in NZ for chemotherapy and I’ve had my lifetime safe amount of radiotherapy—whatever that is).

One thing that I have noticed that is quite interesting is that the more I am affected by symptoms, the more I am interested in a physical cure. Now this might seem too obvious to mention but I feel there is a truth being expressed here: physical suffering draws our attention to physical solutions.
I have been wondering why my book hasn’t been selling very well—it’s available in many places and is getting good reviews but sales have been pathetic. I also notice that most of my customers aren’t actual cancer patients but are much more likely to be friends or relatives of cancer patients or therapists purchasing books for their cancer patients. When I started to get sick again, I began to look around for answers (i.e. cures.) and Stephanie (my wife) said to me, ‘Why are you suddenly looking outward for cures? Why not just read your own book, it’s got all you need?’
As usual, she is right. My book ‘You Don’t Have to Die When Your Doctor Says’ does have all that I need to explore my way through this illness experience. The problem is that what I need and what I want aren’t the same thing. What I want is an easy answer and to be able to hand over the responsibility for my healing to someone who has that answer. This explains both why I’ve been searching the highways and byways of the internet cancer market and why my book hasn’t been selling like hotcakes.
One of the cancer cure stories that has caught my eye over the past weeks is that of Dr. W. D. Kelly, a Texan dentist who cured himself of pancreatic cancer and then went on to advise 33,000 other cancer sufferers over a 30 year period with a reported success rate of 86%. This is a staggering achievement. Just surviving pancreatic cancer is a staggering achievement, never-mind coming up with a treatment regime that was (is?) effective for curing many other types of cancer.
Dr. Kelley’s story is freely available on the www (here) and makes very compelling reading, especially if one is looking for the miracle cancer cure that will make all the difference.
On a personal level I downloaded the protocol and associated materials, printed them out, read them avidly and then set out to find a supply of pancreatic enzyme, the main ingredient of this miracle cure. I also read Dr Kelley’s personal writings and couldn’t help but notice that, although brilliant, he is obviously of a paranoid disposition, is totally against all manifestations of medical authority and is deeply suspicious of everyone’s motivations except his own.
If one wants to follow the Kelley protocol with any chance of success, Kelley says, one has to follow it to the letter. This includes, amongst other things, a change to a low-protein vegetarian diet (with raw eggs, liver and pancreas the only meats allowed) daily coffee enemas and mega-doses of pancreatic enzyme – which really should be manufactured by Dr Kelley himself – for the rest of one’s life.
OK, I admit that I have allowed some space in my mind that this regime could be a path to a cure, I’m on the diet and am taking the enzymes and enemas – just in the spirit of exploration, mind you.
Something about this protocol made sense to me, and I reasoned ‘How can you ignore 33,000 cancer patients?’ However, Kelley’s obvious paranoia is equally off-putting and I am wary of taking on a belief structure that requires me to be suspicious of all medical authorities, so I am proceeding with caution.
Dr. Kelley raises the over aired (and somewhat threadbare) specter of the huge profits to be made in the cancer market and, as many alternative practitioners do, accuses the drug companies and medical authorities of having more intention to treat cancer than to cure it. I find this attitude of blame very short-sighted. Yes there is many billions of dollars to be made in the cancer market and that profit motive does have a consequence, but I don’t believe profit is the driving force of this market; the driving force is our fear and our desire for someone else to take responsibility for our health.
Dr. Kelley found a way to cure himself; he had pancreatic cancer and his cure was centered on the pancreas and its function. Once he cured himself people came to him because they where looking for hope, any hope when medical science could offer them none. They came in their thousands for 30 years and he advised them how to cure themselves using his method. He was not a doctor but a dentist so he got in trouble with the medical authorities for practicing medicine without a license, trouble that probably eroded his sanity, and his work has been marginalized.
I’m not sure that I believe in Dr. Kelley’s cancer cure as a cure-all, but I am certainly interested in the fact that so many people did believe and that their belief brought them to experience cures for such a huge range of cancers.

Today, many of us are still facing the uncertainty and the burden of incurable cancers. Our fears and hopes still exist as the driving force in the billion dollar cancer market; every new email sales-pitch that repackages an old cancer cure, each research fundraiser that promises to bring an end to cancer and every chemotherapy drug brought to market is aiming to get a piece of this pie.
If we point finger at the drug companies we are just attempting to point attention away from our own hopelessness. If we blame our governments we are looking for surrogate parents and if we accuse medical authorities of suppressing cures we are heading for the comforting shallows of self-delusion.
The solution is to realize that our sickness is part of our live. It may become our deaths but it is currently our life and we need to take responsibility for it. I am sick and I am scared and I am in pain. I am frightened and don’t know what the future will bring but it will be my future and I take responsibility for it.
I realize I don’t need to find someone else’s cure and slavishly do what they did; give them all my money or take on all their beliefs. I can listen to my body (as Dr. Kelley listened to his) and find my own path to healing.
There is a big cancer marketplace out there my friends, with many people selling many solutions. My advice is just to be cautious and read the fine print. Just what are you expected to pay, what are you expected to believe and is it a price worth paying?
The minimum price for accepting anothers' answer to cancer is a devaluation of faith in the value of your own healing ability.
If I take on belief in Dr. Kelley’s cancer protocol (without question) I am saying that I believe that the answer he received through listening to his body deal with his cancer is vastly superior to any answer I can achieve by listening to my own body, in present time. And that is obviously silly.
I believe we can all find our way to health and I am happy to believe that you and I will prevail.

With Love

David

Friday, May 15, 2009

Can beliefs influence Cancer on the Cellular Level?

To explore this question I would like to tell you the story of Mr Wright.
This is from an article by Dr. Bruno Klopfer in Journal of Projective Techniques Volume 21

Mr. Wright was a patient of psychologist Bruno Klopfer in 1957.
Mr. Wright had far-advanced lymphosarcoma with tumours the size of oranges in his neck, groin, chest and armpits. He had already exhausted all known treatments and was expected to die of his disease.

Mr. Wright had not given up hope though and when he heard of a new drug called Krebiozen he begged so hard to be included in the trial that he was given a shot of the new drug even though he didn’t qualify as a study subject.
Dr. Klopfer expected Mr. Wright to be dead the following morning but was amazed to find him out of his bed and chatting happily. With continued treatments of Krebiozen Mr. Wright’s tumours melted away within a few days even though the other study subjects showed no such improvements.

Mr. Wright was discharged within 10 days. Within months, however, conflicting reports began to appear in the media about the effectiveness of the drug and Mr. Wright relapsed to his original state and returned to hospital depressed and once more near death.

At this point Dr. Klopfer assured Mr. Wright that the bad press was due to the early shipments of the drug deteriorating during transit and promised to treat him with some fresh, extra potent Krebiozen.

Mr. Wright’s attitude became once more positive and he responded to the drug again with amazing results, except the injections he received were actually only water.
This could have possibly been a happy story except that it seems that Mr. Wright was never told that his miracle cure was really created by his belief in a non-existent drug.

Sadly after reading further reports on the worthlessness of Krebiozen, Mr Wright was re-admitted to the hospital in extremis, his faith was gone, his last hope vanished, and he succumbed in less than two days.

So what happened here. What caused the disappearance and reappearance of Mr Wrights’ tumours? Was it the drugs?

No, Mr Wrights tumours disappeared the second time when he though he was given the drug even though he was only given an injection of water.
It would seem that the driving force in Mr Wright’s recovery from near death was his belief and faith that the new drug would cure him. When he had an optimistic outlook the tumours melted away. When he lost faith the tumours returned.
How does this work? How does a state of mind actually precipitate the creation or discreation of physical tumours?

If we were able to look inside Mr Wright as his tumours were melting away I suspect that we would not find anything unusual going on within his body. I expect that only natural physical processes would be happening and the natural physical process responsible for maintaining health is the immune system.

Mr Wright’s expectation of health would have activated his immune system to recognise that the tumours needed removing and the normal processes of T cells and white blood cells etc would have began to destroy and remove the cancer cells.

Is this possible?

In the book, Quantum Healing, Dr Deepak Chopra tells us how the cells of the immune system contain an intelligence that responds to the intelligence of the mind/body.

I the book, The Biology of belief, Dr Bruce Lipton describes how each of the trillions of cells in our bodies respond to chemical and energetic signals created by our emotions and thoughts.

Our thoughts, attitudes and emotions can turn the effectiveness of our immune system up or down from one moment to the next.

Many doctors and writers claim that our immune system deals with cancerous cells continuously throughout our lives. That cells are continuously becoming cancerous but our immune system destroys and removes them before they can grow to a size that becomes recognised as a cancer.

When we are positive, free from stress and in a healthy state emotionally, our immune system will maintain our bodies in a healthy state but when we are stressed, unhappy and negative, we become vulnerable to infections, diseases and cancer.

In the book, The Creation of Health, Dr Norman Sheilie and Caroline Myss describe how the demands of modern life are causing people to be in a permanent state of stress that lowers their immune systems and makes them susceptible to cancer and other diseases.

It goes like this…
Imagine that things are not going well for you at work. The boss is not satisfied with your performance and, other, younger workers want your position. The economy is not good and cutbacks need to be made.
At home you are having trouble meeting the mortgage and your partner is critical of how much money you are making.
Your kids don’t seem to take any notice of you and you feel nobody cares about you or supports you.
You feel resentful of others and that there is nothing you can do about your situation. You really don’t like you job anyway but can’t afford to stop doing it.
The future looks like a threatening place and you don’t feel you can discuss this with your partner as you don’t want to admit your vulnerability. In short you feel hopeless and worthless.

Can you feel what this does to your energy ?

The message that you are broadcasting to your cells is that life is hopeless, your immune system responds by shutting down and illness results as a solution to the stress of an impossible life
.
Now you discover you have cancer and the doctor tells you that you only have three months to live.
Is this going to boost your immune response, probably not. Depression just makes it worse.

Add to this mix a 30 day dose of chemotherapy and your immune system is in real trouble. Chemotherapy doesn’t just kill caner cells, it kills all rapidly diving cells, ie, stomach lining cells, skin cells, caner cells and bone marrow cells.
The cells of you bone marrow create your blood cells, which are the main component of your immune system. Chemotherapy kills millions of blood cells and can lead to the complete shutdown of the immune system.
Things are not looking good for you!

Lets go the other way.
Imagine that you realise that you have a choice. You can make decisions and positively change you life situation.
You reassess your life and realise that you can live in smaller house, get rid of the mortgage and work at a new job that reflects your values.
You realise that you can begin to talk to your kids and are not afraid to be honest and vulnerable with them and your reconnect with your love and respect of your partner.

You decide that you can change your diet to eat more healthily and you take up meditation to relax your mind and exercise to strengthen your body. You can decide that your death is not determined by statistics.
Now you are communication to your immune system that you love being alive and your immune system will respond by flooding your blood stream with T cells and white cells eager to remove all trace of cancer.
Your tumours will melt away like Mr Wright’s.

Mr Write’s story, and many others like it show us that beliefs can influence what happens on a cellular level in the body. All it takes is your intention to take responsibility for your life situation and emotional stresses and your decision that you will heal and you can influence the health of your cells.

Thursday, May 14, 2009

You Don't Have To Die When Your Doctor Says

You have read the words, now watch teh video...

Friday, April 17, 2009

10 Cancer Truths

Ten things I would advise someone recently diagnosed with cancer:

1 Choose to define yourself as a survivor (it’s better than existing as a victim)

2 Believe whatever helps you. Cancer is a disease of the body, it can’t control what you believe. (statistics, clinical studies and doctors opinions can’t determine what you believe either)

3 Make choices about your life and treatment.

4 Empower your choices with consistent action, ie, if you decide that sugar promotes cancer, then don’t eat it! If you decide to have chemotherapy then take it willingly and without resistance.

5 Accept what is with grace. Resisting your condition only leads to more suffering.

6 Believe in the hype (that you can choose not to have cancer) if you want to. But realise your limits: If you are currently unable to choose not to worry then you probably don’t yet have the ability to choose not to have cancer.

7 Love. Love your family and friends. Love yourself. Love your body and love the wayward cells of your body.

8 Treat your body with care and loving attention, especially the affected parts. Fighting cancer is just fighting an aspect of yourself, it leads to struggle and frustration.

8 Realise that no one is going to save you. It would be nice if a doctor or a miracle cure could make it all go away but even the best available treatments only assist the healing power of your body so develop faith in yourself first.

10 Create joyous reasons to survive and celebrate every success with gratitude. We could all already be dead so we are the lucky ones.

Sunday, April 12, 2009

What would you do if you were told you only had 2 years to live?

I never thought it would happen to me, but it did.

Just before Christmas 2007 I was taken to hospital after having a seizure and was diagnosed with a brain tumour. After undergoing brain surgery I was told that the tumour was a grade 4 glioma, described in the medical literature as being aggressively malignant and inevitably fatal. Then the surgeon told me that I only had a 10% chance of surviving two years.

So what did I do? I chose not to believe that I only had two years to live!

You Don’t Have To Die When Your Doctor Says tells the story of how I lifted the curse of a terminal diagnosis and transformed a medical tragedy into a life of joy, purpose and grace.

If you are suffering from cancer or any other serious disease, or have a terminal diagnosis, then this book can help you reclaim your power to choose your future.
Read how you can liberate yourself from discouraging statistics, access the power of the placebo, create faith in your ability to choose and engage your body’s natural healing abilities.

You don’t have to feel like a victim of circumstance with few choices and a predictable demise. You too can live with joy, purpose and grace in the face of a terminal diagnosis – and we all do have a terminal diagnosis!

Read this book. Apply the principles and exercises to your experience and face the challenge of your life.




You Don’t Have to Die When Your Doctor Says
By
David Elliot

Available for mail-order online at

http://www.survivecancer.info/

Order your copy today and start taking back your life.