How and When to Be Your Own Doctor by Moser and Solomon (best classic books to read .TXT) 📖

I never did find out why I awakened from general anesthetic with two breasts, but I have since supposed that due to my tender age the surgeon was reluctant to disfigure me without at least asking me for permission, or giving me some time to prepare psychologically. When I came out of anesthesia he told me that the lump was malignant, and that he had removed it, and that he needed to do a radical mastectomy to improve my prognosis over the next few years. He asked me to think it over, but he signed me up on his surgery list for the following Monday.

I did think it over and found I was profoundly annoyed at the idea of being treated like I was just a statistic, so I decided that I would be unique. I made a firm decision that I would be well and stay well—and I was for the next fifteen years. The decision healed me.

When I was 37 I had a recurrence. At the time I had in residence Ethyl and Marge, the two far-gone breast cancer cases I already told you about. I also had in residence a young woman with a breast tumor who had not undergone any medical treatment, not even a lumpectomy.

(I will relate her case in detail shortly.) I was too identified emotionally with helping these three, overly-empathetic due to my own history. I found myself taking on their symptoms and their pain.

I went so far into sympathy as to grow back my tumor—just as it had the first time—a lump mushroomed from nothing to the size of a goose egg in only three weeks in exactly the same place as the first one.

Just out of curiosity I went in for a needle biopsy. Once again it was judged to be malignant, and I got the same pressure from the surgeon for immediate surgery. This time, however, I had an alternative system of healing that I believed in. So I went home, continued to care for my very sick residents, and began to work on myself.

The first thing I had to confront about myself was that I was being a compassionate fool. I needed to learn how to maintain my own personal boundaries, and clearly delineate what stuff in my mind and my body was really mine and what was another’s. I needed to apply certain mental techniques of self-protection known to and practiced by many healers. I knew beyond doubt that I had developed sympathetic breast cancer because a similar phenomena had happened to me before. Once, when I had previously been working on a person with very severe back pain with hands-on techniques, I suddenly had the pain, and the client was totally free of it. So I protected myself when working with sick people. I would wash my hands and arms thoroughly with cold water, or with water and vinegar after contact.

I would shake off their “energy,” have a cold shower, walk bare foot on the grass, and visualize myself well with intact boundaries.

These prophylaxes had been working for me, but I was particularly vulnerable to people with breast cancer.

I also began detoxification dieting, took more supplements, and used acupressure and reflexology as my main lines of attack. My healing diet consisted of raw food exclusively. I allowed myself fruits (not sweet fruits) and vegetables (including a lot of raw cabbage because vegetables in the cabbage family such as cauliflower and broccoli are known to have a healing effect on cancer), raw almonds, raw apricot kernels, and some sprouted grains and legumes. I drank diluted carrot juice, and a chlorophyll drink made up of wheat grass and barley green and aloe vera juice. I took echinaechia, red clover, and fenugreek seeds. I worked all the acupuncture points on my body that strengthen the immune system, including the thymus gland, lymph nodes, and spleen. I also worked the meridians, and reflex points for the liver, and large intestine. I massaged the breast along the natural lines of lymphatic drainage from the area.

Last, and of great importance, I knew that the treatment would work, and that the tumor would quickly disappear. It did vanish totally in three months. It would have gone away quicker if I had water fasted, but I was unable to do this because I needed physical strength to care for my resident patients and family.

Eighteen years have passed since that episode, and I have had no further reappearance of breast tumors. At age 55 I still have all my body parts, and have had no surgery except the original lumpectomy.

Many, viewing my muscles and athletic performance, would say my health is exceptional but I know my own frailties and make sure I do not aggravate them. I still have exactly the same organ deficiencies as other cancer patients and must keep a very short leash on my lifestyle.

If for some reason I wanted to make my life very short, all I would have to do would be to abandon my diet, stop taking supplements, eat red meat and ice cream every day and be unhappy about something.

Incidentally, I have had many residential clients with breast cancer since then, and have not taken on their symptoms, so I can assume that I have safely passed that hurdle.

I’ve helped dozens of cases of simple breast cancer where my treatment began before the cancer broadly spread. Kelly’s case was not the easiest of this group, nor the hardest. Sometimes there was lymphatic involvement that the medical doctors had not yet treated in any way. All but one of my early-onset breast cancer cases recovered. I believe those are far better results than achieved by AMA treatment.

Before I crow too much, let me stress that every one of these women was a good candidate for recovery—under 40 years old, ambulatory and did not feel very sick. And most importantly, every one of them had received no other debilitating medical treatment except a needle biopsy or simple lumpectomy. None of these women had old tumors (known about for more than six months) and none of the tumors were enormous (nothing larger than a walnut).

Clearly, this group is not representative of the average breast cancer case. Hygienic therapy for cancer is a radical idea these days and tends to attract younger people, or older, desperate people who have already been through the works. In every one of my simple cases the tumors were reabsorbed by the body during the thirty days of water fasting and the client left happy.

Except one. I think I should describe this unsuccessful case, this “dirty case,” so my readers get a more balanced idea of how fearsome cancer really isn’t if the sick person can clearly resolve to get better and has no problem about achieving wellness.

Marie was an artisan and musician from Seattle who grew up back East in an upper-middle class dysfunctional family. She was in her late twenties. She had been sexually abused by an older brother, was highly reactive, and had never been able to communicate honestly with anyone except her lesbian lover (maybe, about some things).

Three years prior to coming to see me Marie had been medically diagnosed as having breast cancer and had been advised to have immediate surgery. She ignored this advice; Marie never told her friends, said nothing to her family and tried to conceal it from her lover because she did not want to disrupt their life together.

On her own, she did begin eating a Macrobiotic diet. In spite of this diet, the tumor grew, but grew very slowly. After two years the tumor was discovered by her lover, who after a year of exhausting and upsetting arguments, forced Marie to seek treatment. Since Marie adamantly refused to go the conventional medical route, she ended up on my doorstep as a compromise.

By this time the tumor was the size of a fist and had broken through the skin of the left breast. It was very ugly, very hard.

Biokinesiology showed the usual deadly triangle and other associated organ weakneses typical of cancer. Marie began fasting on water with colonics and poultices and bodywork and counseling and supplements.

At the end of the water fast, Marie looked much healthier, with clear eyes and clear skin and had a sort of shine about her, but the tumor had only receded enough for the skin to close over it; it was still large, and very hard. To fully heal, Marie probably needed at least two more water fasts of equal length interspersed with a few months on a raw food diet. But she lacked the personal toughness to confront another fast in the near future. Nor was she emotionally up to what she regarded as the deprivation of a long-term raw foods healing diet.

So I advised her to seek other treatment. Still unwilling to accept standard medical management of her case, Marie chose to go to the Philippines to have “psychic surgery.” She was excited and optimistic about this; I was interested myself because I was dubious about this magical procedure; if Marie went I would have a chance to see the results (if any) on a person I was very familiar with. Marie had her tickets and was due to leave in days when her lover, against Marie’s directly-stated wishes, called her parents and informed them of what was happening.

The parents had known nothing of Marie’s cancer and were shocked, upset, outraged! They had not known Marie was a lesbian, much less that their daughter was flirting with (from their view) obvious quackery. Their daughter needed immediate saving and her parents and brother (the one who had abused her) flew to Oregon and surprisingly appeared the next day in a state of violent rage. They threatened lawsuits, police, incarceration, they threatened to have their daughter civilly committed as unable to take care of herself. They thought everything Marie had done for the last three years was my fault. I was lucky to stay out of jail. Of course, all of this was why Marie had not told them in the first place; she had wanted to avoid this kind of a scene.

Marie did not have enough personal integrity to withstand the domination of her immediate family. They put her in a hospital, where Marie had a radical mastectomy, chemotherapy and radiation.

Assured that they had done everything that should have been done, the self-righteous parents went back home. Marie never recovered from chemotherapy and radiation. She died in the hospital surrounded by her lesbian friends who took dedicated, ever-so-sympathetic turns maintaining an emotional round-the-clock vigil.

Marie’s death was partly my fault. She was an early case of mine. At the time I did not yet understand the total effect of lack of ethics and irresponsibility on illness. Had Marie really wanted to live in the first place, she would have sought treatment three years earlier. In our counseling sessions she always evaded this question and I had not been wise enough to pin her down with my knee on her chest and make her answer up. Marie had too many secrets from everybody and was never fully honest in any of her relationships, including with me. I think she only came to Great Oaks at her lover’s insistence and to the day she died was trying to pretend that nothing was wrong.

All Marie really wanted from her life was to be loved and have a lot of loving attention. In the end, her dramatic death scene gave her that, which is probably why she manifested cancer and kept it and eventually, died from it.

The name for this game is “secondary gain.” A lot of sick people are playing it. Their illness lets them win their deepest desire; they get love, attention, revenge, sympathy, complete service, pampering, create guilt in others.