encouraging you to take ultimate responsibility for your own decisions, the key question remains, who will be your chief adviser?
You may be fortunate and find a cancer specialist who can fill this role. However, experience tells us this is not so common. While I regard the role of doctors as pivotal, it is a sad fact that many patients and their families bemoan the communication skills of their specialists. This criticism has been around for many years and while it does take good training and committed practice to be able to give bad news well, one would hope the quality of communication improves soon.
In some hospitals, nurse-practitioners fill this coordinating confidante role. However, maybe a GP who is trained in and enthusiastic about the integrative approach remains the best choice.
Statistics tell us the average GP sees around three new people diagnosed with cancer each year. Only three. So it is a big thing for them when it happens. However, GPs are very well placed to understand both the medical treatments and your other options. They can provide time for discussion, and they may be specifically trained and experienced in counseling.
You may well have a long-standing relationship with a GP who can fill this role. Unfortunately, what often happens for many people is that they go to the GP with the initial complaint and have their help during diagnosis. Then often they will be referred to specialists, spend plenty of time with them and not revisit the GP. So you may need to remember to go back to your GP for this coordinating role, or you may need to seek a doctor who is more suitable for your current needs, and make ongoing appointments.
Do make it a priority to identify the coordinator of your healing team. Then tell them everything. Tell them about any other treatments you are having. Any and all the supplements or herbs you are considering or taking. Seek their advice to ensure you avoid doubling up or using things that conflict with each other. And seek their support and encouragement. A good GP in this situation can be invaluable, providing clarity, confidence and stability. They can be like a life coach, a healing coach. It is well worth keeping in regular touch with them.
So assemble a good team, seek their advice and support, and make your own decisions.
The Third Big Question • What Is Most Likely to Heal Me?
Essentially there are three main sources of healing: conventional medicine, natural medicine, which has three components, and your own resources, best expressed here as lifestyle medicine.
Conventional or Orthodox Medicine
Conventional medicine generally describes medical interventions that are taught at medical schools, generally provided at hospitals and meet the requirement of peer-accepted mainstream medicine and standards of care.
Natural Medicine—Made Up Of:
Complementary Medicine
Complementary medicine refers to a medicine or therapy that is used in addition to, or complements, conventional medicine. Complementary medicine is increasingly taught in medical schools and practiced in hospitals and is steadily gaining widespread support. More research is needed to better evaluate it.
Traditional Medicine
Traditional medicine includes well-documented or otherwise established medicine or therapies that are based upon the accumulated experience of many traditional health care practitioners over an extended period of time.
Traditional therapies include traditional Chinese medicine, traditional Ayurvedic medicine, Western herbal medicine and homeopathic medicine. These traditional medical systems represent a different paradigm of health care when compared to conventional Western medicine.
Alternative Medicine
Alternative medicine is the term widely used by many medical authorities to describe modalities that they regard as being on the periphery, being unproven and unwelcome. We will investigate what all these different modalities have to offer in the later chapter on healing.
What is helpful to understand now is that all four—conventional, complementary, traditional and alternative medicine— generally involve seeking help from the outside and having things done to or for you. This makes good sense. You go to a surgeon, massage therapist or acupuncturist for the help they can provide. You take the drugs, herbs or supplements recommended for you and receive their benefits. You have things done to or for you. But then there is another completely different possibility—what you can do for yourself.
Lifestyle Medicine
Lifestyle medicine focuses on what you can do for yourself in the context of your daily life. This is what we focus upon in this book. Lifestyle medicine can be highly therapeutic. It can improve your quality of life and increase your chances of long-term survival dramatically.
Lifestyle medicine involves attending to physical, psychological, social and spiritual factors. The actual techniques include nutrition, exercise, sunlight, stress management, social support, emotional health, the power of the mind, relaxation, imagery, mindfulness and meditation.
It is strongly recommended that anyone diagnosed with cancer attend to their lifestyle right from the start. If you have conventional treatment, lifestyle medicine is likely to minimize any side effects and maximize the benefits. If no curative conventional medical treatment is available, then lifestyle medicine still offers real hope.
Integrative Medicine • Finding a Suitable Doctor
It is worth emphasizing one more term: integrative medicine.
Integrative medicine refers to a style of medical practice that is holistic and integrates the best and safest of conventional medical care with lifestyle advice and evidence-based complementary medicines and/or therapies. It aims to use the most appropriate of all available modalities and to help each individual patient make informed choices. Integrative medicine is an umbrella term that aptly embraces all styles of medical practice, including lifestyle medicine.
Integrative medicine is becoming a major specialty and many doctors now describe their approach to health, healing and well-being as being integrative. Simply put, perhaps this is what good medicine has always been—taking full regard of the patient as a whole and working collaboratively with a comprehensive range of allied health professionals.
When seeking a medical practitioner to head your healing team, a good starting point would be a doctor who is an advocate of integrative medicine, and preferably a member of an integrative medical association.
Most people start their cancer journey by consulting a doctor. So now, let us take a logical approach and consider how to manage diagnosis, prognosis and treatment options.
Start at the Beginning • Seek an Accurate Diagnosis
Diagnosis is something modern medicine is very good at. Establishing whether you have cancer or not, what type it is, where it is, how extensive it is—all these facts modern medicine generally gets right. Sure, as in anything, mistakes sometimes are made, and particularly in unusual cases second opinions may be worthwhile, but generally the diagnosis can be taken as a fact and as such warrants being accepted.
The Reaction to a Diagnosis of Cancer
Some people accept a cancer diagnosis quite calmly, but I have seen people of all ages and from all walks of life go into deep shock on hearing the fateful words: “You have cancer.” A strong emotional reaction is common, completely understandable and needs to be taken in context. Quite often the reaction is one of disbelief and numbness. Sometimes
