Philosophy
For the first time in recent memory, I was in tears listening to a patient share her story of grief. Sad news comes with being a clinician. Although I strive to remain professional yet compassionate, present but emotionally receptive, the heartache that ensued from this story spurred me to relay the interaction. It is one we all need to contemplate.
It was the first appointment with my patient after her diagnosis of uterine cancer and subsequent total hysterectomy. The prognosis was good: stage 1A with no lymph involvement. During her intake, I inquired if she was ready to adopt an anti-cancer lifestyle following this shake-up. It didn’t take long to recognize that she didn’t have a clear sense of what that involved, save for not using chemical herbicides anymore.
Some permutation of the sentiment of being busy is a common answer to the question, “How are you?” Busy started being worn as a badge of honor at the same time in history that burn-out was categorized as an “occupational phenomenon” by the World Health Organization.
Take a moment and expand on what constitutes a cancer-promoting or anti-cancer lifestyle; think beyond that black-and-white dichotomy.
There has been a movement within allopathic medicine to adopt a holistic model in their paradigm. This gave rise to functional medicine, practiced by a new generation of integrative physicians, having great success in esteemed medical centers such as Cleveland Clinic.
I have great reverence for the scientific method and one of its beneficiaries, conventional Western medicine (immunotherapy played a role in my cancer journey). Yet conventional medicine sometimes fails to address the whole person—body, mind, spirit—through its reductionist lens. For that piece of the healing puzzle, many turn to practitioners of holistic medicine, such as naturopathy and Chinese medicine.
What if cancer, like so many chronic diseases, is an accumulation of little compromises?
Sometimes cancer has a big, blatant cause—like radiation exposure. Other times the cause is unclear and its inception insidious. Without an obvious etiology, conventional oncology tends to default to badly behaving genes as the cause of malignancy.
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