The Global Conversation

Tag: breast cancer

  • Science or spirituality – does it have to be one or the other?

    Angelina Jolie, 37, recently underwent a preventive double mastectomy after finding out  she carries a mutation of the BRCA1 gene, which significantly increases her risk of developing breast cancer and ovarian cancer, a disease her own mother died of at the age of 59.  “My doctors estimated that I had an 87 percent risk of breast cancer and a 50 percent risk of ovarian cancer, although the risk is different in the case of each woman,” Jolie wrote. “Once I knew that this was my reality, I decided to be proactive and to minimize the risk as much I could. I made a decision to have a preventive double mastectomy.  I can tell my children that they don’t need to fear they will lose me to breast cancer.”

    There are many people who are applauding the proactive choice Angelina is making to minimize her chances of getting cancer.  But her radical decision has also been met with some controversy and her actions are being challenged by members of the holistic and natural health community.

    Dr. Lissa Rankin, M.D., a former OB/GYN for eight years and author of Mind Over Medicine, Scientific Proof That You Can Heal Yourself, says on her website, “By labeling a patient with a negative prognosis and robbing a patient of the hope that cure might be possible, we may ultimately prove the poor prognosis we have bestowed upon our patient correct. Wouldn’t we be better off offering hope and triggering the mind to release health-inducing chemicals intended to aid the body’s self-repair mechanisms?  Is it really healthy for any of us to know that we might have an 87% risk of any illness? Do we really want to poison our minds with such fear-based thoughts that then force us to make decisions about whether or not we will electively cut off perfectly healthy body parts? When we live in fear, we predispose ourselves to illness. To live in fear of what might happen only triggers stress responses in the body.”

    And so we find ourselves as a society continually and more increasingly faced with a difficult choice of what is behind Door Number 1, the marvels of modern medicine, and Door Number 2, the miraculous power of our body’s own ability to organically heal and sustain.  And as Dr. Rankin is suggesting, how much do our thoughts come into play in actually creating — and healing — so many of the illnesses we see in our world today?

    Conversations With God, Book 1, offered this to us: “You never do die. Life is eternal. You are immortal. You never do die. You simply change form. You didn’t even have to do that. You decided to do that, I didn’t. I made you bodies that would last forever. Do you really think the best God could do, the best I could come up with, was a body that could make it 60, 70, maybe 80 years before falling apart? Is that, do you imagine, the limit of My ability?”

    And so with all of the information we have placed before us, upon what do we base our decisions?  Is there a space where science and spirituality harmoniously intersect and work in conjunction to benefit humanity?  Is Dr. Rankin correct in the idea that our fear-based thoughts are actually creating our illnesses and preventing our body’s natural ability to heal?  Or are the medical doctors correct that we are predisposed to certain types of illnesses – cancer, diabetes, high blood pressure, etc., — and we are best served to surgically or medicinally prevent and/or cure these diseases?  Or could it a combination of both?

    What are your thoughts?

    (Lisa McCormack is the Managing Editor & Administrator of The Global Conversation. She is also a member of the Spiritual Helper team at www.ChangingChange.net, a website offering emotional and spiritual support. To connect with Lisa, please e-mail her at Lisa@TheGlobalConversation.com.)

  • Is your life driven by fear or love?

    Fear or Love, that is always the choice before us as we walk in duality. Yet those two polarities will determine very different choices, behaviors, and even outcomes.

    Fear separates us from our eternal Source, locking us into miserable patterns of low self-esteem and victimization and, ultimately, it keeps us separate from each other. Love, on the other hand, unifies us into wholeness and brings us to trust in the magic and mystery of life again.

    So many of our institutions are still rooted in fear, however, and so many of us are programmed to follow the voice of an external “authority” even when that advice may be detrimental to our physical, mental or emotional well-being.

    Too often we blindly give our power away to medical “facts” or “statistics” that have no basis in reality.  We buy into the illusion of fear – fear of “loss” of some kind – and there is no greater fear than death.

    A couple of weeks into 2013, a dramatic headline in the UK papers caught my eye: “Drug That Prevents Breast Cancer for 20 Years.”

    It seems that Big Pharma now want thousands of healthy women to be given breast cancer drugs, such as tamoxifen or raloxifene, to cut their chances of contracting the disease, despite possible nasty side effects that include hot flushes, nausea, indigestion, weight gain leg cramps, depression, tiredness, headaches, blood clots, vision problems, voice changes and, even though rare, womb cancer!

    These drugs have not been designed to be used as preventative medicine by the way. Yet they are being put forward, based on a change in policy.

    We need to ask, how will they – the faceless, stern voice of “authority” –  determine which women to give it to? Who will be labelled as ‘high risk’? What about the side effects?

    The wide ranging side effects of today’s medical drugs are tolerated by those who are ill, but now we are asking otherwise healthy women to tolerate unnecessary side effects just because they will be labelled as being ‘at risk’ by ‘those in charge.’

    SPIRIT says we do not inherit disease, only the potential for disease.  The new science is now saying the same thing, but the old dogma refuses to die.

    Aside from the fact that Big Pharma is, most likely, rubbing its greedy little hands together, this is a nonsensical approach driven by fear, reinforcing the victim mindset that says we are are the mercy of our genes, and which blatantly ignores the latest discoveries in science – epigenetics – which demonstrate that our environment is the key to determining our health, or lack of it.

    Perhaps we should all cut off our limbs before they get gangrene?

    Jaime Tanna

    (Jaime Tanna is the founder of Energy Therapy and an active Reiki Master and Spiritual Mentor, Healer and Teacher. Together with his wife Jennifer, their unifying vision is to empower others through spiritual education and energy-based healing treatments, to help them become aware of their true natures, and to live more joyfully and consciously. You can visit their website at www.energytherapy.biz).

  • What would love do now?
    Wear a pink tutu in Times Square, of course!

    51-year-old Bob Carey, standing 5-foot-10-inches tall, and weighing more than 200 pounds, is appearing around the country in only a pink tutu and creating a 61-page book of his self-portraits in an effort to support his Beloved Other, Linda, who has advanced breast cancer.

    His extraordinary journey has taken him to the Grand Canyon, Coney Island, Times Square, The Washington Monument, a cow pasture in the midwest, and Giants Stadium, just to highlight a few.  You can view some of the images from his self-published book here:  Tutu Breast Cancer Project.

    Linda Lancaster-Carey, 51, who was diagnosed with cancer in 2003, says, “He’s not afraid to put himself out there. It’s his own body, with all its imperfections.”  The Careys say laughter has always been at the heart of their relationship and that the photography allowed Bob Carey to focus on something other than his own fear and anger surrounding his wife’s illness and the loss of his father to lung cancer and his mother to breast cancer.

    The Careys’ story demonstrates the level of unconditional love that so many people desperately yearn for but fall short of time and time again in their relationships, a level of love and commitment that perhaps may have not have been as fully experienced but for Linda’s illness.

    I imagine there was an earlier time in Bob Carey’s life where he would not have even considered donning only a pink tutu in the middle of Times Square, much less actually do it.  Even now, some members of the media have been less than kind, colorfully pointing out the flaws in Carey’s physique, to which he replies, “The photos are about transforming into somebody I’m not. It’s about being vulnerable.” Carey is also feeling pushback from critics who question his actions, women who are put off by the pink tutu and those who have grown tired of the “pinkification” of October, which has been designated as Breast Cancer Awareness month.

    In the midst of darkness and pain and uncertainty, Bob Carey answered the question, “What would love do now?”   He pushed past the illusions of fear, embraced his vulnerability, and stepped into his next grandest version of himself, gifting to his wife and all those whose lives he touches the remembrance of his own sufficiency and divinity.  His act of self-definition now spans the country, if not the world, so others, too, can remember more fully who they are:  as sufficient and divine.

    Conversations with God, Book 1, reminds us:

    “What you do for your Self, you do for another.

    What you do for another, you do for the Self.

    And this is because you and the other are one.

    And this is because…

    There is naught but You.”

    Perhaps the Careys’ story will serve to inspire us all today to do something extraordinary, something silly and unexpected, an expression of pure givingness to our partner, and thus to ourselves — or to ourselves, and thus to all of humanity — as a demonstration of our Highest Self and our deepest affection and in remembrance of who we really are.

    Yes?

    (Lisa McCormack is the Managing Editor & Administrator of The Global Conversation.  She is also a member of the Spiritual Helper team at www.ChangingChange.net, a website offering emotional and spiritual support .   To connect with Lisa, please e-mail her at Lisa@TheGlobalConversation.com.)