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Cancer Is The Answer

Cancer, which had begun to affect as many as one in four, was a disease whereby an essentially weak, immature, dysfunctional cell invaded and occupied surrounding territories, dislocating the inhabitants, destroying the territory, devouring the resources, providing no exchange whatsoever until the entire territory was devastated and the inhabitants died of starvation, suffocation or toxicity. This dread disease became endemic to the second half of the twentieth century as tuberculosis had been in Europe in the nineteenth, and the plague earlier. Ironically, cancer, which perfectly mirrored imperialism, became through its proliferation the agency of spiritual and social — and therefore political — conversion.

The Doctor Who Won’t Charge

An Interview With Patch Adams

People are not their diseases. They are the same weak fragile beings that we ourselves are. Traditionally, a physician in general practice follows patients throughout their lives, but without touching on the quality of a person’s life, their loves, concerns, and fears, we ignore a gigantic area of resource and of disease.

The Green Woman

A hush fell between us now that almost had a thickness to it. It was like the moment when you drop a stone down a well and wait for the sound of its striking.

Gently Changing

An Interview On Cancer And Health With O. Carl Simonton

What we have our patients do is to take the symptoms of cancer as the illness, and to look for the five biggest changes that they can identify in their lives in the 18 months prior to the diagnosis being made. If they have had subsequent flareups, they look at the six months prior to each flareup. Then, they look at their emotional reactions to those changes. Finally, with each episode, they look at five good things that happened to them as a result of the diagnosis or of each flareup — what they get out of being sick.

Birdseye

We know something at the same time — we need to get out quick, Hal is already out, and Chuck is out on the other side, Anne and I are scrambling out, then we’re in the middle of the road in a little group, all looking at the illuminated bird. As the bird stands still in the air, I get an old ecstatic feeling of being overcome.

Doctors As Equals: Beyond The Medical Mystique

An Interview With Dan Domizio

It would be so nice if we didn’t have societal inertia, history, intransigence to deal with, but that’s a dream. We’ve got a system that was primitive, evolved to an enormously sophisticated set-up and is now riding on the myths and images and reputations of the past medical tradition. We need to recognize it, understand why it is what it is, and then step by evolutionary step take it apart and put it where it needs to be.

Powerless No More

On Meeting Patricia Sun

Patricia’s work in the world quickly moved from academia to a home no longer hidden: a personal partnership with anyone who cared to work with her, piece by piece, on the expansion of private politics to a global realm and the exposure of the lie that we are powerless.

On The Mind And Cancer

I think it’s important that we appreciate that what we’re doing with this approach is to bring to awareness an unconscious tool that has existed in our culture for centuries, that tool being the use of physical disease to meet important emotional needs. Disease has been called Western civilization’s only form of meditation.

Mysteries And Metaphors

A New Look At Cancer

I’m on my way to the biggest — and for me the most enigmatic — of cities, New York, to attend Cancer Dialogue ’80, an historic gathering of physicians, scientists, and researchers brought together by the Omega Institute to shed light on the most frightening and puzzling disease of our time.

An Interview With Stewart Walker

In massage each of the levels has to be respected. The tension seems to work in layers. It takes a certain amount of time to work through those different layers. It’s rude, in a way, to go barging into the deepest levels, unless there is relaxation and trust.