Suffering From Cancer Quotes

This sentence is made of lead (and a sentence of lead gives a reader an entirely different sensation from one made of magnesium). This sentence is made of yak wool. This sentence is made of sunlight and plums. This sentence is made of ice. This sentence is made from the blood of the poet. This sentence was made in Japan. This sentence glows in the dark. This sentence was born with a caul. This sentence has a crush on Norman Mailer. This sentence is a wino and doesn't care who knows it. Like many italic sentences, this one has Mafia connections. This sentence is a double Cancer with a Pisces rising. This sentence lost its mind searching for the perfect paragraph. This sentence refuses to be diagrammed. This sentence ran off with an adverb clause. This sentence is 100 percent organic: it will not retain a facsimile of freshness like those sentences of Homer, Shakespeare, Goethe et al., which are loaded with preservatives. This sentence leaks. This sentence doesn't look Jewish... This sentence has accepted Jesus Christ as its personal savior. This sentence once spit in a book reviewer's eye. This sentence can do the funky chicken. This sentence has seen too much and forgotten too little. This sentence is called "Speedoo" but its real name is Mr. Earl. This sentence may be pregnant. This sentence suffered a split infinitive - and survived. If this sentence has been a snake you'd have bitten it. This sentence went to jail with Clifford Irving. This sentence went to Woodstock. And this little sentence went wee wee wee all the way home.

In a perfectly designed world —one with no history— we would not have to suffer everything from hemorrhoids to cancer.

Besides being blind to lots of good things, the GDP also benefits from all manner of human suffering. Gridlock, drug abuse, adultery? Goldmines for gas stations, rehab centers, and divorce attorneys. If you were the GDP, your ideal citizen would be a compulsive gambler with cancer who’s going through a drawn-out divorce that he copes with by popping fistfuls of Prozac and going berserk on Black Friday. Environmental pollution even does double duty: One company makes a mint by cutting corners while another is paid to clean up the mess. By contrast, a centuries-old tree doesn’t count until you chop it down and sell it as lumber.

So at family gatherings… I try to stick to the acceptable script. Indeed, I discover that the less I say, the happier everyone seems to be with me. I sometimes wonder if I wouldn’t have been better off as a paraplegic or afflicted by some tragic form of cancer. The invisibility and periodicity of my disorder, along with how often I border on normalcy, allows them to evade my need for their understanding. And because our most enduring family heirloom is avoidance and denial of pain and suffering, I don’t need much prompting to shut myself down in their presence.

When cells are no longer needed, they die with what can only be called great dignity. They take down all the struts and buttresses that hold them together and quietly devour their component parts. The process is known as apoptosis or programmed cell death. Every day billions of your cells die for your benefit and billions of others clean up the mess. Cells can also die violently- for instance, when infected- but mostly they die because they are told to. Indeed, if not told to live- if not given some kind of active instruction from another cell- cells automatically kill themselves. Cells need a lot of reassurance. When, as occasionally happens, a cell fails to expire in the prescribed manner, but rather begins to divide and proliferate wildly, we call the result cancer. Cancer cells are really just confused cells. Cells make this mistake fairly regularly, but the body has elaborate mechanisms for dealing with it. It is only very rarely that the process spirals out of control. On average, humans suffer one fatal malignancy for each 100 million billion cell divisions. Cancer is bad luck in every possible sense of the term.

America today is a "save yourself" society if there ever was one. But does it really work? The underdeveloped societies suffer from one set of diseases: tuberculosis, malnutrition, pneumonia, parasites, typhoid, cholera, typhus, etc. Affluent America has virtually invented a whole new set of diseases: obesity, arteriosclerosis, heart disease, strokes, lung cancer, venereal disease, cirrhosis of the liver, drug addiction, alcoholism, divorce, battered children, suicide, murder. Take your choice. Labor-saving machines have turned out to be body-killing devices. Our affluence has allowed both mobility and isolation of the nuclear family, and as a result, our divorce courts, our prisons and our mental institutions are flooded. In saving ourselves we have nearly lost ourselves.

Society has three stages: Savagery, Ascendance, Decadence. The great rise because of Savagery. They rule in Ascendance. They fall because of their own Decadence." He tells how the Persians were felled, how the Romans collapsed because their rulers forgot how their parents gained them an empire. He prattles about Muslim dynasties and European effeminacy and Chinese regionalism and American self-loathing and self-neutering. All the ancient names. "Our Savagery began when our capital, Luna, rebelled against the tyranny of Earth and freed herself from the shackles of Demokracy, from the Noble Lie - the idea that men are brothers and are created equal." Augustus weaves lies of his own with that golden tongue of his. He tells of the Goldens' suffering. The Masses sat on the wagon and expected the great to pull, he reminds. They sat whipping the great until we could no longer take it. I remember a different whipping. "Men are not created equal; we all know this. There are averages. There are outliers. There are the ugly. There are the beautiful. This would not be if we were all equal. A Red can no more command a starship than a Green can serve as a doctor!" There's more laughter across the square as he tells us to look at pathetic Athens, the birthplace of the cancer they call Demokracy. Look how it fell to Sparta. The Noble Lie made Athens weak. It made their citizens turn on their best general, Alcibiades, because of jealousy. "Even the nations of Earth grew jealous of one another. The United States of America exacted this idea of equality through force. And when the nations united, the Americans were surprised to find that they were disliked! The Masses are jealous! How wonderful a dream it would be if all men were created equal! But we are not. It is against the Noble Lie that we fight. But as I said before, as I say to you now, there is another evil against which we war. It is a more pernicious evil. It is a subversive, slow evil. It is not a wildfire. It is a cancer. And that cancer is Decadence. Our society has passed from Savagery to Ascendance. But like our spiritual ancestors, the Romans, we too can fall into Decadence.

We live in truly unbelievable times. Autism is an epidemic in most western countries, western governments are nothing more than corrupt corporations, and corporations are routinely suppressing information regarding the toxicity of many common household items. The result is that many people are unnecessarily suffering from easily preventable developmental problems, sickness and cancer.

Children with multiple ACEs are more likely to struggle with anxiety and depression, to suffer from heart disease and obesity, and to contract certain types of cancers. They’re also more likely to underperform in school and suffer from relationship instability as adults. Even excessive shouting can damage a kid’s sense of security and contribute to mental health and behavioral issues down the road. Harvard

A landmark 2010 study from the Massachusetts General Hospital had even more startling findings. The researchers randomly assigned 151 patients with stage IV lung cancer, like Sara’s, to one of two possible approaches to treatment. Half received usual oncology care. The other half received usual oncology care plus parallel visits with a palliative care specialist. These are specialists in preventing and relieving the suffering of patients, and to see one, no determination of whether they are dying or not is required. If a person has serious, complex illness, palliative specialists are happy to help. The ones in the study discussed with the patients their goals and priorities for if and when their condition worsened. The result: those who saw a palliative care specialist stopped chemotherapy sooner, entered hospice far earlier, experienced less suffering at the end of their lives—and they lived 25 percent longer. In other words, our decision making in medicine has failed so spectacularly that we have reached the point of actively inflicting harm on patients rather than confronting the subject of mortality.

Good things can come from thinking about and facing your death. It's about understanding life.

I became a student of my own depressed experience, trying to unthread its causes. What was the root of all this despair? Was it psychological? (Was it Mom and Dad's fault?( Was it just temporal, a 'bad time' in my life? (When the divorce ends will the depression end with it?) Was it genetic? (Melancholy, called by many names, has run through my family for generations, along with its sad bride, Alcoholism.) Was it cultural? (Is this just the fallout of postfeminist American career girl trying to find balance in an increasingly stressful alienting urban world?) Was it astrological? (Am I so sad because I'm a thin-skinned Cancer whose major signs are all ruled by unstable Gemini?) Was it artistic? (Don't creative people always suffer from depression because we're so supersensitive and special?) Was it evolutionary? (Do I carry in me the residual panic that comes after millennia of my species' attempting to survive a brutal world?) Was it karmic? (Are all these spasms of grief just the consequences of bad behavior in previous lifetimes, the last obstacles before liberation?) Was it hormonal? Dietary? Philosophical? Seasonal? Environmental? Was I tapping into a universal yearning for God? Did I have a chemical imbalance? Or did I just need to get laid?

When I went on my first antidepressant it had the side effect of making me fixated on suicide (which is sort of the opposite of what you want). It’s a rare side effect so I switched to something else that did work. Lots of concerned friends and family felt that the first medication’s failure was a clear sign that drugs were not the answer; if they were I would have been fixed. Clearly I wasn’t as sick as I said I was if the medication didn’t work for me. And that sort of makes sense, because when you have cancer the doctor gives you the best medicine and if it doesn’t shrink the tumor immediately then that’s a pretty clear sign you were just faking it for attention. I mean, cancer is a serious, often fatal disease we’ve spent billions of dollars studying and treating so obviously a patient would never have to try multiple drugs, surgeries, radiation, etc., to find what will work specifically for them. And once the cancer sufferer is in remission they’re set for life because once they’ve learned how to not have cancer they should be good. And if they let themselves get cancer again they can just do whatever they did last time. Once you find the right cancer medication you’re pretty much immune from that disease forever. And if you get it again it’s probably just a reaction to too much gluten or not praying correctly. Righ

Well, my dear sisters, the gospel is the good news that can free us from guilt. We know that Jesus experienced the totality of mortal existence in Gethsemane. It's our faith that he experienced everything- absolutely everything. Sometimes we don't think through the implications of that belief. We talk in great generalities about the sins of all humankind, about the suffering of the entire human family. But we don't experience pain in generalities. We experience it individually. That means he knows what it felt like when your mother died of cancer- how it was for your mother, how it still is for you. He knows what it felt like to lose the student body election. He knows that moment when the brakes locked and the car started to skid. He experienced the slave ship sailing from Ghana toward Virginia. He experienced the gas chambers at Dachau. He experienced Napalm in Vietnam. He knows about drug addiction and alcoholism. Let me go further. There is nothing you have experienced as a woman that he does not also know and recognize. On a profound level, he understands the hunger to hold your baby that sustains you through pregnancy. He understands both the physical pain of giving birth and the immense joy. He knows about PMS and cramps and menopause. He understands about rape and infertility and abortion. His last recorded words to his disciples were, "And, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world." (Matthew 28:20) He understands your mother-pain when your five-year-old leaves for kindergarten, when a bully picks on your fifth-grader, when your daughter calls to say that the new baby has Down syndrome. He knows your mother-rage when a trusted babysitter sexually abuses your two-year-old, when someone gives your thirteen-year-old drugs, when someone seduces your seventeen-year-old. He knows the pain you live with when you come home to a quiet apartment where the only children are visitors, when you hear that your former husband and his new wife were sealed in the temple last week, when your fiftieth wedding anniversary rolls around and your husband has been dead for two years. He knows all that. He's been there. He's been lower than all that. He's not waiting for us to be perfect. Perfect people don't need a Savior. He came to save his people in their imperfections. He is the Lord of the living, and the living make mistakes. He's not embarrassed by us, angry at us, or shocked. He wants us in our brokenness, in our unhappiness, in our guilt and our grief. You know that people who live above a certain latitude and experience very long winter nights can become depressed and even suicidal, because something in our bodies requires whole spectrum light for a certain number of hours a day. Our spiritual requirement for light is just as desperate and as deep as our physical need for light. Jesus is the light of the world. We know that this world is a dark place sometimes, but we need not walk in darkness. The people who sit in darkness have seen a great light, and the people who walk in darkness can have a bright companion. We need him, and He is ready to come to us, if we'll open the door and let him.

The results of the study were astoundingly clear: The more childhood trauma someone had suffered, the worse their health outcomes were in adulthood. And their risk for contracting diseases didn’t go up just a few percentage points. People with high ACE scores were about three times as likely to develop liver disease, twice as likely to develop cancer or heart disease, four times as likely to develop emphysema.[2] They were seven and a half times more likely to become alcoholics, four and a half times more likely to suffer from depression, and a whopping twelve times more likely to attempt suicide.[3] Scientists have learned that stress is literally toxic. Stress chemicals like cortisol and adrenaline surging through our bodies are healthy in moderation—you wouldn’t be able to get up in the morning without a good dose of cortisol. But in overwhelming quantities, they become toxic and can change the structure of our brains. Stress and depression wear our bodies out. And childhood trauma affects our telomeres. Telomeres are like little caps on the ends of our strands of DNA that keep them from unraveling. As we get older, those telomeres get shorter and shorter. When they’ve finally disappeared, our DNA itself begins to unravel, increasing our chances of getting cancer and making us especially susceptible to disease. Because of this tendency, telomeres are linked to human lifespan. And studies have shown that people who suffered from childhood trauma have significantly shortened telomeres.[4]

It takes courage, humiliating courage, to step aside from your own sovereignty and imagined control and begin looking for the gift that comes unmerited. Yes, I’m talking about grace. Grace by my definition is the gift that comes unearned. In a world of unbelievably able bodies, where new diets are fashioned every day to keep my brand of story away, it is hard to realize you may be living in the middle of the best story ever told. That the story of breast cancer could possibly be a good story? A great story even? It would be easier to shake my fist at the test results and scream that this isn’t the right story, but to receive—humbly receive—the story no one would ever want, and know there is goodness in the midst of its horror, is not something I could ever do in my own strength. I simply cannot. That receiving comes from the One who received His own suffering for a much greater purpose than my own.

Cold flu looks nothing in front of cancer...complications in our personal life is like a flu and killing people on name of God or borders or countries is cancer...you can help this planet...there are ways...willingness is an action We are one...the only difference is ...few are awake, few are ready to wake up and few are just ignorant and time is coming when there will be no choice for those who is ignorant because of suffering and pain .... Bigger EGO is always drawn to Bigger Ego so many times Bigger ego ignores the important message being delivered by not a famous person. Love heals...Love not from mind...deep from heart....Mind brings games and play around with relationships...Something sacred deep from heart....L ♥ V E...Unconditional...No business of give and take....unconditional giving.... Don't be afraid and run away from loneliness and start seeking securities....Try to enjoy every part of it and then you will see ...Loneliness turned into something which we never want to loose....investigate your feeling when you feel lonely We always want something in return...we have made LOVE a business...I did it too in the past that's why I know it...this is the reason that we should change...you change, I change....everyone should think again on the way of living life and thinking and specially who thinks they know what life is. 2 births in the same life....physical and spiritual....you break the bondage (psychologically) with physical attributes of life ( detached state of mind) and try to find real "maksad" (purpose) of your existence as Being not Doing If you want to enjoy your relationship with your special one then please keep these tools handy:1) Patience2) Trust3) Freedom4) Honesty5) Respect we are all stars... twinkling with love and when there is love then there is no conflict 4 letters L ♥ V E ..imagine these letters on your hand and try to feel the deep meaning and power of these letters...feel the love you have for this life...start from there and spread love to everyone you see or meet...LOVE

Every time you come to the limit of what is demanded of you, you are faced with the same problem - to be yourself! And with the first step you make in this direction you realize that there is neither plus nor minus; you throw the skates away and swim. There is no suffering any more because there is nothing which can threaten your security. And there is no desire to be of help to others even, because why rob them of a privilege which must be earned? Life stretches out from moment to moment in stupendous infinitude. Nothing can be more real than what you suppose it to be. Whatever you think the cosmos to be it is and it could not possibly be anything else as long as you are you and I am I. You live in the fruits of your action and your action is the harvest of your thought. Thought and action are one, because swimming you are in it and of it, and it is everything you desire it to be, no more, no less. Every stroke counts for eternity. The heating and cooling system is one system, and Cancer is separated from Capricorn only by an imaginary line. You don't become ecstatic and you are not plunged into violent grief; you don't pray for rain, neither do you dance a jig. You live like a happy rock in the midst of the ocean: you are fixed while everything about you is in turbulent motion. You are fixed in a reality which permits the thought that nothing is fixed, that even the happiest and mightiest rock will one day be utterly dissolved and fluid as the ocean from which it was born.

There are more sociopaths among us than people who suffer from the much-publicized disorder of anorexia, four times as many sociopaths as schizophrenics, and one hundred times as many sociopaths as people diagnosed with a known scourge such as colon cancer. —Dr. Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door

One day, when I thought I was alone, I prayed in church. While making this offering before the cross, a parishioner came up to me, put her arm around my shoulder and prayed, ‘Dear God, please heal Father Jim. And give me his cancer.’ I was incredulous. I looked at her, and then back to the Lord and quietly prayed, ‘If she insists, Lord, hear our prayer!’ Later I was able to pray, ‘Lord, rather than give my cancer to her, give her heart of love to me – the love that prompted her to deny her very self and pray in such a loving way.

Eventually sinking into despair, [Heinrich von Kleist] shot himself in 1811 as part of a suicide pact made with a woman suffering from incurable cancer.

The number of people who suffer from hole phobia apparently trumps the number who suffer from cancer phobia, which is number 11 on the list, while the fear of death itself sits at number 12.

Part of me was afraid that if I raised my fist to the sky and demanded an answer now, I would hear a thundering and calloused, 'Because I said so," from God in heaven. And I may not ever want to speak to Him again.

Selfishness comes from too little self-love, not too much, as we compensate for our lack. There's no such thing as caring for the self too much, just as there's no such thing as too much genuine affection for others. Our world suffers from too little self-love and too much judgment, insecurity, fear, and mistrust. If we all cared about ourselves more, most of these ills would disappear.

Children with multiple ACEs are more likely to struggle with anxiety and depression, to suffer from heart disease and obesity, and to contract certain types of cancers. They’re also more likely to underperform in school and suffer from relationship instability as adults.

Our world is suffering from metastatic cancer. Stage 4. Racism has spread to nearly every part of the body politic, intersecting with bigotry of all kinds, justifying all kinds of inequities by victim blaming; heightening exploitation and misplaced hate; spurring mass shootings, arms races, and demagogues who polarize nations, shutting down essential organs of democracy; and threatening the life of human society with nuclear war and climate change. In the United States, the metastatic cancer has been spreading, contracting, and threatening to kill the American body as it nearly did before its birth, as it nearly did during its Civil War. But how many people stare inside the body of their nations' racial inequities, their neighborhoods' racial inequities, their occupations' racial inequities, their institutions' racial inequities, and flatly deny that their policies are racist? They flatly deny that racial inequity is a signpost of racist policy. They flatly deny the racist policy as they use racist ideas to justify the racial inequity. They flatly deny the cancer of racism as the cancer cells spread and literally threaten their own lives and the lives of the people and spaces and places they hold dear. The popular conception of denial--like the popular strategy of suasion--is suicidal.

Jesus didn’t have to extend His love. He didn’t have to think of me when He went up on that cross. He didn’t have to rewrite my story from one of beauty to one of brokenness and create a whole new brand of beauty. He simply didn’t have to do it, but He did. He bought me. He bought me that day He died, and He showed His power when He overcame death and rose from the grave. He overcame my death in that moment. He overcame my fear of death in that unbelievable, beautiful moment, and the fruit of that death, that resurrection, and that stunning grace is peace. It is the hardest peace, because it is brutal. Horribly brutal and ugly, and we want to look away, but it is the greatest, greatest story that ever was. And it was, and it is.

Well it seems to me that there are books that tell stories, and then there are books that tell truths...," I began. "Go on," she said "The first kind, they show you life like you want it to be. With villains getting what they deserve and the hero seeing what a fool he's been and marrying the heroine and happy ending and all that. Like Sense and Sensibility or Persuasion. But the second kind, they show you life more like it is. Like in Huckleberry Finn where Huck's pa is a no-good drunk and Jim suffers so. The first kind makes you cheerful and contented, but the second kind shakes you up." "People like happy ending, Mattie. They don't want to be shaken up." "I guess not, ma'am. It's just that there are no Captain Wentworths, are there? But there are plenty of Pap Finns. And things go well for Anne Elliot in the end, but they don't go well for most people." My voice trembled as I spoke, as it did whenever I was angry. "I feel let down sometimes. The people in the books-the heroes- they're always so...heroic. And I try to be, but..." "...you're not," Lou said, licking deviled ham off her fingers. "...no, I'm not. People in books are good and noble and unselfish, and people aren't that way... and I feel, well... hornswoggled sometimes. By Jane Austen and Charles Dickens and Louisa May Alcott. Why do writers make things sugary when life isn't that way?" I asked too loudly. "Why don't they tell the truth? Why don't they tell how a pigpen looks after the sow's eaten her children? Or how it is for a girl when her baby won't come out? Or that cancer has a smell to it? All those books, Miss Wilcox," I said, pointing at a pile of them," and I bet not one of them will tell you what cancer smells like. I can, though. It stinks. Like meat gone bad and dirty clothes and bog water all mixed together. Why doesn't anyone tell you that?" No one spoke for a few seconds. I could hear the clock ticking and the sound of my own breathing. Then Lou quietly said, "Cripes, Mattie. You oughtn't to talk like that." I realized then that Miss Wilcox had stopped smiling. Her eyes were fixed om me, and I was certain she'd decided I was morbid and dispiriting like Miss Parrish had said and that I should leave then and there. "I'm sorry, Miss Wilcox," I said, looking at the floor. "I don't mean to be coarse. I just... I don't know why I should care what happens to people in a drawing room in London or Paris or anywhere else when no one in those places cares what happens to people in Eagle Bay." Miss Wilcox's eyes were still fixed on me, only now they were shiny. Like they were the day I got my letter from Barnard. "Make them care, Mattie," she said softly. "And don't you ever be sorry.

Some years ago a Belgian couple committed euthanasia together. He (eighty-three) had terminal cancer and she (seventy-eight), suffering from other serious age-related ailments, didn’t want to go on living without him. Hand in hand they stepped out of life. There’s something very romantic about that.

Our world is suffering from metastatic cancer.

Cancer is a gift. There, I said it. I can say that cancer and suffering give the beautiful gift of perspective. It is the gift you never wanted, the gift wrapped in confusion and brokenness and heartbreak. It’s the gift that strips all your other ideas of living from you completely. The beautiful, ugly raising to the surface of the importance of each and every moment.

I took on my depression like it was the fight of my life, wich of course, it was. I became a student of my own depressed experience, trying to unthread its causes. What was the root of all this dispair? Was it psychological? (Mom and Dad's fault?) Was it just temporal, a "bad time" in my life? (When the divorce ends, will the depression end with it?) Was it genetic? (Melancholy, called by many names, has run through my family for generations, along with its sad bride, Alcholisme.) Was it cultural? (Is this just the fallout of a postfeminist American career girl trying to find balance in an increasingly stressful and alienating urban world?) Was it astrological? (Am I so sad because I'm a thin-skinned cancer whose major signs are all ruled by unstable Gemini?) Was it artistic? (Don't creative people always suffer from depression because we're so supersensitive and special?) Was it evolutionary? (Do I carry in me the residual panic that come after millennia of my species' attempting to survive a brutal world?) Was it Karmic? (Are all these spasms of grief just the consequences of bad behavior in previous lifetimes, the last obstacles before liberation?) Was it hormonal? Dietary? Philosophical? Seasonal? Environmental? Did I have a chemical imbalance? Or did I just need to get laid?

To take estrogen or not to take estrogen: That is the question. Whether 'tis nobler to abstain and suffer The sweat and puddles of outrageous flashes Or to take arms against a sea of mood swings, And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep; No more; at first the studies say 'twill end The heart attacks and thousand bouts of bloat That flesh is heir to, 'tis a true confusion - For then they say 'twill cause us all to die Perchance from breast cancer; ay, there's the rub; For who can dream or even sleep while worrying about What doctors might be saying come next week?

Only Jesus can hold things like this in tandem. Only Jesus can simultaneously attend to the one with the broken foot and the one with stage IV cancer. Only Jesus can concurrently care about the child withering away from starvation and the child weeping over his parents’ divorce. Only Jesus can cry with the girl sobbing over a high school breakup and the wife who is widowed, left with mouths to feed and an empty bed. He is the only one who can see that all pain is real and valid, regardless of how the world would rank it. He is the only one who can validate our suffering—and he does.

Comparative suffering is a function of fear and scarcity. Falling down, screwing up, and facing hurt often lead to bouts of second-guessing our judgment, our self-trust, and even our worthiness. I am enough can slowly turn into Am I really enough? If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the past decade, it’s that fear and scarcity immediately trigger comparison, and even pain and hurt are not immune to being assessed and ranked. My husband died and that grief is worse than your grief over an empty nest. I’m not allowed to feel disappointed about being passed over for promotion when my friend just found out that his wife has cancer. You’re feeling shame for forgetting your son’s school play? Please—that’s a first-world problem; there are people dying of starvation every minute. The opposite of scarcity is not abundance; the opposite of scarcity is simply enough. Empathy is not finite, and compassion is not a pizza with eight slices. When you practice empathy and compassion with someone, there is not less of these qualities to go around. There’s more. Love is the last thing we need to ration in this world. The refugee in Syria doesn’t benefit more if you conserve your kindness only for her and withhold it from your neighbor who’s going through a divorce. Yes, perspective is critical. But I’m a firm believer that complaining is okay as long as we piss and moan with a little perspective. Hurt is hurt, and every time we honor our own struggle and the struggles of others by responding with empathy and compassion, the healing that results affects all of us.

I ate a lot of candy and engaged in light stalking: I prowled Blythe’s Instagram and Twitter, I read her reviews, considered photos of her baked goods and watched from a distance as she got on her soapbox – at one point bragging she was the only person she knew who used her real name and profession online. As my fascination mounted, and my self-loathing deepened, I reminded myself that there are worse things than rabid bloggers (cancer, for instance) and that people suffer greater degradations than becoming writers. But still, I wanted to respond.

What, then, shall we say to our patient with the imaginary cancer? I would tell him: “Yes, my friend, you are really suffering from a cancer-like thing, you really do harbour in yourself a deadly evil. However, it will not kill your body, because it is imaginary. But it will eventually kill your soul. It has already spoilt and even poisoned your human relations and your personal happiness and it will go on growing until it has swallowed your whole psychic existence. So that in the end you will not be a human being any more, but an evil destructive tumour.

Two-thirds of the terminal cancer patients in the Coping with Cancer study reported having had no discussion with their doctors about their goals for end-of-life care, despite being, on average, just four months from death. But the third who did have discussions were far less likely to undergo cardiopulmonary resuscitation or be put on a ventilator or end up in an intensive care unit. Most of them enrolled in hospice. They suffered less, were physically more capable, and were better able, for a longer period, to interact with others. In addition, six months after these patients died, their family members were markedly less likely to experience persistent major depression. In other words, people who had substantive discussions with their doctor about their end-of-life preferences were far more likely to die at peace and in control of their situation and to spare their family anguish.

If prayer works, why can’t God cure cancer or grow back a severed limb? Why so much avoidable suffering that God could so readily prevent? Why does God have to be prayed to at all? Doesn’t He already know what cures need to be performed? Dossey also begins with a quote from Stanley Krippner, M.D. (described as “one of the most authoritative investigators of the variety of unorthodox healing methods used around the world”): [T]he research data on distant, prayer-based healing are promising, but too sparse to allow any firm conclusion to be drawn. This after many trillions of prayers over the millennia.

One of their first decisions was to donate Robin’s body to Memorial Sloan Kettering. The doctors told them that they could learn from studying her disease, and my parents hoped that Robin’s death might lead to some benefit for other suffering children. Childhood cancer research became a lifelong cause for them.

It’s a Buddhist meditation that Teza uses to calm his mind, to put aside not just the physical pain but the sadness and rage he’s feeling: He starts to whisper a prayer. “Whatever beings there are, may they be free from suffering. Whatever beings there are, may they be free from enmity. Whatever beings there are, may they be free from hurtfulness. Whatever beings there are, may they be free from ill health. Whatever beings there are, may they be able to protect their own happiness.” “I particularly like that last phrase,” Mom said. “About protecting your own happiness.” “But how can you protect your own happiness when you can’t control the beatings?” I asked. “That’s the point, Will. You can’t control the beatings. But maybe you can have some control over your happiness. As long as he can, well then, he still has something worth living for. And when he’s no longer able, he knows he’s done all he can.” In my mind, I replaced the word beatings with cancer.

An amicus curiae brief in Roe from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and several other medical groups observed that “a woman suffering from heart disease, diabetes or cancer whose pregnancy worsens the underlying pathology may be denied a medically indicated therapeutic abortion under the statute because death is not certain.”8

Children with multiple ACEs are more likely to struggle with anxiety and depression, to suffer from heart disease and obesity, and to contract certain types of cancers. They’re also more likely to underperform in school and suffer from relationship instability as adults. Even excessive shouting can damage a kid’s sense of security and contribute to mental health and behavioral issues down the road.

In 1994, Friedman wrote a memo marked “Very Confidential” to Raymond, Mortimer, and Richard Sackler. The market for cancer pain was significant, Friedman pointed out: four million prescriptions a year. In fact, there were three-quarters of a million prescriptions just for MS Contin. “We believe that the FDA will restrict our initial launch of OxyContin to the Cancer pain market,” Friedman wrote. But what if, over time, the drug extended beyond that? There was a much greater market for other types of pain: back pain, neck pain, arthritis, fibromyalgia. According to the wrestler turned pain doctor John Bonica, one in three Americans was suffering from untreated chronic pain. If that was even somewhat true, it represented an enormous untapped market. What if you could figure out a way to market this new drug, OxyContin, to all those patients? The plan would have to remain secret for the time being, but in his memo to the Sacklers, Friedman confirmed that the intention was “to expand the use of OxyContin beyond Cancer patients to chronic non-malignant pain.” This was a hugely audacious scheme. In the 1940s, Arthur Sackler had watched the introduction of Thorazine. It was a “major” tranquilizer that worked wonders on patients who were psychotic. But the way the Sackler family made its first great fortune was with Arthur’s involvement in marketing the “minor” tranquilizers Librium and Valium. Thorazine was perceived as a heavy-duty solution for a heavy-duty problem, but the market for the drug was naturally limited to people suffering from severe enough conditions to warrant a major tranquilizer. The beauty of the minor tranquilizers was that they were for everyone. The reason those drugs were such a success was that they were pills that you could pop to relieve an extraordinary range of common psychological and emotional ailments. Now Arthur’s brothers and his nephew Richard would make the same pivot with a painkiller: they had enjoyed great success with MS Contin, but it was perceived as a heavy-duty drug for cancer. And cancer was a limited market. If you could figure out a way to market OxyContin not just for cancer but for any sort of pain, the profits would be astronomical. It was “imperative,” Friedman told the Sacklers, “that we establish a literature” to support this kind of positioning. They would suggest OxyContin for “the broadest range of use.” Still, they faced one significant hurdle. Oxycodone is roughly twice as potent as morphine, and as a consequence OxyContin would be a much stronger drug than MS Contin. American doctors still tended to take great care in administering strong opioids because of long-established concerns about the addictiveness of these drugs. For years, proponents of MS Contin had argued that in an end-of-life situation, when someone is in a mortal fight with cancer, it was a bit silly to worry about the patient’s getting hooked on morphine. But if Purdue wanted to market a powerful opioid like OxyContin for less acute, more persistent types of pain, one challenge would be the perception, among physicians, that opioids could be very addictive. If OxyContin was going to achieve its full commercial potential, the Sacklers and Purdue would have to undo that perception.

Besides that, our potatoes have contracted such strange diseases that one out of every two buckets of pommes de terre winds up in the garbage. We entertain ourselves by trying to figure out which disease they’ve got, and we’ve reached the conclusion that they suffer from cancer, smallpox and measles. Honestly, being in hiding during the fourth year of the war is no picnic. If only the whole stinking mess were over!

Naturally, it causes psychological harm as well; it shouldn’t surprise you that a national survey of 24,000 workers found that men and women with few social ties were two to three times more likely to suffer from major depression than people with strong social bonds.9 When we enjoy strong social support, on the other hand, we can accomplish impressive feats of resilience, and even extend the length of our lives. One study found that people who received emotional support during the six months after a heart attack were three times more likely to survive.10 Another found that participating in a breast cancer support group actually doubled women’s life expectancy post surgery.11 In fact, researchers have found that social support has as much effect on life expectancy as smoking, high blood pressure, obesity, and regular physical activity.12

I’ll never forget the crippling headaches Grandpa suffered, the nausea from chemo and radiation. I watched Daddy wrestle with decision after decision, ultimately withholding IV antibiotics to treat the pneumonia that took Grandpa more quickly and far more gently. Barrons is voicing the legitimate question of anyone who’s ever agreed not to resuscitate, to cease life-sustaining measures for a loved one, to accept a Stage 4 cancer patient’s decision to refuse more chemo, or euthanize a beloved pet. Throughout the caretaker experience, your loved one’s presence is intense and exquisitely poignant and painful, then all the sudden they’re gone and you discover their absence is even more intense and exquisitely poignant and painful. You don’t know how to walk or breathe when they’re no longer there. And how could you? Your world revolved around them.

Long before there were effective treatments, physicians dispensed prognoses, hope, and, above all, meaning. When something terrible happens-and serious disease is always terrible-people want to know why. In a pantheistic world, the explanation was simple-one god had caused the problem, another could cure it. In the time since people have been trying to get along with only one God, explaining disease and evil has become more difficult. Generations of theologians have wrestled with the problem of theodicy-how can a good God allow such bad things to happen to good people? Darwinian medicine can't offer a substitute for such explanations. It can't provide a universe in which events are part of a divine plan, much less one in which individual illness reflects individual sins. It can only show us why we are the way we are, why we are vulnerable to certain diseases. A Darwinian view of medicine simultaneously makes disease less and more meaningful. Diseases do not result from random or malevolent forces, they arise ultimately from past natural selection. Paradoxically, the same capacities that make us vulnerable to disease often confer benefits. The capacity for suffering is a useful defense. Autoimmune disease is a price of our remarkable ability to attack invaders. Cancer is the price of tissues that can repair themselves. Menopause may protect the interests of our genes in existing children. Even senescence and death are not random, but compromises struck by natural selection as it inexorably shaped out bodies to maximize the transmission of our genes. In such paradoxical benefits, some may find a gentle satisfaction, even a bit of meaning-at least the sort of meaning Dobzhansky recognized. After all, nothing in medicine makes sense except in the light of evolution.

When Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act in 1935, old age was defined as sixty-five years, yet estimated life expectancy in the United States at the time was sixty-one years for males and sixty-four years for females.62 A senior citizen today, however, can expect to live eighteen to twenty years longer. The downside is that he or she also should expect to die more slowly. The two most common causes of death in 1935 America were respiratory diseases (pneumonia and influenza) and infectious diarrhea, both of which kill rapidly. In contrast, the two most common causes of death in 2007 America were heart disease and cancer (each accounted for about 25 percent of total deaths). Some heart attack victims die within minutes or hours, but most elderly people with heart disease survive for years while coping with complications such as high blood pressure, congestive heart failure, general weakness, and peripheral vascular disease. Many cancer patients also remain alive for several years following their diagnosis because of chemo-therapy, radiation, surgery, and other treatments. In addition, many of the other leading causes of death today are chronic illnesses such as asthma, Alzheimer’s, type 2 diabetes, and kidney disease, and there has been an upsurge in the occurrence of nonfatal but chronic illnesses such as osteoarthritis, gout, dementia, and hearing loss.63 Altogether, the growing prevalence of chronic illness among middle-aged and elderly individuals is contributing to a health-care crisis because the children born during the post–World War II baby boom are now entering old age, and an unprecedented percentage of them are suffering from lingering, disabling, and costly diseases. The term epidemiologists coined for this phenomenon is the “extension of morbidity.

The mental health system reaches only a fraction of the people suffering from mental disorders, most of whom are discouraged from seeking treatment by its cost, social stigma, or ineffectiveness. There are almost forty-three thousand suicides every year in America (more than the number of deaths from either breast cancer or auto accidents), yet only about half of the people who take their lives have ever received mental health treatment. “Broken” does not seem too harsh a characterization of such a system.

At the same time, medical experts of every persuasion agree that African Americans share the most deplorable health profile in the nation by far, one that resembles that of Third World countries. When Dr. Harold Freedman observed that the health status of Harlem men resembles that of Bangladeshis more closely than that of their Manhattan neighbors, he did not exaggerate. Twice as many African American babies as babies of other ethnic groups die before their first birthday. One and half times as many African American adults as white adults die every year. Blacks have dramatically higher rates of nearly every cancer, of AIDS, of heart disease, of diabetes, of liver disease, of infectious diseases, and they even suffer from higher rates of accidental death, homicide, and mental illness. Before they die young in droves from eminently preventable diseases, African Americans also suffer far more devastating but equally preventable disease complications, such as blindness, confinement to wheelchairs, and limb loss.

Health outcomes for black people are worse across the board during non-pandemic times. Black women are 22% more likely to die from heart disease than white women and 71% more likely to die from cervical cancer. Blacks are diagnosed with diabetes at a 71% higher rate than whites. Minorities receive lower quality care for their diabetes, resulting in more complications, such as chronic kidney disease and amputations. The list of conditions which Blacks suffer more extend to mental health, cancer, and heart disease.

Lots of concerned friends and family felt that the first medication’s failure was a clear sign that drugs were not the answer; if they were I would have been fixed. Clearly I wasn’t as sick as I said I was if the medication didn’t work for me. And that sort of makes sense, because when you have cancer the doctor gives you the best medicine and if it doesn’t shrink the tumor immediately then that’s a pretty clear sign you were just faking it for attention. I mean, cancer is a serious, often fatal disease we’ve spent billions of dollars studying and treating so obviously a patient would never have to try multiple drugs, surgeries, radiation, etc., to find what will work specifically for them. And once the cancer sufferer is in remission they’re set for life because once they’ve learned how to not have cancer they should be good. And if they let themselves get cancer again they can just do whatever they did last time. Once you find the right cancer medication you’re pretty much immune from that disease forever. And if you get it again it’s probably just a reaction to too much gluten or not praying correctly. Right?

The only proven way in which to lengthen the life span of an animal is through caloric restriction. In other words, if you eat 30 percent fewer calories, you can live roughly 30 percent longer, depending on the animal being studied. This general rule has been tested across a vast array of species, from insects, mice, dogs and cats, even to apes. Animals eating fewer calories live longer than their counterparts that gorged themselves. They have fewer diseases and suffer less frequently from the problems of old age, such as cancer and hardening of the arteries.

Every moment of this experience we call a physical life is determined by the choices you make in your thoughts, intentions, and actions. Thus, when you choose to experience a thought, image, or activity from a place of loving, joyful, and compassionate intentions for yourself and others, you have the power to weave a lovely fabric that heals your mind, body, and soul. When you choose differently, the fabric you weave may contribute to an experience of suffering and pain in the form of mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual anguish. The choice is always yours.

Few chemicals confer maleness, but many take it away. Which, if any, are responsible for our own troubles is hard to say. The Pill changed men's lives in more ways than one. It caused reproductive hormones to leak into tap water and has been blamed both for the sex changes in freshwater fish and for the drop in our own sperm count. The jury is still out on the issue, but other hormones have had a disastrous effect. A drug called diethylstilbestrol was once thought - in error - to prevent miscarriage. Five million mothers took it and for a time it was even used as a chicken food supplement. A third of the boys exposed to the drug in the womb suffer from small testes or a reduced penis. In rats, the chemical causes prostate and testicular cancer (although there is as yet no sign of those problems in ourselves). To give a powerful steroid to pregnant women was at best unwise, but the effects of other chemicals were harder to foresee. The 1950s saw a wonderful new chemical treatment for banana pests. Soon the substance was much used. Twenty years later the workers noticed something odd: they had almost no children. Their sperm count had dropped by five hundred times.

Thinking about a physical irritation as small as a mosquito bite can really illustrate how suffering arises based on attachment to the body. When our identification and attachment are untempered and intense, we cannot help ourselves—we automatically engage in behavior that irritates and agitates what is already painful. We hurt ourselves, even though we are doing our best to relieve our own suffering. Isn’t this what we are doing all the time? When we attach to the physical experience of suffering, whether it be something as small as a mosquito bite or as painful as an illness such as cancer, even more pain is sure to follow.

It seems we do not believe what we teach. If we did, we would know that an abuser is a slave and cannot simply stop. We would understand that the narcotic of self-deception has become so powerful in his life that he not only cannot stop lying; he does not even know when he is and has lost his capacity to tell truth from lies, good from evil. We would know that habituated sin has roots and tentacles and has long done damage to the soul so it is not easily routed out. And we would know that exposure, consequences, and treatment are necessary if there is ever to be freedom from the cancer that has sent tentacles throughout his life.

You can make quite a life for yourself hosting charity dinners and collecting art. You can find a way to be happy with whatever the truth is. Until your daughter dies. Connor was diagnosed with late-stage breast cancer two and a half years ago, when she was thirty-nine. She was given months to live. I knew what it was like to realize that the one you love would leave this earth well before you. But nothing could prepare me for the pain of watching my child suffer. I held her when she puked from the chemo. I wrapped her in blankets when she was so cold she was crying. I kissed her forehead like she was my baby again, because she was forever my baby. I told her every single day that her life had been the world’s greatest gift to me, that I believed I was put on earth not to make movies or wear emerald-green gowns and wave at crowds but to be her mother. I sat next to her hospital bed. “Nothing I have ever done,” I said, “has made me as proud as the day I gave birth to you.” “I know,” she said. “I’ve always known that.” I had made a point of not bullshitting her ever since her father died. We had the sort of relationship where we believed each other, believed in each other. She knew she was loved. She knew that she had changed my life, that she had changed the world. She made it eighteen months before she passed away. And when they put her in the ground next to her father, I broke like I have never broken before. The devastating luxury of panic overtook me. And it has never left.

I spend a lot of time thinking now. Perhaps too much time. But I’ve decided that cancer is not the worst thing that could have happened to me. Dying of cancer isn’t the worst thing that could have happened to me. Every day, I try to remind myself that it could have been one of the children suffering from this awful, life-threatening illness, and how much worse I would be feeling if that were the case. I’m thankful it is me and not them. If I were to die having first lost one of my children, then I would die with a broken heart. Instead, I am dying surrounded by my family, knowing I was loved. What more could a woman ask for? I have been blessed. Yes, I still have moments where I want to wail and rail against the world. Where I want to scream ‘Why me?’ and cry about how unfair life is. But that is simply life. Bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people. There’s no fairness in it.

One of our greatest epidemics today is obesity. It is estimated that more than 500 million people suffer from obesity worldwide today, and that it kills more than three million people each year. In comparison, about 55,000 people are killed in war each year, which of course in no way suggests that we are overestimating the horror and seriousness of war – how could we? – but the little attention we give to obesity in comparison does suggest, however, that we are not taking the “war” we should be waging against obesity seriously. It seems that we overlook what a merciless killer and cause of pain that obesity and the overeating that leads to it really is: it increases the risk of heart disease (the most common cause of death worldwide), many kinds of cancer, type 2 diabetes, degenerative joint disease and mental problems such as depression and low self-esteem.[27] Fortunately, a lot seems to imply that we have a powerful and peaceful weapon at our hands that can help us overcome obesity: a vegan diet.

Between 1995 and 1997 the California-based healthcare network Kaiser Permanente gave more than 17,000 patients a questionnaire to assess the level of trauma in their childhoods. Questions included whether the patients' parents had been mentally or physically abusive or neglectful and whether their parents were divorced or had abused substances. This was called the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) study. After taking the questionnaire, patients were given an ACE score on a scale of 0 to 10. The higher the score, the more trauma a person experienced in childhood. The results of the study were astoundingly clear: The more childhood trauma someone had suffered, the worse their health outcomes were in adulthood. And their risk for contracting diseases didn't go up just a few percentage points. People with high ACE scores were about three times as likely to develop liver disease, twice as likely to develop cancer or heart disease, four times as likely to develop emphysema. They were seven and a half times more likely to become alcoholics, four and a half times more likely to suffer from depression, and a whopping twelve times more likely to attempt suicide. Scientists have learned that stress is literally toxic. Stress chemicals surging through our bodies like cortisol and adrenaline are healthy in moderation—you wouldn't be able to get up in the morning without a good dose of cortisol. But in overwhelming quantities, they become toxic and can change the structure of our brains. Stress and depression wear our bodies out. And childhood trauma affects our telomeres. Telomeres are like little caps on the ends of our strands of DNA that keep them from unraveling. As we get older, those telomeres get shorter and shorter. When they've finally disappeared, our DNA itself begins to unravel, increasing our chances of getting cancer and making us especially susceptible to disease. Because of this, telomeres are linked to human lifespan. And studies have shown that people who have suffered from childhood trauma have significantly shortened telomeres. In the end, these studies claimed that having an ACE score of 6 or higher takes twenty years off your life expectancy. The average life expectancy for someone with 6 or more ACEs is sixty years old.

Some people God cures and some he slays. Fat denies that God slays anyone. Fat says, God never harms anyone. Illness, pain and undeserved suffering arise not from God but from elsewhere, to which I say, How did this elsewhere arise? Are there two gods? Or is part of the universe out from under God’s control? Fat used to quote Plato. In Plato’s cosmology, noös or Mind is persuading ananke or blind necessity—or blind chance, according to some experts—into submission. Noös happened to come along and to its surprise discovered blind chance: chaos, in other words, onto which noös imposes order (although how this “persuading” is done Plato nowhere says). According to Fat, my friend’s cancer consisted of disorder not yet persuaded into sentient shape. Noös or God had not yet gotten around to her, to which I said, “Well, when he did get around to her it was too late.” Fat had no answer for that, at least in terms of oral rebuttal. Probably he sneaked off and wrote about it in his journal. He stayed up to four A.M. every night scratching away in his journal. I suppose all the secrets of the universe lay in it somewhere amid the rubble.

People always feel sorry for you if you’re physically sick. It doesn’t matter if you have cancer or a cold. People always feel sorry for you and ask you if you’re okay. You need money? You got it! You want to meet a celebrity? Of course you can! You want to go to a convention, ComiCon, Disney World, anywhere in the world? You’re going to go there. That doesn’t happen when you’re mentally ill. If you’re mentally ill, people look at you differently. People roll their eyes when you talk about how sad you are. People won’t lift a finger to help you. “Get a job,” they’ll tell you. “Stop being so lazy. Be grateful you don’t have cancer. Get over it. It’s in the past. You have no reason to be sad.” And that isn’t how it works. But, of course, they wouldn’t know that. They’ve never been mentally ill, they don’t know how you can be so permanently damaged by your past that your present is painful and your future looks bleak. They don’t understand that most days getting out of bed is a chore. They don’t get that sometimes getting a job is out of the question because you’re just too damn afraid to even speak to anyone. That isn’t something you can just get over. But no one knows that because mental illnesses aren’t a real problem apparently. Apparently, the fact that over 800,000 million people die from suicide each year isn’t a real problem. Apparently, the fact that 15% of the adolescent population self-harms isn’t a real problem either. And, apparently, it isn’t a cause to worry that one in 200 American women suffer from an eating disorder. And, as I stand on the balcony, staring at the glittering city, thinking about the short time I spent in Paperthin Hearts, meeting all of the damaged children, I wonder how in the world people don’t understand what a mistake they’re making when they assume that having cancer is worse than being depressed or anxious or wanting to starve yourself to the point of death. How is that a mystery to anyone? Cancer patients are told they’re brave. They’re all made out to be martyrs. They’re given everything they need. Almost all of them. Mental health patients? They’re lucky if they get the right treatment they need before their broken, bleeding hearts, desperate only for love, destroy a part of them that can never be repaired.

tried to go to a counselor, but it was just too weird. Talking to some stranger about my feelings made me want to vomit. I did go to the library, and I learned that behavior I considered commonplace was the subject of pretty intense academic study. Psychologists call the everyday occurrences of my and Lindsay’s life “adverse childhood experiences,” or ACEs. ACEs are traumatic childhood events, and their consequences reach far into adulthood. The trauma need not be physical. The following events or feelings are some of the most common ACEs: •​being sworn at, insulted, or humiliated by parents •​being pushed, grabbed, or having something thrown at you •​feeling that your family didn’t support each other •​having parents who were separated or divorced •​living with an alcoholic or a drug user •​living with someone who was depressed or attempted suicide •​watching a loved one be physically abused. ACEs happen everywhere, in every community. But studies have shown that ACEs are far more common in my corner of the demographic world. A report by the Wisconsin Children’s Trust Fund showed that among those with a college degree or more (the non–working class), fewer than half had experienced an ACE. Among the working class, well over half had at least one ACE, while about 40 percent had multiple ACEs. This is really striking—four in every ten working-class people had faced multiple instances of childhood trauma. For the non–working class, that number was 29 percent. I gave a quiz to Aunt Wee, Uncle Dan, Lindsay, and Usha that psychologists use to measure the number of ACEs a person has faced. Aunt Wee scored a seven—higher even than Lindsay and me, who each scored a six. Dan and Usha—the two people whose families seemed nice to the point of oddity—each scored a zero. The weird people were the ones who hadn’t faced any childhood trauma. Children with multiple ACEs are more likely to struggle with anxiety and depression, to suffer from heart disease and obesity, and to contract certain types of cancers. They’re also more likely to underperform in school and suffer from relationship instability as adults. Even excessive shouting can damage a kid’s sense of security and contribute to mental health and behavioral issues down the road. Harvard pediatricians have studied the effect that childhood trauma has on the mind. In addition to later negative

Descendants of people enslaved at the Whitney still live in the areas surrounding the former plantation. A few now work at the Whitney—ranging from a director-level position to tour guides to the front desk. But much of the community still suffers from the intergenerational poverty that plagues many formerly enslaved communities more than a century and a half after emancipation. Poverty is common in Wallace, Louisiana, the area encompassing the Whitney, where over 90 percent of the population is Black. Wallace is also one of a series of majority-Black communities lining the Mississippi River from Baton Rouge to New Orleans that—as a result of their proximity to petrochemical plants—form what is known as Cancer Alley. Neighborhoods here have some of the highest cancer risks in the country, and chemical emissions from these plants are linked to cardiovascular, respiratory, and developmental ailments. Civil rights leader Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II put it this way when describing the landscape of factories and refineries along the Mississippi River: “The same land that held people captive through slavery is now holding people captive through this environmental injustice and devastation.

When we are needy Christ does His best work, but be warned. Someone, maybe even some well-meaning soul, is going to tell you, “Don’t worry. God will never give you more than you can handle.” I double-dog-dare you to find that in the scriptures. The closest you can come is found in 1 Corinthians 10:13: “There hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to man: but God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it.” This talks about an escape from temptation; it does not say that you will not be faced with more than you can handle. The mother whose baby is born and dies, the father who loses his eyesight in a construction accident and can no longer provide for his family, the child who hurries home from school every day hoping that his mother hasn’t yet succumbed to the cancer that he sees ravish her body day by day . . . all of these souls have more than they can handle—on their own. But with Christ as their companion on the journey through life—and only with Christ—all things are possible. Without Him, we fail no matter how far we manage on our own. We can never cross over without Christ and His all-access Atonement.

Yet the new research into psychedelics comes along at a time when mental health treatment in this country is so “broken”—to use the word of Tom Insel, who until 2015 was director of the National Institute of Mental Health—that the field’s willingness to entertain radical new approaches is perhaps greater than it has been in a generation. The pharmacological toolbox for treating depression—which afflicts nearly a tenth of all Americans and, worldwide, is the leading cause of disability—has little in it today, with antidepressants losing their effectiveness* and the pipeline for new psychiatric drugs drying up. Pharmaceutical companies are no longer investing in the development of so-called CNS drugs—medicines targeted at the central nervous system. The mental health system reaches only a fraction of the people suffering from mental disorders, most of whom are discouraged from seeking treatment by its cost, social stigma, or ineffectiveness. There are almost forty-three thousand suicides every year in America (more than the number of deaths from either breast cancer or auto accidents), yet only about half of the people who take their lives have ever received mental health treatment. “Broken” does not seem too harsh a characterization of such a system.

Here is another weird example of the privileging of religion. On 21 February 2006 the United States Supreme Court ruled, in accordance with the Constitution, that a church in New Mexico should be exempt from the law, which everybody else has to obey, against the taking of hallucinogenic drugs. Faithful members of Centro Espirita Beneficiente Uniao do Vegetal believe that they can understand God only by drinking dimethyltryptamine. Note that it is sufficient that they believe that the drug enhances their understanding. They do not have to produce evidence. Conversely, there is plenty of evidence that cannabis eases the nausea and discomfort of cancer sufferers undergoing chemotherapy. Yet, again in accordance with the Constitution, the Supreme Court ruled in 2005 that all patients who use cannabis for medicinal purposes are vulnerable to federal prosecution (even in the minority of states where such specialist use is legalized). Religion, as ever, is the trump card. Imagine members of an art appreciation society pleading in court they they 'believe' they need a hallucinogenic drug in order to enhance their understanding of Impressionist or Surrealist paintings. Yet, when a church claims an equivalent need, it is backed by the highest court in the land. Such is the power of religion as a talisman.

On 21 February 2006 the United States Supreme Court ruled, in accordance with the Constitution, that a church in New Mexico should be exempt from the law, which everybody else has to obey, against the taking of hallucinogenic drugs.8 Faithful members of the Centro Espirita Beneficiente Uniao do Vegetal believe that they can understand God only by drinking hoasca tea, which contains the illegal hallucinogenic drug dimethyltryptamine. Note that it is sufficient that they believe that the drug enhances their understanding. They do not have to produce evidence. Conversely, there is plenty of evidence that cannabis eases the nausea and discomfort of cancer sufferers undergoing chemotherapy. Yet, again in accordance with the Constitution, the Supreme Court ruled in 2005 that all patients who use cannabis for medicinal purposes are vulnerable to federal prosecution (even in the minority of states where such specialist use is legalized). Religion, as ever, is the trump card. Imagine members of an art appreciation society pleading in court that they ‘believe’ they need a hallucinogenic drug in order to enhance their understanding of Impressionist or Surrealist paintings. Yet, when a church claims an equivalent need, it is backed by the highest court in the land. Such is the power of religion as a talisman.

Government By The Industry, For The Industry Vice President George Bush sat in his chair across from four Monsanto executives. They had come to the White House with an unusual request. They wanted more regulation. They were venturing into a new technology, the genetic modification of food, and they were actually asking the government to oversee their emerging industry. But this was late 1986. Ronald Reagan was president and the administration was busily deregulating business. Bush needed convincing. “We bugged him for regulation,” said Leonard Guarraia, one of the executives at the meeting. “We told him that we have to be regulated.”[1] Monsanto was about to make a multibillion-dollar gamble. With this new technology, they could engineer and patent a whole new kind of food. Later, by buying up seed companies around the world, Monsanto could replace the natural seeds with their patented engineered seeds and control a hefty portion of the food supply. But there was fear among Monsanto’s ranks—fear of consumers’ and environmentalists’ reactions. Their fear was borne of experience. Years earlier, Monsanto had assured the public that their Agent Orange, the defoliant used during the Vietnam War, was safe for humans. It wasn’t. Thousands of veterans and tens of thousand of Vietnamese who suffered a wide range of maladies, including cancer, neurological disorders, and birth defects, blame Monsanto.

We must never forget that we may also find meaning in life even when confronted with a hopeless situation, when facing a fate that cannot be changed. For what then matters is to bear witness to the uniquely human potential at its best, which is to transform a personal tragedy into a triumph, to turn one’s predicament into a human achievement. When we are no longer able to change a situation—just think of an incurable disease such as inoperable cancer—we are challenged to change ourselves. Let me cite a clear-cut example: Once, an elderly general practitioner consulted me because of his severe depression. He could not overcome the loss of his wife who had died two years before and whom he had loved above all else. Now, how could I help him? What should I tell him? Well, I refrained from telling him anything but instead confronted him with the question, “What would have happened, Doctor, if you had died first, and your wife would have had to survive you?” “Oh,” he said, “for her this would have been terrible; how she would have suffered!” Whereupon I replied, “You see, Doctor, such a suffering has been spared her, and it was you who have spared her this suffering—to be sure, at the price that now you have to survive and mourn her.” He said no word but shook my hand and calmly left my office. In some way, suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.

Hunter-gatherers who survive childhood typically live to be old: their most common age of death is between sixty-eight and seventy-two, and most become grandparents or even great-grandparents.70 They most likely die from gastrointestinal or respiratory infections, diseases such as malaria or tuberculosis, or from violence and accidents.71 Health surveys also indicate that most of the noninfectious diseases that kill or disable older people in developed nations are rare or unknown among middle-aged and elderly hunter-gatherers.72 These admittedly limited studies have found that hunter-gatherers rarely if ever get type 2 diabetes, coronary heart disease, hypertension, osteoporosis, breast cancer, asthma, and liver disease. They also don’t appear to suffer much from gout, myopia, cavities, hearing loss, collapsed arches, and other common ailments. To be sure, hunter-gatherers don’t live in perpetually perfect health, especially since tobacco and alcohol have become increasingly available to them, but the evidence suggests that they are healthy compared to many older Americans today despite never having received any medical care. In short, if you were to compare contemporary health data from people around the world with equivalent data from hunter-gatherers, you would not conclude that rising rates of common mismatch diseases such as heart disease and type 2 diabetes are straightforward, inevitable by-products of economic progress and increased longevity. Moreover,

In March 2002, the National Academy of Sciences, a private, nonprofit society of scholars, released a high-profile report documenting the unequivocal existence of racial bias in medical care, which many thought would mark a real turning point. Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care was so brutal and damning that it would seem impossible to turn away. The report, authored by a committee of mostly white medical educators, nurses, behavioral scientists, economists, health lawyers, sociologists, and policy experts, took an exhaustive plunge into more than 480 previous studies. Because of the knee-jerk tendency to assume that health disparities were the end result of differences in class, not race, they were careful to compare subjects with similar income and insurance coverage. The report found rampant, widespread racial bias, including that people of color were less likely to be given appropriate heart medications or to undergo bypass surgery or receive kidney dialysis or transplants. Several studies revealed significant racial differences in who receives appropriate cancer diagnostic tests and treatments, and people of color were also less likely to receive the most sophisticated treatments for HIV/AIDS. These inequities, the report concluded, contribute to higher death rates overall for Black people and other people of color and lower survival rates compared with whites suffering from comparable illnesses of similar severity.

Interactions with the world program our physiological and psychological development. Emotional contact is as important as physical contact. The two are quite analogous, as we recognize when we speak of the emotional experience of feeling touched. Our sensory organs and brains provide the interface through which relationships shape our evolution from infancy to adulthood. Social-emotional interactions decisively influence the development of the human brain. From the moment of birth, they regulate the tone, activity and development of the psychoneuroimmunoendocrine (PNI) super-system. Our characteristic modes of handling psychic and physical stress are set in our earliest years. Neuroscientists at Harvard University studied the cortisol levels of orphans who were raised in the dreadfully neglected child-care institutions established in Romania during the Ceausescu regime. In these facilities the caregiver/child ratio was one to twenty. Except for the rudiments of care, the children were seldom physically picked up or touched. They displayed the self-hugging motions and depressed demeanour typical of abandoned young, human or primate. On saliva tests, their cortisol levels were abnormal, indicating that their hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axes were already impaired. As we have seen, disruptions of the HPA axis have been noted in autoimmune disease, cancer and other conditions. It is intuitively easy to understand why abuse, trauma or extreme neglect in childhood would have negative consequences. But why do many people develop stress-related illness without having been abused or traumatized? These persons suffer not because something negative was inflicted on them but because something positive was withheld.

HISTORICAL NOTE There are no nuclear power stations in Belarus. Of the functioning stations in the territory of the former USSR, the ones closest to Belarus are of the old Soviet-designed RBMK type. To the north, the Ignalinsk station, to the east, the Smolensk station, and to the south, Chernobyl. On April 26, 1986, at 1:23:58, a series of explosions destroyed the reactor in the building that housed Energy Block #4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station. The catastrophe at Chernobyl became the largest technological disaster of the twentieth century. For tiny Belarus (population: 10 million), it was a national disaster. During the Second World War, the Nazis destroyed 619 Belarussian villages along with their inhabitants. As a result of Chernobyl, the country lost 485 villages and settlements. Of these, 70 have been forever buried underground. During the war, one out of every four Belarussians was killed; today, one out of every five Belarussians lives on contaminated land. This amounts to 2.1 million people, of whom 700,000 are children. Among the demographic factors responsible for the depopulation of Belarus, radiation is number one. In the Gomel and Mogilev regions, which suffered the most from Chernobyl, mortality rates exceed birth rates by 20%. As a result of the accident, 50 million Ci of radionuclides were released into the atmosphere. Seventy percent of these descended on Belarus; fully 23% of its territory is contaminated by cesium-137 radionuclides with a density of over 1 Ci/km2. Ukraine on the other hand has 4.8% of its territory contaminated, and Russia, 0.5%. The area of arable land with a density of more than 1 Ci/km2 is over 18 million hectares; 2.4 thousand hectares have been taken out of the agricultural economy. Belarus is a land of forests. But 26% of all forests and a large part of all marshes near the rivers Pripyat, Dniepr, and Sozh are considered part of the radioactive zone. As a result of the perpetual presence of small doses of radiation, the number of people with cancer, mental retardation, neurological disorders, and genetic mutations increases with each year. —“Chernobyl.” Belaruskaya entsiklopedia On April 29, 1986, instruments recorded high levels of radiation in Poland, Germany, Austria, and Romania. On April 30, in Switzerland and northern Italy. On May 1 and 2, in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Great Britain, and northern Greece. On May 3, in Israel, Kuwait, and Turkey. . . . Gaseous airborne particles traveled around the globe: on May 2 they were registered in Japan, on May 5 in India, on May 5 and 6 in the U.S. and Canada. It took less than a week for Chernobyl to become a problem for the entire world. —“The Consequences of the Chernobyl Accident in Belarus.” Minsk, Sakharov International College on Radioecology The fourth reactor, now known as the Cover, still holds about twenty tons of nuclear fuel in its lead-and-metal core. No one knows what is happening with it. The sarcophagus was well made, uniquely constructed, and the design engineers from St. Petersburg should probably be proud. But it was constructed in absentia, the plates were put together with the aid of robots and helicopters, and as a result there are fissures. According to some figures, there are now over 200 square meters of spaces and cracks, and radioactive particles continue to escape through them . . . Might the sarcophagus collapse? No one can answer that question, since it’s still impossible to reach many of the connections and constructions in order to see if they’re sturdy. But everyone knows that if the Cover were to collapse, the consequences would be even more dire than they were in 1986. —Ogonyok magazine, No. 17, April 1996

In Gethsemane, Jesus experienced the pains of a person dying of cancer. He experienced what it is like to be a queer kid who is constantly bullied. He experienced the birthing pains of every mother who ever lived or would live. He experienced the embarrassment of a gay boy having an erection at the sight of his school crush in the locker room. He experienced conversion therapy. He experienced rejection. He experienced the brutal physical and psychological attacks that trans women endure. He experienced the acid poured on a woman’s face for her defiance to the patriarchs. He experienced the fear, grief, and sorrow of every parent who has buried their child. He experienced sex slavery. He experienced his first period. He experienced menstruation, not simply from a vagina but from every pore of his body. He experienced rape. He experienced catcalls. He experienced hunger. He experienced disease. He experienced an ectopic pregnancy. He experienced an abortion. He experienced a miscarriage and stillbirth. He experienced the Holocaust. He experienced war – both the killing and being killed. He experienced internment camps. He experienced depression, anxiety, and suicide. He experienced sleeping on the street with the homeless. He experienced the slave master’s whip on his back and the noose around his neck. He knew the fear of every black mother who kissed her son before he left the house, praying he would return home safely. He experienced the effects of unrighteous dominion, corrupt politicians, and all manner of injustice. He experienced the migrant mother with no food or diapers for her baby as she desperately walked north in search of a better life. He experienced having his child taken away from him at the border due to “legal complications.” He experienced it all – every death, every cut, every tear, every pain, every sorrow, every bit of suffering imaginable and beyond imagination. He experienced an onslaught of suffering, which was so great that it took a god to bear it. He experienced death and came through the other side to show us the way.

Over the course of two years, from June 2004 to June 2006, two separate deaths did nothing to ease my overall anxiety. Steve’s beloved Staffordshire bull terrier Sui died of cancer in June 2004. He had set up his swag and slept beside her all night, talking to her, recalling old times in the bush catching crocodiles, and comforting her. Losing Sui brought up memories of losing Chilli a decade and a half earlier. “I am not getting another dog,” Steve said. “It is just too painful.” Wes, the most loyal friend anyone could have, was there for Steve while Sui passed from this life to the next. Wes shared in Steve’s grief. They had known Sui longer than Steve and I had been together. Two years after Sui’s death, in June 2006, we lost Harriet. At 175, Harriet was the oldest living creature on earth. She had met Charles Darwin and sailed on the Beagle. She was our link to the past at the zoo, and beyond that, our link to the great scientist himself. She was a living museum and an icon of our zoo. The kids and I were headed to Fraser Island, along the southern coast of Queensland, with Joy, Steve’s sister, and her husband, Frank, our zoo manager, when I heard the news. An ultrasound had confirmed that Harriet had suffered a massive heart attack. Steve called me. “I think you’d better come home.” “I should talk to the kids about this,” I said. Bindi was horrified. “How long is Harriet going to live?” she asked. “Maybe hours, maybe days, but not long.” “I don’t want to see Harriet die,” she said resolutely. She wanted to remember her as the healthy, happy tortoise with whom she’d grown up. From the time Bindi was a tiny baby, she would enter Harriet’s enclosure, put her arms around the tortoise’s massive shell, and rest her face against her carapace, which was always warm from the sun. Harriet’s favorite food was hibiscus flowers, and Bindi would collect them by the dozen to feed her dear friend. I was worried about Steve but told him that Bindi couldn’t bear to see Harriet dying. “It’s okay,” he said. “Wes is here with me.” Once again, it fell to Wes to share his best mate’s grief.

The personal case histories were the most encouraging. A prominent Los Angeles public relations executive has been living with MM for fourteen years, rides horses, and has an altogether active life on drug maintenance. An Arizona man survived MM and with his wife set up a foundation and website for other families bewildered by the diagnosis. I learned, for the first time, that Frank McGee, host of the Today show from 1971 to 1974, suffered from MM and kept it from everyone despite his ever more gaunt appearance. When he died after putting in another full week on the air his producers and friends were stunned. Sam Walton, founder of Walmart, was another MM casualty, which led many to believe that he had established the high-profile multiple myeloma treatment center in Little Rock, Arkansas. This is a full-immersion process in which MM is the singular target under the commanding title of Myeloma Institute for Research and Therapy. There is a Walton auditorium on the institute’s University of Arkansas medical school campus, but the institute itself was founded by Bart Barlogie, a renowned MM specialist from the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. The institute has an impressive record, running well ahead of the national average for survival for those who are dealing with MM. One number is especially notable. The institute has followed 1,070 patients for more than ten years, and 783 have never had a relapse of the disease. Sam Walton was treated by Dr. Barlogie at MD Anderson before the Little Rock institute was founded, but the connection ended there. Walton, who’d had an earlier struggle with leukemia, didn’t survive his encounter with multiple myeloma, dying in April 1992, a time when life expectancy for a man his age with this cancer was short. I was unaware of all of this when I was diagnosed. I took comfort in the repeated reassurances of specialists that great progress in treating MM with a new class of drugs, your own body’s reengineered immunology system, was rapidly improving chances of a longer survival than the published five to ten years. As I began to respond to treatment the favored and welcome line was, “You’re gonna die but from something else.

The biology of potential illness arises early in life. The brain’s stress-response mechanisms are programmed by experiences beginning in infancy, and so are the implicit, unconscious memories that govern our attitudes and behaviours toward ourselves, others and the world. Cancer, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis and the other conditions we examined are not abrupt new developments in adult life, but culminations of lifelong processes. The human interactions and biological imprinting that shaped these processes took place in periods of our life for which we may have no conscious recall. Emotionally unsatisfying child-parent interaction is a theme running through the one hundred or so detailed interviews I conducted for this book. These patients suffer from a broadly disparate range of illnesses, but the common threads in their stories are early loss or early relationships that were profoundly unfulfilling emotionally. Early childhood emotional deprivation in the histories of adults with serious illness is also verified by an impressive number of investigations reported in the medical and psychological literature. In an Italian study, women with genital cancers were reported to have felt less close to their parents than healthy controls. They were also less demonstrative emotionally. A large European study compared 357 cancer patients with 330 controls. The women with cancer were much less likely than controls to recall their childhood homes with positive feelings. As many as 40 per cent of cancer patients had suffered the death of a parent before the age of seventeen—a ratio of parental loss two and a half times as great as had been suffered by the controls. The thirty-year follow-up of Johns Hopkins medical students was previously quoted. Those graduates whose initial interviews in medical school had revealed lower than normal childhood closeness with their parents were particularly at risk. By midlife they were more likely to commit suicide or develop mental illness, or to suffer from high blood pressure, coronary heart disease or cancer. In a similar study, Harvard undergraduates were interviewed about their perception of parental caring. Thirty-five years later these subjects’ health status was reviewed. By midlife only a quarter of the students who had reported highly positive perceptions of parental caring were sick. By comparison, almost 90 per cent of those who regarded their parental emotional nurturing negatively were ill. “Simple and straightforward ratings of feelings of being loved are significantly related to health status,” the researchers concluded.

And, even more important for our purposes, these facts are sturdy enough that we can build a sensible diet upon them. Here they are: FACT 1. Populations that eat a so-called Western diet—generally defined as a diet consisting of lots of processed foods and meat, lots of added fat and sugar, lots of refined grains, lots of everything except vegetables, fruits, and whole grains—invariably suffer from high rates of the so-called Western diseases: obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and cancer. Virtually all of the obesity and type 2 diabetes, 80 percent of the cardiovascular disease, and more than a third of all cancers can be linked to this diet. Four of the top ten killers in America are chronic diseases linked to this diet. The arguments in nutritional science are not about this well-established link; rather, they are all about identifying the culprit nutrient in the Western diet that might be responsible for chronic diseases. Is it the saturated fat or the refined carbohydrates or the lack of fiber or the transfats or omega-6 fatty acids—or what? The point is that, as eaters (if not as scientists), we know all we need to know to act: This diet, for whatever reason, is the problem. FACT 2. Populations eating a remarkably wide range of traditional diets generally don’t suffer from these chronic diseases. These diets run the gamut from ones very high in fat (the Inuit in Greenland subsist largely on seal blubber) to ones high in carbohydrate (Central American Indians subsist largely on maize and beans) to ones very high in protein (Masai tribesmen in Africa subsist chiefly on cattle blood, meat, and milk), to cite three rather extreme examples. But much the same holds true for more mixed traditional diets. What this suggests is that there is no single ideal human diet but that the human omnivore is exquisitely adapted to a wide range of different foods and a variety of different diets. Except, that is, for one: the relatively new (in evolutionary terms) Western diet that most of us now are eating. What an extraordinary achievement for a civilization: to have developed the one diet that reliably makes its people sick! (While it is true that we generally live longer than people used to, or than people in some traditional cultures do, most of our added years owe to gains in infant mortality and child health, not diet.) There is actually a third, very hopeful fact that flows from these two: People who get off the Western diet see dramatic improvements in their health. We have good research to suggest that the effects of the Western diet can be rolled back, and relatively quickly.

You see, I suffer from a disease that you cannot see; a disease that there is no cure for and that keeps the medical community baffled at how to treat and battle this demon, who’s[sic] attacks are relentless. My pain works silently, stealing my joy and replacing it with tears. On the outside we look alike you and I; you won’t see my scars as you would a person who, say, had suffered a car accident. You won’t see my pain in the way you would a person undergoing chemo for cancer; however, my pain is just as real and just as debilitating. And in many ways my pain may be more destructive because people can’t see it and do not understand....” “Please don’t get angry at my seemingly [sic] lack of interest in doing things; I punish myself enough, I assure you. My tears are shed many times when no one is around. My embarrassment is covered by a joke or laughter…” “I have been called unreliable because I am forced to cancel plans I made at the last minute because the burning and pain in my legs or arms is so intense I cannot put my clothes on and I am left in my tears as I miss out on yet another activity I used to love and once participated in with enthusiasm.” “And just because I can do a thing one day, that doesn’t mean I will be able to do the same thing the next day or next week. I may be able to take that walk after dinner on a warm July evening; the next day or even in the next hour I may not be able to walk to the fridge to get a cold drink because my muscles have begun to cramp and lock up or spasm uncontrollably. And there are those who say “But you did that yesterday!” “What is your problem today?” The hurt I experience at those words scars me so deeply that I have let my family down again; and still they don’t understand….” “On a brighter side I want you to know that I still have my sense of humor….I love you and want nothing more than to be a part of your life. And I have found that I can be a strong friend in many ways. Do you have a dream? I am your friend, your supporter and many times I will be the one to do the research for your latest project; many times I will be your biggest fan and the world will know how proud I am at your accomplishments and how honored I am to have you in my life.” “So you see, you and I are not that much different. I too have hopes, dreams, goals… and this demon…. Do you have an unseen demon that assaults you and no one else can see? Have you had to fight a fight that crushes you and brings you to your knees? I will be by your side, win or lose, I promise you that; I will be there in ways that I can. I will give all I can as I can, I promise you that. But I have to do this thing my way. Please understand that I am in such a fight myself and I know that I have little hope of a cure or effective treatments, at least right now. Please understand….

Are you interested in medical marijuana but have no idea what it is? In recent years, there is a growing cry for the legalization of cannabis because of its proven health benefits. Read on as we try to look into the basics of the drug, what it really does to the human body, and how it can benefit you. Keep in mind that medical marijuana is not for everyone, so it’s important that you know how you’re going to be using it before you actually use it. What is Marijuana? Most likely, everyone has heard of marijuana and know what it is. However, many people hold misconceptions of marijuana because of inaccurate news and reporting, which has led to the drug being demonized—even when numerous studies have proven the health benefits of medical marijuana when it is used in moderation. (Even though yes, weed is also used as a recreational drug.) First and foremost, medical marijuana is a plant. The drug that we know of is made of its shredded leaves and flowers of the cannabis sativa or indica plant. Whatever its strain or form, all types of cannabis alter the mind and have some degree of psychoactivity. The plant is made of chemicals, with tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) being the most powerful and causing the biggest impact on the brain. How is Medical Marijuana Used? There are several ways medical weed is used, depending on the user’s need, convenience and preference. The most common ways are in joint form, and also using bongs and vaporizers. But with its growing legalization, we’re seeing numerous forms of cannabis consumption methods being introduced (like oils, edibles, drinks and many more). ● Joint – Loose marijuana leaves are rolled into a cigarette. Sometimes, it’s mixed with tobacco to cut the intensity of the cannabis. ● Bong – This is a large water pipe that heats weed into smoke, which the user then inhales. ● Vaporizer – Working like small bongs, this is a small gadget that makes it easier to bring and use weed practically anywhere. What’s Some Common Medical Marijuana Lingo? We hear numerous terms from people when it comes to describing medical marijuana, and this list continually grows. An example of this is the growing number of marijuana nicknames which include pot, grass, reefer, Mary Jane, dope, skunk, ganja, boom, chronic and herb among many others. Below are some common marijuana terms and what they really mean. ● Bong – Water pipe that allows for weed to be inhaled ● Blunt – Hollowed-out cigar with the tobacco replaced with weed ● Hash – Mix of medical weed and tobacco ● Joint – Rolled cigarette-like way to consume medical cannabis How Does It Feel to be High? When consumed in moderation, weed’s common effects include a heightened sense of euphoria and well-being. You’ll most likely talk and laugh more. At its height, the high creates a feeling of pensive dreaminess that wears off and becomes sleepiness. In a group setting, there are commonly feelings of exaggerated physical and emotional sensitivity as well as strong feelings of camaraderie. Medical marijuana also has a direct impact on a person’s speech patterns, which will get slower. There will be an impairment in your ability to carry out conversations. Cannabis also affects short-term memory. The usual high that one gets from cannabis can last for about two hours; when you overindulge, it can last for up to 12 hours. Is Using Medical Marijuana Safe? Medical cannabis is scientifically proven to be safer compared to alcohol or nicotine. Marijuana is slowly being legalized around the world because of its numerous health benefits, particularly among people suffering from mental illness like depression, anxiety and stress. It also has physical benefits, like helping in managing pain and the treatment of glaucoma and cancer.

In my youth . . . my sacred youth . . . in eaves sole sparowe sat not more alone than I . . . in my youth, my saucer-deep youth, when I possessed a mirror and both a morning and an evening comb . . . in my youth, my pimpled, shame-faced, sugared youth, when I dreamed myself a fornicator and a poet; when life seemed to be ahead somewhere like a land o’ lakes vacation cottage, and I was pure tumescence, all seed, afloat like fuzz among the butterflies and bees; when I was the bursting pod of a fall weed; when I was the hum of sperm in the autumn air, the blue of it like watered silk, vellum to which I came in a soft cloud; O minstrel galleons of Carib fire, I sang then, knowing naught, clinging to the tall slim wheatweed which lay in a purple haze along the highway like a cotton star . . . in my fumbling, lubricious, my uticated youth, when a full bosom and a fine round line of Keats, Hart Crane, or Yeats produced in me the same effect—a moan throughout my molecules—in my limeade time, my uncorked innocence, my jellybelly days, when I repeated Olio de Oliva like a tenor; then I would touch the page in wonder as though it were a woman, as though I were blind in my bed, in the black backseat, behind the dark barn, the dim weekend tent, last dance, date's door, reaching the knee by the second feature, possibly the thigh, my finger an urgent emissary from my penis, alas as far away as Peking or Bangkok, so I took my heart in my hand, O my love, O my love, I sighed, O Christina, Italian rose; my inflated flesh yearning to press against that flesh becoming Word—a word—words which were wet and warm and responsive as a roaming tongue; and her hair was red, long, in ringlets, kiss me, love me up, she said in my anxious oral ear; I read: Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour; for I had oodles of needs, if England didn't; I was nothing but skin, pulp, and pit, in my grapevine time, during the hard-on priesthood of the poet; because then—in my unclean, foreskinned, and prurient youth—I devoutly believed in Later Life, in Passion, in Poetry, the way I thought only fools felt about God, prayer, heaven, foreknowledge, sin; for what was a poem if not a divine petition, a holy plea, a prophecy: [...] a stranger among strangers, myself the strangest because I could never bring myself to enter adolescence, but kept it about like a bit of lunch you think you may eat later, and later come upon at the bottom of a bag, dry as dust, at the back of the refrigerator, bearded with mold, or caked like sperm in the sock you've fucked, so that gingerly, then, you throw the mess out, averting your eyes, just as Rainer complained he never had a childhood—what luck!—never to have suffered birthpang, nightfear, cradlecap, lake in your lung; never to have practiced scales or sat numb before the dentist's hum or picked your mother up from the floor she's bled and wept and puked on; never to have been invaded by a tick, sucked by a leech, bitten by a spider, stung by a bee, slimed on by a slug, seared by a hot pan, or by paper or acquaintance cut, by father cuffed; never to have been lost in a crowd or store or parking lot or left by a lover without a word or arrogantly lied to or outrageously betrayed—really what luck!—never to have had a nickel roll with slow deliberation down a grate, a balloon burst, toy break; never to have skinned a knee, bruised a friendship, broken trust; never to have had to conjugate, keep quiet, tidy, bathe; to have lost the chance to be hollered at, bullied, beat up (being nothing, indeed, to have no death), and not to have had an earache, life's lessons to learn, or sums to add reluctantly right up to their bitter miscalculated end—what sublime good fortune, the Greek poet suggested—because Nature is not accustomed to life yet; it is too new, too incidental, this shiver in the stone, never altogether, and would just as soon (as Culp prefers to say) cancer it; erase, strike, stamp it out— [...]

A Republican seizure of power based not on the strength of the party's ideas but on massive disfranchisement denies citizens not only their rights, but also the "talisman" of humanity that voting represents. The lie of voter fraud breaks a World War II veteran down into a simple, horrifying statement: "I wasn't a citizen no more." It forces a man, a retired engineer who was instrumental in building this nation, into facing a bitter truth: "I am not wanted in this state." It eviscerates the key sense of self-worthy in a disabled man who has to pen the painful words "My constitutional rights have been stripped from me." It maligns thousands of African Americans who resiliently weathered the Missouri cold and hours of bureaucratic runarounds as nothing but criminals and frauds. It leaves a woman suffering from lung cancer absolutely "distraught" and convinced that "they prevented us from voting," because none of her IDs could penetrate Wisconsin's law. It shatters the dying wish of a woman who, in her last moments on earth, wanted to cast a vote for possibly the first woman president of the United States. But an expired driver's license meant none of that was to be.

When he had cancer and knew that the end was not far away, I asked him what had driven him to spend his life working for others. He replied: I guess basically one wants to feel that one's life has amounted to more than just consuming products and generating garbage. I think that one likes to look back and say that one's done the best one can to make this a better place for others. You can look at it from this point of view: what greater motivation can there be than doing whatever one possibly can to reduce pain and suffering?

Fortunately, I have neither coronavirus nor asthma and lung photos are Ok. Today my family doctor again checked but didn't see the medical issue, whereas a few days ago, night doctors sent an emergency ambulance for a checkup but also found nothing. I do not trust the doctors since they made a grave mistake and failed to diagnose metastatic prostate cancer early, and now I am suffering from it. I am taking four Xtandi tablets of 40 mg per day. As a result, I have short breathing and difficulty breathing; I called several times the hospital assistant of the oncologist, who didn't take it seriously while I searched Google for the reasons and truth; I found the Xtandi link with its side effects that states the breathing difficulties and to contact doctors; it creates anxiety, indeed. Whatever any suggestions in this regard: Additional input; however, as a history of black magic by Qadiyyanis followers of fake Jesus that Europe is still unaware of their deeds; I don't exclude the new attacks by them; it is my belief they will face consequences of their crimes accordingly the worldly law and penalty of the Divine.

Saying Yes to Life in Spite of Everything: Viktor Frankl The story of Viktor Frankl (1905–1997), an Austrian psychiatrist and neurologist imprisoned in concentration camps during the Nazi Holocaust of WWII, inspired the world after the war. By 1997, when Frankl died of heart failure, his book Man’s Search for Meaning, which related his experiences in the death camps and the conclusions he drew from them, had sold more than 10 million copies in 24 languages. The book’s original title (translated from the German) reveals Frankl’s amazing outlook on life: Saying Yes to Life in Spite of Everything: A Psychologist Experiences the Concentration Camp. In 1942, Frankl and his wife and parents were sent to the Nazi Theresienstadt ghetto in Czechoslovakia, which was one of the show camps used to deceive Red Cross inspectors as to the true purpose and conditions of the concentration camps. In October 1944, Frankl and his wife were moved to Auschwitz, where an estimated 1.1 million people would meet their deaths. Later that month, he was transported to one of the Kaufering labor camps (subcamps of Dachau), and then, after contracting typhoid, to the Türkheim camp where he remained until American troops liberated the camp on April 27, 1945. Frankl and his sister, Stella, were the only ones in his immediate family to survive the Holocaust. In Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl observed that a sense of meaning is what makes the difference in being able to survive painful and even horrific experiences. He wrote, “We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms—to choose one’s own attitude in any given set of circumstances—to choose one’s own way.” Frankl maintained that while we cannot avoid suffering in life, we can choose the way we deal with it. We can find meaning in our suffering and proceed with our lives with our purpose renewed. As he states it, “When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.” In this beautiful elaboration, Frankl wrote, “Between a stimulus and a response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. The last of human freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.” 7.2. In recent years, record numbers have visited Auschwitz. The ironic sign above the front gate means “Work sets you free.” TRAUMA IS EVERYWHERE It’s not just veterans, crime victims, abused children, and accident survivors who come face-to-face with trauma. About 75% of Americans will experience a traumatic event at some point in their lives. Women are more likely to be victims of domestic violence than they are to get breast cancer.

Children with multiple ACEs are more likely to struggle with anxiety and depression, suffer from heart disease and obesity, and contract certain types of cancers. They're also more likely to underperform in school and suffer from relationship instability as adults. Even excessive shouting can damage a kid's sense of security and contribute to mental health and behavioral issues down the road.

The Israeli social media strategy aimed to involve both domestic and global supporters of its military missions. By doing so, and asking backers to post their own supporting tweets, Face-book posts, or Instagram images, the IDF created a collective mission that other nations could easily mimic by stirring up nationalist fervor online. During Operation Pillar of Defense, the IDF encouraged supporters of Israel to both proudly share when “terrorists” were killed while at the same time reminding a global audience that the Jewish state was a victim. It was a form of mass conscription to the cause through the weaponization of social media.12 This was war as spectacle, and the IDF was spending big to make it happen. The IDF media budget allowed at least 70 officers and 2,000 soldiers to design, process, and disseminate official Israeli propaganda, and almost every social media platform was flooded with IDF content. Today, the IDF Instagram page regularly features pro-gay and pro-feminist messaging alongside its hard-line militaristic iconography.13 On October 1, 2021, the IDF posted across its social media platforms a photo of its headquarters swathed in pink light with this message: “For those who are fighting, for those who have passed, and for those who have survived, the IDF HQ is lit up pink this #BreastCancerAwarenessMonth.” Palestinian American activist Yousef Munayyer responded on Twitter: “An untold number of women in Gaza suffer from breast cancer and are routinely denied adequate treatment and timely lifesaving care because this military operates a brutal siege against over 2 million souls.” On Instagram, however, most of the comments below the post praised the IDF.

Life can be brutal, but that is not an excuse for committing atrocities

FACT 1. Populations that eat a so-called Western diet—generally defined as a diet consisting of lots of processed foods and meat, lots of added fat and sugar, lots of refined grains, lots of everything except vegetables, fruits, and whole grains—invariably suffer from high rates of the so-called Western diseases: obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and cancer. Virtually all of the obesity and type 2 diabetes, 80 percent of the cardiovascular disease, and more than a third of all cancers can be linked to this diet. Four of the top ten killers in America are chronic diseases linked to this diet. The arguments in nutritional science are not about this well-established link; rather, they are all about identifying the culprit nutrient in the Western diet that might be responsible for chronic diseases. Is it the saturated fat or the refined carbohydrates or the lack of fiber or the transfats or omega-6 fatty acids—or what?

Page 180: A fascinating contemporary parallel, and another example of destruction through centralization if a federal union harbors a single disproportionately large power, has been furnished by the short-lived United States of Indonesia. When it was created in December 1949, it was composed of sixteen member states of which one was so large that its subordination without its own consent was impossible … Page 183: … if our present unifiers really want union, they must have disunion first. If Europe is to be united under the auspices of the European Council, its participating great powers must first be dissolved to a degree that, as in Switzerland … none of its component units is left with a significant superiority in size and strength over the others. Page 187: This is why such attempts at international union as the European Council or the United Nations are doomed to failure if they continue to insist on their present composition. Compromising with their framework a number of unabsorbably great powers, they suffer from the deadly disease of political cancer. To save them it would be necessary to follow Professor Simons who said of the overgrown nation-states that: ‘These monsters of nationalism and mercantilism must be dismantled, both to preserve world order and to protect internal peace. Their powers to wage war and restrict world trade must be sacrificed to some supranational state or league of nations. Their other powers and functions must be diminished in favor of states, provinces, and, in Europe, small nations.’ This is, indeed, the only way by which the problem of international government can be solved. The great powers, those monsters of nationalism, must be broken up and replaced by small states; for, as perhaps even our diplomats will eventually be able to understand, only small states are wise, modest and, above all, weak enough, to accept an authority higher than their own. Page 190 But war is fortunately not the only means by which great powers can be divided. Engulfed in a swamp of infantile emotionalism, and attaching phenomenal value to the fact that they are big and mighty, they cannot be persuaded to execute their own dissolution. But, being infantile and emotional, they can be tricked into it.

he decided to try his hand as a publisher. His first book was his greatest success: Ulysses S. Grant’s memoirs. Grant had been facing financial ruin after his presidency, and Twain offered him an outrageous sum to publish the work, sure that it would be a hit. Grant wrote the book with a death sentence hanging over his head, suffering from terminal cancer. Twain wrote of Grant, “I then believed he would live several months. He was still adding little perfecting details to his book, and preface, among other things. He was entirely through a few days later. Since then the lack of any strong interest to employ his mind has enabled the tedious weariness to kill him. I think his book kept him alive several months. He was a very great man and superlatively good.” Grant died days after finishing his memoir, which was a huge success, restoring his family’s fortunes and making Twain even richer.

I had outgrown the shallow Christianity of my youth by the time I could understand the fundamentals of Darwinian theory. After that, I could not distinguish the basic elements of Christian belief from wishful thinking. The socialism that soon afterward became so attractive to me as an alternative proved equally insubstantial; with time, I came to understand, through the great George Orwell, that much of such thinking found its motivation in hatred of the rich and successful, instead of true regard for the poor. Besides, the socialists were more intrinsically capitalist than the capitalists. They believed just as strongly in money. They just thought that if different people had the money, the problems plaguing humanity would vanish. This is simply untrue. There are many problems that money does not solve, and others that it makes worse. Rich people still divorce each other, and alienate themselves from their children, and suffer from existential angst, and develop cancer and dementia, and die alone and unloved. Recovering addicts cursed with money blow it all in a frenzy of snorting and drunkenness. And boredom weighs heavily on people who have nothing to do.

•  Addiction is a chronic medical illness that attacks the brain, damaging key parts of the cerebral cortex and limbic system. •  With standard traditional treatment, the chance of recovering from addiction and maintaining that recovery is 20–30 percent. •  With the new Recovery Science approach to treatment, the chance of recovering from addiction and maintaining that recovery can approach 90 percent. •  Seventy-five percent of alcoholics are not in treatment, even though alcoholism is nearly as life threatening as heart disease and cancer.

The mental health system reaches only a fraction of the people suffering from mental disorders, most of whom are discouraged from seeking treatment by its cost, social stigma, or ineffectiveness. There are almost forty-three thousand suicides every year in America (more than the number of deaths from either breast cancer or car accidents), yet only about half of the people who take their lives have ever received mental health treatment. "Broken" does not seem too harsh a characterization of such a system. p335

I have suffered from urinary flaming since March 2016. I have been several times in a hospital in The Hague, but doctors failed to take that seriously, and they sent me back home without any treatment or medical check-ups. I initiated contact with a Brazilian homeopathy doctor, Miriam Sommer, in July 2016; she treated me with different medicines. After that, I was sick for the whole months of November and December 2016. I stopped going to Miriam Sommer Homeopathy. The doctors were still ignoring my sufferings; consequently, in January 2017, I felt the blood in my urine. I went to emergency medical help; doctors tested and identified that I had aggressive prostate cancer level 9. They cannot remove the tumor; however, they will treat it to extend my life. I believe in God that mysteries and miracles will happen to cure that. 

Today, the IDF Instagram page regularly features pro-gay and pro-feminist messaging alongside its hard-line militaristic iconography.13 On October 1, 2021, the IDF posted across its social media platforms a photo of its headquarters swathed in pink light with this message: “For those who are fighting, for those who have passed, and for those who have survived, the IDF HQ is lit up pink this #BreastCancerAwarenessMonth.” Palestinian American activist Yousef Munayyer responded on Twitter: “An untold number of women in Gaza suffer from breast cancer and are routinely denied adequate treatment and timely lifesaving care because this military operates a brutal siege against over 2 million souls.” On Instagram, however, most of the comments below the post praised the IDF.

Note: The first incident happened after the arrest by the Netherlands police in May 1980. I suffered from that, which destroyed my career, future, health, and life. I tried and tried to investigate that, but the police didn't even register the first information report (FIR). It stayed, refusing since 1980 until now, which creates suspicious questions about what the reasons are for not filing the case. It mirrors whether the Netherlands government victimised me or whether the hired ones of the international intelligence agencies have been a hindrance or the criminal groups. - The second incident happened in the shape of uncurable cancer; it was a deliberate mistake and ignorance of the Netherlands Urologists, who did not follow even the primary medical borderlines for the checkup during one year from 2016 to 2017. After the diagnosis, they are hiding the reality, and they still do not take it seriously. I still hope that the Netherlands' neutral and free media will awaken to help me investigate the incident. It will save millions of lives around the world. In God's name, take it seriously to protect me and others. I feel suspicious elements around me. I cry and pray day and night for God's protection since I do not exclude the Qadeyanis witches and magicians, who keep doing black magic continuously that the West does not understand. My Real Story In A Poem *** I never thought I would suffer from cancer The metastatic prostate gland I still cannot decide that It is natural or human-made Since everything is possible In the medical-criminal world How it happened in Western society; Civilized urologists ignored it deliberately From 2016 to 2017 Telling that nothing was wrong Whereas I was suffering from Bleeding, burning, and pain During urinating I begged urologists for a wide-scale checkup With MRI scans and other new technologies But urologists stayed rejecting; Whereas I was paying insurance for that Consequently, at the beginning of 2017 The diagnosis became a time bomb that I had metastatic prostate gland cancer, Which was not curable, They listed me on the death list, Treating for longer life expectancy However, they do tell not the truth And stay suspicious It confuses me and creates grave fear Since then I am bearing terrible side effects Factually, I became victimized twice By criminals, Intelligence Agencies And underground-mafias Which I am unable to trace alone In this regard, I approached Western Media, Ministries, police, courts, Euro Union Unfortunately, none of those responded Even my motherland media cruelly ignored It seems as if I am in the grip of the demon And The Prisoner Of The Hague Everyone has left me alone in pain, Stress, fear, depression Even my children don't care And realize my tears Where resides sympathy, empathy, And humanity? I feel death before death It is a silent cruelty Ah, where should I ask and beg For justice, help, and investigation That civilized world should know An innocent is under victimization I believe God will help and protect And someone from somewhere Appear to hold my hands To eliminate all criminals and demons My cancer will be curable With a longer life expectancy, in some ways Amen, O' merciful God amen.