The Cancer Journals Quotes

My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences.

The fact that we are here and that I speak these words is an attempt to break that silence and bridge some of those differences between us, for it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken.

What is there possibly left for us to be afraid of, after we have dealt face to face with death and not embraced it? Once I accept the existence of dying as a life process, who can ever have power over me again?

I swear it only hit me then, with full conscious force, who the real villains of this piece had been from start to finish…those lying, cancerous dogs of the mainstream media!

And where the words of women are crying to be heard, we must each of us recognize our responsibility to seek those words out, to read them and share them and examine them in their pertinence to our lives.

Wouldn't it be great,as Scott Peck suggests, if all medical students had to undergo the symptoms and feeling of a spectrum of illnesses. From acute infections to terminal cancer - and Kuru, the laughing sickness. Just a month for each exposure, controlled of course, and a good heavy dose of excruciating pain. So they'll know what that feels like.

I want to write rage but all that comes is sadness. We have been sad long enough to make this earth either weep or grow fertile. I am an anachronism, a sport, like the bee that was never meant to fly. Science said so. I am not supposed to exist. I carry death around in my body like a condemnation. But I do live. The bee flies. There must be some way to integrate death into living, neither ignoring it nor giving in to it.

We have been sad long enough to make this earth either weep or grow fertile.

Each of us struggles daily with the pressures of conformity and the loneliness of difference from which those choices seem to offer escape.

I have found that battling despair does not mean closing my eyes to the enormity of the tasks of effecting change, nor ignoring the strength and the barbarity of the forces aligned against us. It means teaching, surviving and fighting with the most important resource I have, myself, and taking joy in that battle. It means, for me, recognizing the enemy outside and the enemy within, and knowing that my work is part of a continuum of women’s work, of reclaiming this earth and our power, and knowing that this work did not begin with my birth nor will it end with my death. And it means knowing that within this continuum, my life and my love and my work has particular power and meaning relative to others.

If I can look directly at my life and my death without flinching I know there is nothing they can ever do to me again.

Somedays, if bitterness were a whetstone, I could be sharp as grief.

Although of course being incorrect is always the hardest, but even that is becoming less important. The world will not stop if I make a mistake.

In becoming forcibly and essentially aware of my mortality, and of what I wished and wanted for my life, however short it might be, priorities and omissions became strongly etched in a merciless light and what I most regretted were my silences. Of what had I ever been afraid? To question or to speak as I believed could have meant pain, or death. But we all hurt in so many different ways, all the time, and pain will either change, or end. Death, on the other hand, is the final silence. And that might be coming quickly, now, without regard for whether I had ever spoken what needed to be said, or had only betrayed myself into small silences, while I planned someday to speak, or waited for someone else's words. And I began to recognize a source of power within myself that comes from the knowledge that while it is most desirable not to be afraid, learning to put fear into a perspective gave me great strength. I was going to die, if not sooner then later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.

[...] it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence.

The only answer to death is the heat and confusion of living; the only dependable warmth is the warmth of the blood.

Growing up Fat Black Female and almost blind in america requires so much surviving that you have to learn from it or die.

So much for self-love: I carry it with me like a dear cancerous relative - to be disposed of only when desperation sets in.

There is so much false spirituality around us these days, calling itself goddess-worship or "the way." It is false because too cheaply bought and little understood, but most of all because it does not lend, but rather saps, that energy we need to do our work. So when an example of the real power of healing love comes along such as this one, it is difficult to use the same words to talk about it because so many of our best and most erotic words have been so cheapened. Perhaps I can say this all more simply; I say the love of women healed me.

I wanted to write in my journal but couldn't bring myself to. There are so many shades to what passed through me in those days. And I would shrink from committing myself to paper because the light would change before the word was out, the ink was dry.

Women have been programmed to view our bodies only in terms of how they look and feel to others, rather than how they feel to ourselves, and how we wish to use them. We are surrounded by media images portraying women as essentially decorative machines of consumer function, constantly doing battle with rampant decay. (Take your vitamins every day and he might keep you, if you don’t forget to whiten your teeth, cover up your smells, color your grey hair and iron out your wrinkles....) As women, we fight this depersonalization every day, this pressure toward the conversion of one’s own self-image into a media expectation of what might satisfy male demand.

I am myself, a black woman warrior poet doing my work, come to ask you, are you doing yours? And, of course I am afraid – you can hear it in my voice – because the transformation of silence into language and actions is an act of self-revelation and that always seems fraught with danger.

I do not wish my anger and pain and fear about cancer to fossilize into yet another silence, nor to rob me of whatever strength can lie at the core of this experience, openly acknowledged and examined. For other women of all ages, colors, and sexual identities who recognize that imposed silence about any area of our lives is a tool for separation and powerlessness, and for myself, I have tried to voice some of my feelings and thoughts about the travesty of prosthesis, the pain of amputation, the function of cancer in a profit economy, my confrontation with mortality, the strength of women loving, and the power and rewards of self-conscious living.

The enormity of our task, to turn the world around. It feels like turning my life around, inside out.

One never really forgets the primary lessons of survival, if one continues to survive.

I smile with equanimity and do not cherish grudges, as most of us adults do, letting them fester like a cancer. But I let my emotions run on the same forgiving and transient track.

Sometimes despair sweeps across my consciousness like luna winds across a barren moonscape. Ironshod horses rage back and forth over every nerve.

I realize that if I wait until I am no longer afraid to act, write, speak, be, I'll be sending messages on a ouija board, cryptic comments from the other side. When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less important whether or not I am unafraid.

Is this pain and despair that surround me a result of cancer, or has it just been released by cancer? I feel so unequal to what I always handled before, the abominations outside that echo the pain within.

Something maternal awakened, perhaps, by the physical contact with such lovely young babies? And tonight was a good night, thus I feel correspondingly tender. There will be other bad nights, but remembering the versatile quicksilver shifting of children's moods, I smile with equanimity and do not cherish grudges, as most of us adults do, letting them fester like a cancer. But I let my emotions run on the same forgiving and transient track.

Side effects of those very same prescription drugs are the third leading cause of death, behind heart disease and cancer. That’s right! Prescription drugs kill more people than traffic accidents. According to Dr. Barbara Starfield, writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2000, “adverse effects of medications” (from drugs that were correctly prescribed and taken) kill 106,000 people per year.5 And that doesn’t include accidental overdoses.

Toward the end of the plague, yellow journalism had spread a cancerous dread of vampires to all corners of the nation. He could remember himself the rash of pseudo-scientific articles that veiled an out-and-out fright campaign designed to sell papers. There was something grotesquely amusing in that; the frenetic attempt to sell papers while the world died. Not that all newspapers had done that. Those papers that had lived in honesty and integrity died the same way.

Intermittent fasting was associated with more than a 40 percent reduction in heart disease risk in a study of 448 people published in the American Journal of Cardiology reporting that “most diseases, including cancer, diabetes and even neurodegenerative illnesses, are forestalled” by caloric reduction.

Saw a film on cancer yesterday, shown by the English delegation. No doubt about it. I'm right. "Migratory cancer cells" are amoebic formations. They are produced from disintegrating tissue and thus demonstrate the law of tension and charge in its purest form - as does the orgastic convulsion. Now money is a must - cancer the main issue - in every respect, even political. It was a staggering experience. My intuition is good. I depend on it. Was absolutely driven to buy a microscope. The sight of the cancer cells was exactly as I had previously imagined it, had almost physically felt it would be. Cancer is an autoinfection of the body, of an organ. And researchers have no idea of what, hor, or where!!

I am learning to live beyond fear by living through it. And in the process, learning to turn fury and my own limitations into some more creative energy.

So much for selflove: I carry it with me like a dear cancerous relative - to be disposed of only when desperation sets in.

The labor leader Samuel Gompers had long considered the production of cigars in unsanitary tenements “one of the most dreadful, cancerous sores” on the city of New York. Realizing

I must let this pain flow through me and pass on. If I resist or try to stop it, it will detonate inside me, shatter me, splatter my pieces against every wall and person that I touch.

Is it any coincidence that the plastic surgeons most interested in pushing breast reconstruction and most involved in the superficial aspects of women’s breasts speak the language of sexist pigs?

As a result of its investigation, the NIH said that to qualify for funding, all proposals for research on human subjects had to be approved by review boards—independent bodies made up of professionals and laypeople of diverse races, classes, and backgrounds—to ensure that they met the NIH’s ethics requirements, including detailed informed consent. Scientists said medical research was doomed. In a letter to the editor of Science, one of them warned, “When we are prevented from attempting seemingly innocuous studies of cancer behavior in humans … we may mark 1966 as the year in which all medical progress ceased.” Later that year, a Harvard anesthesiologist named Henry Beecher published a study in the New England Journal of Medicine showing that Southam’s research was only one of hundreds of similarly unethical studies. Beecher published a detailed list of the twenty-two worst offenders, including researchers who’d injected children with hepatitis and others who’d poisoned patients under anesthesia using carbon dioxide. Southam’s study was included as example number 17. Despite scientists’ fears, the ethical crackdown didn’t slow scientific progress. In fact, research flourished. And much of it involved HeLa. 18

Medical journals from 1905 to 1915 are rife with articles on “vibratory massage” and the many things it cures. Weakened hearts and floating kidneys. Hysterical cramp of the esophagus and catarrh of the inner ear. Deafness, cancer, bad eyesight. And lots and lots of prostate problems. A Dr. Courtney W. Shropshire, writing in 1912, was impressed to note that by means of “a special prostatic applicator, well lubricated, attached to the vibrator, introduced to the rectum” he was “able to empty the seminal vesicles of their secretions.” Indeedy. Shropshire’s patients returned every other day for treatment, no doubt also developing a relationship with the vibration machine.

Living a self-conscious life, under the pressure of time, I work with the consciousness of death at my shoulder, not constantly, but often enough to leave a mark upon all my life's decisions and actions. And it does not matter whether this death comes next week or thirty years from now, this consciousness gives my life another breadth. It helps shape the words I speak, the way I love, my politics of action, the strength of my vision and purpose, the depth of my appreciation of living.

My work is to inhabit the silences with which I have lived and fill them with myself until they have the sounds of brightest day and the loudest thunder. And then there will be no room left inside of me for what has been except as memory of sweetness enhancing what can and is to be.

But support will always have a special and vividly erotic set of image/meanings for me now, one of which is floating upon a sea within a ring of women like warm bubbles keeping me afloat upon the surface of that sea. I can feel the texture of inviting water just beneath their eyes, and do not fear it. It is the sweet smell of their breath and laughter and voices calling my name that gives me volition, helps me remember I want to turn away from looking down. These images flow quickly, the tangible floods of energy rolling off these women toward me that I converted into power to heal myself.

Heart disease is the Jeffrey Dahmer of modern ailments. It kills more than 25 percent of us. That’s one person in the United States dying of it every 37 seconds. Expanding fitness just a bit—the equivalent of a person improving their max running speed from five to six miles an hour—reduces the risk of heart disease by 30 percent, according to the American Heart Association. Next is cancer. It kills 22.8 percent of us. The most fit people face a 45 percent lower risk of dying from the disease, according to a study in the Annals of Oncology. Then we have accidents. They take 6.8 percent of us. If a person is in a serious car accident, being in shape drops their chances of dying by 80 percent, according to a study in the Emergency Medical Journal. If the docs have to operate—regardless of whether it’s an emergency or a planned surgery—fitter people also face fewer surgical complications and recover faster than unfit people, say scientists in Brazil.

But I believe that socially sanctioned prosthesis is merely another way of keeping women with breast cancer silent and separate from each other. For instance, what would happen if an army of one-breasted women descended upon Congress and demanded that the use of carcinogenic, fat-stored hormones in beef-feed be outlawed?

As a recent editorial in the Journal of Clinical Oncology put it: "What we must first remember is that the immune system is designed to detect foreign invaders, and avoid out own cells. With few exceptions, the immune system does not appear to recognize cancers within an individual as foreign, because they are actually part of the self.

A 2002 Wall Street Journal article provided eye-opening details about how comprehensive review worked in practice. UCLA had accepted a Hispanic girl with SATs of 940, while rejecting a Korean student with 1500s. The Korean student hardly lived in the lap of luxury. He tutored children to pay rent for his divorced mother, who developed breast cancer.

If you want to live long, sleep more and eat less. ... Intermittent fasting was associated with more than a 40 percent reduction in heart disease risk in a study of 448 people published in the American Journal of Cardiology reporting that 'most diseases, including cancer, diabetes and even neurodegenerative illnesses, are forstalled' by caloric reduction.

Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), included a recent article by Barbara Starfield, M.D., stating that physician error, medication error and adverse events from drugs or surgery kill 225,400 people per year (Chart 1.5).11 That makes our health care system the third leading cause of death in the United States, behind only cancer and heart disease

My head is burning again this morning. I am starting to get used to it and see it as a glow. The head weighs fourteen pounds or thereabouts. Today, mine feels like a giant sunflower perched on top of a slender, swaying reed. It is odd to me how an easy day like yesterday is followed by another like today. I stay with discomfort, and pause to rest the lids of my eyes, my head on its stem.

I am talking here about the need for every woman to live a considered life. The necessity for that consideration grows and deepens as one faces directly one's own mortality and death. Self scrutiny and an evaluation of our own lives, while painful, can be rewarding and strengthening journeys toward a deeper self. For as we open ourselves more and more to the genuine conditions of our lives, women become less and less willing to tolerate those conditions unaltered, or to passively accept external and destructive controls over our lives and our identities.

We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired. For we have been socialised to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us. The fact that we are here and that I speak now these words is an attempt to break that silence and bridge some of those differences between us, for it is not difference which immobilises us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken.

In the cause of silence, each of us draws the face of her own fear--fear of contempt, of censure, or some judgment, or recognition, of challenge, of annihilation. But most of all, I think, we fear the very visibility without which we also cannot truly live. Within this country where racial difference creates a constant, if unspoken, distortion of vision, Black women have on one hand always been highly visible, and so, on the other hand, have been rendered invisible through the depersonalization of racism. Even within the women’s movement, we have had to fight, and still do, for that very visibility which also renders us most vulnerable, our Blackness. For to survive in the mouth of this dragon we call america, we have had to learn this first and most vital lesson--that we were never meant to survive. Not as human beings. And neither were most of you here today, Black or not. And that visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest strength. Because the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or not we speak. We can sit in our corners mute forever while our sisters and our selves are wasted, while our children are distorted and destroyed, while our earth is poisoned; we can sit in our safe corners mute as bottles, and we will still be no less afraid.

For me, my scars are an honorable reminder that I may be a casualty in the cosmic war against radiation, animal fat, air pollution, McDonald’s hamburgers and Red Dye No. 2, but the fight is still going on, and I am still a part of it. I refuse to have my scars hidden or trivialized behind lambswool or silicone gel. I refuse to be reduced in my own eyes or in the eyes of others from warrior to mere victim, simply because it might render me a fraction more acceptable or less dangerous to the still complacent, those who believe if you cover up a problem it ceases to exist. I refuse to hide my body simply because it might make a woman-phobic world more comfortable.

Dr. Louis Jolyon “Jolly” West was born in New York City on October 6, 1924. He died of cancer on January 2, 1999. Dr. West served in the U.S. Army during World War II and received his M.D. from the University of Minnesota in 1948, prior to Air Force LSD and MKULTRA contracts carried out there. He did his psychiatry residency from 1949 to 1952 at Cornell (an MKULTRA Institution and site of the MKULTRA cutout The Human Ecology Foundation). From 1948 to 1956 he was Chief, Psychiatry Service, 3700th USAF Hospital, Lackland Air Force Base, San Antonio, Texas Psychiatrist-in-Chief, University of Oklahoma Consultant in Psychiatry, Oklahoma City Veterans Administration Hospital Consultant in Psychiatry. [...] Dr. West was co-editor of a book entitled Hallucinations, Behavior, Experience, and Theory[285]. One of the contributors to this book, Theodore Sarbin, Ph.D., is a member of the Scientific and Professional Advisory Board of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF). Other members of the FMSF Board include Dr. Martin Orne, Dr. Margaret Singer, Dr. Richard Ofshe, Dr. Paul McHugh, Dr. David Dinges, Dr. Harold Lief, Emily Carota Orne, and Dr. Michael Persinger. The connections of these individuals to the mind control network are analyzed in this and the next two chapters. Dr. Sarbin[272] (see Ross, 1997) believes that multiple personality disorder is almost always a therapist-created artifact and does not exist as a naturally-occurring disorder, a view adhered to by Dr. McHugh[188], [189], Dr. Ofshe[213] and other members of the FMSF Board[191], [243]. Dr. Ofshe is a colleague and co-author of Dr. Singer[214], who is in turn a colleague and co author of Dr. West[329]. Denial of the reality of multiple personality by these doctors in the mind control network, who are also on the FMSF Scientific and Professional Advisory Board, could be disinformation. The disinformation could be amplified by attacks on specialists in multiple personality as CIA conspiracy lunatics[3], [79], [191], [213]. The FMSF is the only organization in the world that has attacked the reality of multiple personality in an organized, systematic fashion. FMSF Professional and Advisory Board Members publish most of the articles and letters to editors of psychiatry journals hostile to multiple personality disorder.

Toward the end of the plague, yellow journalism had spread a cancerous dread of vampires to all corners of the nation. He could remember himself the rash of pseudo-scientific articles that veiled an out-and-out fright campaign designed to sell papers. There was something grotesquely amusing in that; the frenetic attempt to sell papers while the world died. Not that all newspapers had done that. Those papers that had lived in honesty and integrity died the same way. Yellow journalism, though, had been rampant in the final days. And, in addition, a great upsurge in revivalism had occurred. In a typical desperation for quick answers, easily understood, people had turned to primitive worship as the solution. With less than success. Not only had they died as quickly as the rest of the people, but they had died with terror in their hearts, with a mortal dread flowing in their very veins.

Well, women with breast cancer are warriors, also. I have been to war, and still am. So has every woman who had had one or both breasts amputated because of the cancer that is becoming the primary physical scourge of our time. For me, my scars are an honorable reminder that I may be a casualty in the cosmic war against radiation, animal fat, air pollution, McDonald’s hamburgers and Red Dye No. 2, but the fight is still going on, and I am still a part of it. I refuse to have my scars hidden or trivialized behind lambswool or silicone gel. I refuse to be reduced in my own eyes or in the eyes of others from warrior to mere victim, simply because it might render me a fraction more acceptable or less dangerous to the still complacent, those who believe if you cover up a problem it ceases to exist. I refuse to hide my body simply because it might make a woman-phobic world more comfortable.

In 2013 a study published in the Journal of Patient Safety8 put the number of premature deaths associated with preventable harm at more than 400,000 per year. (Categories of avoidable harm include misdiagnosis, dispensing the wrong drugs, injuring the patient during surgery, operating on the wrong part of the body, improper transfusions, falls, burns, pressure ulcers, and postoperative complications.) Testifying to a Senate hearing in the summer of 2014, Peter J. Pronovost, MD, professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and one of the most respected clinicians in the world, pointed out that this is the equivalent of two jumbo jets falling out of the sky every twenty-four hours. “What these numbers say is that every day, a 747, two of them are crashing. Every two months, 9/11 is occurring,” he said. “We would not tolerate that degree of preventable harm in any other forum.”9 These figures place preventable medical error in hospitals as the third biggest killer in the United States—behind only heart disease and cancer.

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.

Emotions also directly modulate the immune system. Studies at the U.S. National Cancer Institute found that natural killer (NK) cells, an important class of immune cells we have already met, are more active in breast cancer patients who are able to express anger, to adopt a fighting stance and who have more social support. NK cells mount an attack on malignant cells and are able to destroy them. These women had significantly less spread of their breast cancer, compared with those who exhibited a less assertive attitude or who had fewer nurturing social connections. The researchers found that emotional factors and social involvement were more important to survival than the degree of disease itself. Many studies, such as the one reported in The British Medical Journal article, fail to appreciate that stress is not only a question of external stimulus but also of individual response. It occurs in the real lives of real persons whose inborn temperament, life history, emotional patterns, physical and mental resources, and social and economic supports vary greatly. As already pointed out, there is no universal stressor. In most cases of breast cancer, the stresses are hidden and chronic. They stem from childhood experiences, early emotional programming and unconscious psychological coping styles. They accumulate over a lifetime to make someone susceptible to disease.

The transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation and that always seems fraught with danger. But my daughter, when I told her of our topic and my difficulty with it, said, "Tell them about how you're never really a whole person if you remain silent, because there's always that one little piece inside of you that wants to be spoken out, and if you keep ignoring it, it gets madder and madder and hotter and hotter, and if you don't speak it out one day it will just up and punch you in the mouth.

A report in the peer-reviewed journal Public Health Nutrition showed that the organisation accepted more than $4 million from food companies and industry associations, including Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Nestlé, Hershey, Kellogg’s and Conagra.39 And this was just between 2011 and 2017. In addition, they had significant equity in UPF companies including more than a million dollars of stocks in PepsiCo, Nestlé and J.M. Smucker.40 Meanwhile, back across the Atlantic, Diabetes UK lists Boots, Tesco and Abbott as corporate partners.41 Cancer Research UK is funded by Compass, Roadchef, Slimming World, Tesco and Warburtons.42 The British Heart Foundation takes money from Tesco.43 The British Dietetic Association has Abbott, Danone and Quorn as its current strategic partners, with other food companies as supporters.44 The

One reason for this “dirty little secret” is the positive publication bias described in Chapter 7. If researchers and medical journals pay attention to positive findings and ignore negative findings, then they may well publish the one study that finds a drug effective and ignore the nineteen in which it has no effect. Some clinical trials may also have small samples (such as for a rare diseases), which magnifies the chances that random variation in the data will get more attention than it deserves. On top of that, researchers may have some conscious or unconscious bias, either because of a strongly held prior belief or because a positive finding would be better for their career. (No one ever gets rich or famous by proving what doesn’t cure cancer.)

lesson about the difficulties of communicating balanced information through the mass media: First you must fight to be heard; then your message is distorted, and finally, you are bound to be misunderstood.

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.

the Mayo Clinic explains, “Studies show that a lifelong diet rich in soy foods reduces the risk of breast cancer in women . . . Soy contains protein, isoflavones and fiber, all of which provide health benefits.”17 Even women who have breast cancer can benefit from eating more soy. After following tens of thousands of breast cancer patients, a study in the journal Cancer found that women with breast cancer who ate the most soy lived significantly longer.18 That’s great news for soul-food lovers; some of the best southern-inspired plant-based recipes feature delicious soy foods like tofu and edamame.

In 2016, The Journal of the American Medical Association released an observational study that looked at more than 2,000 women between the ages of 27 and 70 who had undergone conventional breast cancer treatment. After analyzing this large group of women for four years, researchers determined that when women fasted 13 hours or more, they had a 64 percent less chance of recurrence of breast cancer. This is largely because fasting created a significant decrease in hemoglobin A1c, an indicator of blood glucose levels, and C-reactive protein,

In 2016, The Journal of the American Medical Association released an observational study that looked at more than 2,000 women between the ages of 27 and 70 who had undergone conventional breast cancer treatment. After analyzing this large group of women for four years, researchers determined that when women fasted 13 hours or more, they had a 64 percent less chance of recurrence of breast cancer. This is largely because fasting created a significant decrease in hemoglobin A1c, an indicator of blood glucose levels, and C-reactive protein, an indicator of inflammation.

2016, The Journal of the American Medical Association released an observational study that looked at more than 2,000 women between the ages of 27 and 70 who had undergone conventional breast cancer treatment. After analyzing this large group of women for four years, researchers determined that when women fasted 13 hours or more, they had a 64 percent less chance of recurrence of breast cancer. This is largely because fasting created a significant decrease in hemoglobin A1c, an indicator of blood glucose levels, and C-reactive protein, an indicator of inflammation.

I could die of difference, or live — myriad selves.

This emphasis upon the cosmetic after surgery reinforces this society’s stereotype of women, that we are only what we look or appear, so this is the only aspect of our existence we need to address. Any woman who has had a breast removed because of cancer knows she does not feel the same. But we are allowed no psychic time or space to examine what our true feelings are, to make them our own. With quick cosmetic reassurance, we are told that our feelings are not important, our appearance is all, the sum total of self.

In 2003, Michael McBurney from the University of Ottawa in Canada discovered that mouse embryos manipulated to be unable to produce one of the seven sirtuin enzymes, SIRT1, couldn’t last past the fourteenth day of development—about two-thirds of the way into a mouse’s gestation period.26 Among the reasons, the team reported in the journal Cancer Cell, was an impaired ability to respond to and repair DNA damage.

Trading reproduction for repair, the sirtuins order our bodies to “buckle down” in times of stress and protect us against the major diseases of aging: diabetes and heart disease, Alzheimer’s disease and osteoporosis, even cancer. They mute the chronic, overactive inflammation that drives diseases such as atherosclerosis, metabolic disorders, ulcerative colitis, arthritis, and asthma. They prevent cell death and boost mitochondria, the power packs of the cell. They go to battle with muscle wasting, osteoporosis, and macular degeneration. In studies on mice, activating the sirtuins can improve DNA repair, boost memory, increase exercise endurance, and help the mice stay thin, regardless of what they eat. These are not wild guesses as to their power; scientists have established all of this in peer-reviewed studies published in journals such as Nature, Cell, and Science.

TASSC also ran ads in commercial and campus newspapers across the country, and developed potential congressional testimony on “public health priorities.”70 They also created a “Sound Science in Journalism Award,” first granted to New York Times reporter Gina Kolata, “who responsibly detailed … how science has been distorted and manipulated to fuel litigation” on silicone breast implants.71 (Kolata has subsequently been heavily criticized by scientists, environmentalists, and her journalism colleagues for a persistent proindustry, protechnology bias, and an overt skepticism about environmental causes of cancer.)

Castaneda talks of living with death as your guide, that sharp awareness engendered by the full possibility of any given chance and moment. For me, that means being—not ready for death—but able to get ready instantly, and always to balance the "I wants" with the "I haves." I am learning to speak my pieces, to inject into the living world my convictions of what is necessary and what I think is important without concern (of the enervating kind) for whether or not it is understood, tolerated, correct or heard before. Although of course being incorrect is always the hardest, but even that is becoming less important. The world will not stop if I make a mistake.

The greatest incidence of breast cancer in american women appears within the ages of 40 to 55. These are the very years when women are portrayed in the popular media as fading and desexualized figures. Contrary to the media picture, I find myself as a woman of insight ascending into my highest powers, my greatest psychic strengths, and my fullest satisfactions. I am freer of the constraints and fears and indecisions of my younger years, and survival throughout these years has taught me how to value my own beauty, and how to look closely into the beauty of others. It has also taught me to value the lessons of survival, as well as my own perceptions. I feel more deeply, value those feelings more, and can put those feelings together with what I know in order to fashion a vision of and pathway toward true change.

Like superficial spirituality, looking on the bright side of things is a euphemism used for obscuring certain realities of life, the open consideration of which might prove threatening or dangerous to the status quo. Last week I read a letter from a doctor in a medical magazine which said that no truly happy person ever gets cancer. Despite my knowing better, and despite my having dealt with this blame-the-victim thinking for years, for a moment this letter hit my guilt button. Had I really been guilty of the crime of not being happy in this best of all possible infernos?

But fear and anxiety are not the same at all. One is an appropriate response to a real situation which I can accept and learn to work through just as I work through semi-blindness. But the other, anxiety, is an immobilizing yield to things that go bump in the night, a surrender to namelessness, formlessness, voicelessness, and silence.

Power comes from moving into whatever I fear most that cannot be avoided.

Expanding fitness just a bit—the equivalent of a person improving their max running speed from five to six miles an hour—reduces the risk of heart disease by 30 percent, according to the American Heart Association. Next is cancer. It kills 22.8 percent of us. The most fit people face a 45 percent lower risk of dying from the disease, according to a study in the Annals of Oncology. Then we have accidents. They take 6.8 percent of us. If a person is in a serious car accident, being in shape drops their chances of dying by 80 percent, according to a study in the Emergency Medical Journal. If the docs have to operate—regardless of whether it’s an emergency or a planned surgery—fitter people also face fewer surgical complications and recover faster than unfit people, say scientists in Brazil.

What is there possibly left for us to be afraid of, after we have dealt face to face with death and not embraced it? Once I accept the existence of dying, as a life process, who can ever have power over me again?

Like superficial spirituality, looking on the bright side of things is a euphemism used for obscuring certain realities of life, the open consideration of which might prove threatening or dangerous to the status quo.

Once I accept the existence of dying, as a life process, who can ever have power over me again?

I do not wish my anger and pain and fear about cancer to fossilize into yet another silence, nor to rob me of whatever strength can lie at the core of this experience, openly acknowledged and examined.

In the cloudy swirl of misleading ideas surrounding public discussion of addiction, there’s one that stands out: the misconception that drug taking by itself will lead to addiction — in other words, that the cause of addiction resides in the power of the drug over the human brain. It is one of the bedrock fables sustaining the so-called “War on Drugs.” It also obscures the existence of a basic addiction process of which drugs are only one possible object, among many. Compulsive gambling, for example, is widely considered to be a form of addiction without anyone arguing that it’s caused by a deck of cards. The notion that addiction is drug-induced is often reinforced. Clearly, if drugs by themselves could cause addiction, we would not be safe offering narcotics to anyone. Medical evidence has repeatedly shown that opioids prescribed for cancer pain, even for long periods of time, do not lead to addiction except in a minority of susceptible people. During my years working on a palliative care ward I sometimes treated terminally ill cancer patients with extraordinarily high doses of narcotics — doses that my hardcore addict clients could only dream of. If the pain was alleviated by other means — for example, when patient was successfully given a nerve block for bone pain due to malignant deposits in the spine — the morphine could be rapidly discontinued. Yet if anyone had reason to seek oblivion through narcotic addiction, it would have been these terminally ill human beings. An article in the Canadian Journal of Medicine in 2006 reviewed international research covering over six thousand people who had received narcotics for chronic pain that was not cancerous in origin. There was no significant risk of addiction, a finding common to all studies that examine the relationship between addiction and the use of narcotics for pain relief. “Doubts or concerns about opioid efficacy, toxicity, tolerance, and abuse or addiction should no longer be used to justify withholding opioids,” concluded a large study of patients with chronic pain due to rheumatic disease. We can never understand addiction if we look for its sources exclusively in the actions of chemicals, no matter how powerful they are.

Doctors and drugs (medical errors) are the third-leading cause of death in the United States (behind heart disease and cancer). As reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association, over 250,000 Americans die each year from medical therapies, including at least 113,000 from the negative effects of prescription medications.

we have shown in experimental animals that cancer growth can be turned on and off by nutrition, despite very strong genetic predisposition. We have studied these effects in great detail and have published our findings in the very best scientific journals. As you will see later, these findings are nothing short of spectacular, and the same effects have been indicated over and over again in humans.

Nothing could be further from the truth than the myth that if we lower our cholesterol levels we might have a greater chance of living longer and healthier lives. In a recent report appearing in the prestigious medical journal the _Lancet_, researchers from the Netherlands studied 724 elderly individuals whose average age was eighty-nine years and followed them for ten years. What they found was truly extraordinary. During the study, 642 participants died. Each thirty-nine-point increase in total cholesterol corresponded to a 15 percent decrease in mortality risk. In the study, there was absolutely no difference in the risk of dying from coronary artery disease between the high- versus low-cholesterol groups, which is incredible when you consider the number of elderly folks who are taking powerful cholesterol-lowering drugs. Other common causes of death in the elderly were found to be dramatically associated with lower cholesterol. The authors reported: 'Mortality from cancer and infection was significantly lower among the participants in the highest total cholesterol category than in the other categories, which largely explains the lower all-cause mortality in this category.' In other words, people with the highest total cholesterol were less likely to die from cancer and infections -- common fatal illnesses in older folks -- than those with the lowest cholesterol levels. In fact, when you compare the lowest- and highest-cholesterol groups, the risk of dying during the study was reduced by a breathtaking 48 percent in those who had the highest cholesterol. High cholesterol can extend longevity. ~ David Perlmutter, M.D., _Grain Brain_

A 2001 study from the University of Rochester Cancer Center published in the Journal of Pain and Symptom Management concluded that expecting nausea was the strongest predictor that patients would actually experience it.16 The researchers

largest study to look at this phenomenon, involving nearly five thousand men who were treated with external-beam radiation alone, found that the PSA bounce did not seem to raise the risk of local failure or distant metastases. However, because of this PSA bounce, the ASTRO consensus definition may falsely identify some of these men as having a relapse—again, leading to unnecessary anxiety. Preliminary research using magnetic resonance spectroscopy imaging (MRSI) suggests that the bounce may actually be caused by inflammation of the prostate after radiation. MRSI is also being investigated as a means to determine whether what’s happening with a man’s PSA is a bounce, or a return of cancer. Another study, published in the Journal

One of those 48 studies is the Danish analysis published in November 2020 in the world-renowned journal Annals of Internal Medicine, which concluded: „The trial found no statistically significant benefit of wearing a face mask.“1416 Shortly before, U.S. researcher Yinon Weiss updated his charts on cloth face masks mandates in various countries and U.S. states—and they also showed that mask mandates have made no difference or may even have been counterproductive.1417 The aforementioned website „Ärzte klären auf“ showed a graph with data going until December 4, 2020, which also refutes the effectiveness of the mask obligation.

I think now what was most important was not what I chose to do so much as that I was conscious of being able to choose, and having chosen, was empowered from having made a decision, done a strike for myself, moved.

One report that particularly impressed me appeared in the prestigious journal Science in April 1982 by authors Visintainer, Volpicelli, and Seligman. They described a group of rats, all suffering from the same cancer, that were exposed to annoying electric shock under two different experimental conditions; one group could escape from it, and the other had to take it until it stopped. Both groups got exactly the same dose of shock; the ability to escape from it was the only difference between the two groups. According to the authors, "Rats receiving inescapable shock were only half as likely to reject the tumor and twice as likely to die as rats receiving escapable shock or no shock. Only 27 percent of the rats given inescapable shock rejected the tumor, compared to 63 percent of the rats given escapable shock and 54 percent of the rats given no shock." The clear implication of the study was that the immune systems of the rats that were more emotionally stressed were less efficient, since it is the effectiveness of the immune system that determines whether a cancer will be thrown off or not. If this is the case with rats, imagine how much more important the emotions must be in humans. (page 185)

I have integrated the information from these studies into the various chapters of this new edition. For example, one study published in the journal Nature in 2007 concluded that cancer can be understood as a breakdown in the balance between cancer cells that have always been “dormant” in the body and the natural defenses that normally keep them at bay (see chapter 4).

One report that particularly impressed me appeared in the prestigious journal Science in April 1982 by authors Visintainer, Volpicelli, and Seligman. They described a group of rats, all suffering from the same cancer, that were exposed to annoying electric shock under two different ex- perimental conditions; one group could escape from it, and the other had to take it until it stopped. Both groups got exactly the same dose of shock; the ability to escape from it was the only difference between the two groups. Accord- ing to the authors, "Rats receiving inescapable shock were only half as likely to reject the tumor and twice as likely to die as rats receiving escapable shock or no shock. Only 27 percent of the rats given inescapable shock rejected the tumor, compared to 63 percent of the rats given escapable shock and 54 percent of the rats given no shock." The clear implication of the study was that the im- mune systems of the rats that were more emotionally stressed were less efficient, since it is the effectiveness of the immune system that determines whether a cancer will be thrown off or not. If this is the case with rats, imag- ine how much more important the emotions must be in humans. (page 185)

Prosthesis offers the empty comfort of “Nobody will know the difference.” But it is that very difference which I wish to affirm, because I have lived it, and survived it, and wish to share that strength with other women.

As was stated in one study published in the Autophagy journal, “one well-recognized way of inducing autophagy is by food restriction, which up regulates autophagy in many organs including the liver” (Alirezai et al. 2010). The study goes on to point out that autophagy has been recognized as a crucial defense mechanism to protect against malignancy (cancer), infection, Alzheimer’s disease, and neurodegenerative diseases.

Je m’aperçois à quel point je peux être civilisé, terriblement – je me rends compte du besoin que j’ai d’avoir des gens autour de moi, à qui parler, du besoin que j’ai de livres, de théâtre, de musique, de cafés, de boissons, etc. C’est affreux d’être civilisé ; quand on arrive au bout du monde on n’a rien pour vous aider à supporter la terreur de la solitude. Être civilisé, c’est avoir des besoins compliqués. Et un homme, dans toute sa force d’homme, ne devrait avoir besoin de rien. Tout le jour je m’étais promené dans les champs de tabac, me sentant de moins en moins à mon aise. Qu’ai-je à voir avec tout ce tabac ? Où veux-je en venir ? Partout les gens font pousser leur récolte, produisent des marchandises pour d’autres gens – et moi je ressemble à un fantôme qui glisse silencieusement parmi toute cette activité inintelligible. Je voudrais trouver du travail, n’importe lequel, mais je n’ai pas envie de m’associer à cette chose, à l’enfer de ce processus automatique. Je traverse une ville et je regarde le journal qui rapporte les événements de la ville et de ses environs. Il me semble qu’il n’y a pas d’événement, que l’horloge s’est arrêtée, mais que ces pauvres diables ne s’en sont pas aperçus

Cardinal Bernardin was for many a model of a church leader who led by example; and his book The Gift of Peace stands as one of the finest contemporary spiritual journals, a chronicle of his overcoming great stress and coming to deal with his slow dying of cancer.