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CHANGING THE HORMONE BALANCE BY REMOVING OR DESTROYING GLANDS – REMOVAL OF THE ADRENAL GLANDS (GENERAL INFORMATION)

admin — Sun, 27 Feb 2011 11:09:13 +0000

The problem is that this operation also permanently removes our only source of corticosteroid homones. As we have seen, these hormones are essential for life. If your adrenal glands are removed, you must take as much corticosteroids as they would normally have produced, for the rest of your life. This means taking about forty milligrams (mg) of cortisone or ten milligrams of prednisone or one to one-and-a-half milligrams of dexamethasone every day and much more whenever you are under stress. The symptoms of corticosteroid deficiency and what to do to prevent these from happening.
If your adrenals are removed, you should at all times carry a card or wear a bracelet stating this. It is essential that, in any emergency, your doctors know that you must be given large amounts of corticosteroids.
What are the alternatives to removal of your adrenal glands? With breast cancer, the chance of this operation producing a remission is similar to the many other ways of favourably changing the hormone balance. Remember that there is even another way of stopping your adrenals from producing hormones. Aminoglutethimide can do this by chemical means and has the major advantage of producing only a temporary effect. Whenever the treatment is not controlling your cancer, it can be stopped and your adrenal glands will start working normally again within a few weeks. If they’ve been removed, you’re stuck with taking replacement hormones, not just for the time (if any) during which the treatment is working against your cancer, but for the rest of your life.
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OVERCOMING CANCER: OUR PATIENTS’ EXPERIENCES WITH THE RESENTMENT IMAGERY PROCESS

admin — Sun, 20 Feb 2011 11:06:45 +0000

We have frequently observed over the last several years that after our patients have forgiven others, the final person to forgive is themselves—for their own participation in the event and their contributions to the discomfort and stress that followed it. This can be an especially important process for people with malignancy, because they often find themselves victims of a guilt-resentment cycle for having the disease and having given their families pain and stress. Three examples may clarify how this process has actually worked.
Edith
Edith, fifty-three, had breast cancer that had spread to her bones and intestines. An only child, she had been extremely fond of her father, a charming, successful man, but she felt that her mother consumed so much of her father’s attention that there was none left for her. She felt angry toward her mother and competed with her for her father’s love.
While Edith was in her forties, her father died of cancer. She suffered a great sense of loss from his death and now found herself responsible for caring for her mother, who was quite elderly and living in a nursing home. Her mother complained bitterly if Edith did not visit her every day, and even when she did visit regularly, her mother invariably evoked feelings of guilt and inadequacy. Edith not only had the present inconvenience and emotional turmoil of caring for her mother, but she also felt forced to cope with earlier unresolved feelings of resentment. Shortly after her father’s death, Edith developed breast cancer.
After she became aware of her resentment, we suggested that she visualize good things happening to her mother. While practicing this exercise for several weeks, Edith gained new insights into her mother’s loneliness, particularly since her widowhood, and began to see that her mother’s demands and complaints were not aimed at her personally but came out of her fears and frustration. She also became aware of her own feelings of insecurity and inadequacy generated by her father’s death.
As a result of these recognitions, Edith was able to make decisions about whether or not to visit her mother without feeling guilty when she did not visit her. She also discovered that when she reacted less defensively to her mother’s comments, her mother’s behavior became gentler. An unexpected payoff from resolving her feelings about her mother was that Edith found she was able to communicate more satisfactorily with her own children.
Edith had a dramatic remission of her widespread metastases and has been able to remain very active for the past three years.
Betty
Betty, thirty-five, was experiencing much anger and hostility. She was quick to challenge almost everything—the temperature of the room, the quality of the food, anyone who asked her why she smoked, and so on. After a very upsetting conflict with a member of our staff, Betty tried the resentment imagery process and discovered she had a seemingly endless list of things about which she could feel resentful. Indeed, she even found that she would seek out other people’s difficulties and start resenting for them. For instance, at our residential treatment center, she discovered that the staff cook and the cook’s husband were unhappy with the center’s manager and planned to quit, and she brought their resentment up at our group meetings.
As she became aware of the role these feelings played in her approach to life, she also recognized that she had learned this approach from her mother, whose attitude had been that “the world was picking on her.” (Betty’s mother, incidentally, had died of breast cancer.)
We worked with Betty again after she had been using the resentment imagery process for six months, and it was quickly apparent that she had changed significantly. Gradually, she had learned to catch herself when she started to collect resentments and recognize that, even if injustices did exist, she was damaging her own health by going out of her way to look for them. Her facial expression had softened, she was much more direct in expressing her feelings, and she felt less depressed and anxious. Psychological tests that we gave her also indicated that she spent less time repressing and denying her feelings, showed increased resiliency and, in general, felt better about herself.
Ellen
At thirty-two, Ellen had breast cancer with bone metastases. During her initial work with us, she began to realize that she had spent much of her life blaming her parents, particularly her mother, for having damaged her psychologically in her early childhood. She blamed much of the pain in her life on that perceived hurt.
When we asked her to use the resentment imagery process and report on it, she said that at first she had great difficulty creating a picture of her mother. Then, after forcing herself to picture her mother and see good things happening to her, Ellen discovered that she was really angry with herself for having messed up her own life. She realized that she had used the resentment toward her mother as an excuse to avoid facing her anger at herself, and she saw that the person she really needed to forgive was herself.
Ellen began visualizing hugging herself, patting herself on the back, seeing good things come about in her life. She changed noticeably. Whereas she had formerly shown very little emotion and often felt extremely depressed, now she began to show signs of vitality and energy.
Importantly, Ellen learned to use her feelings toward her mother as feedback. Whenever she found herself raking over old resentments toward her mother, she knew she was covering up anger at herself. At such times, she would visualize herself with greater self-acceptance and more responsibility for solving her own problems. One year later, psychological tests indicate that considerable psychological improvement has taken place. Her physical health has also improved greatly. She is very active and has no evidence of disease at this time.
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BREAST X-RAY: MAMMOGRAM

admin — Sun, 13 Feb 2011 11:05:36 +0000

This is a specialized breast X-ray where the breast is sandwiched between two X-ray plates. I joked once, when having a mammogram myself, that if men had to have them, they would never have been designed the way they are. The radiographer told me that unfortunately men with testicular cancer do have to go through exactly the same routine, only it isn’t their breasts – keep that in mind as you go through the minor indignity of a mammography check. It is a slightly uncomfortable (not painful) procedure, less so for post-menopausal women whose breast tissue is less active than in younger women. Usually four X-rays are taken, two of each breast – one compressing the breasts horizontally and one vertically.
Mammograms are more useful for women beyond the menopause when the breasts lose volume and ducts shrink and eventually atrophy. There is less to confuse the eye when interpreting the results and so it is more successful at picking up small cancers. Mammograms will only show the breast itself (i.e. not the axilla tail or underarm area).
If you are unhappy with a mammogram result, have the situation reviewed by a breast surgeon, as about 10-15 per cent of the time a malignant lump will not show up on a mammogram. A persistent lump, which does not go away or which changes in nature, should always be investigated further.
To improve the chances of the mammography being accurate, make sure that you point out to the radiographer the location of any lump, and if you are uncertain that the positioning on the film plate prior to taking the X-ray is appropriate, say so. Do not be embarrassed about discussing these questions with the technician.
Mammography is also used for routine screening of post-menopausal women, as well as for investigating suspicion of breast cancer. Calcification of tissue can be seen in very early development of breast cancer and is one of the signs that are looked for with mammography. However, calcium flecks, known as calcifications, can also result from stagnant milk secretions within breast cysts and are totally harmless. Micro-calcifications are more suspicious if they are clustered in one section of the breast than if they are scattered throughout the tissue, and around 20 per cent of micro-calcifications turn out to be cancerous.
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OBSTACLES TO PAIN RELIEF – PAIN CONTROL

admin — Mon, 18 May 2009 06:43:38 +0000

There are some doctors who will not listen, who will act in a disinterested and impatient way if you try to discuss your pain control with them and who clearly give pain control a low priority. If you have a doctor like this, you would probably be better off changing doctors, as we discussed in the introduction to this chapter. Unfortunately, there is no type of doctor that I can guarantee will be good at pain control. I believe that the ones who are most likely to be well informed about painkillers are doctors who specialise in pain control, in terminal or palliative care, in radiotherapy or chemotherapy treatment. You can ask for a second opinion from one or more doctors from whichever of these categories is available and seems appropriate for you. I hope you strike it lucky first time!

Right, let’s say you now have a doctor who, at the least, seems interested and concerned about your pain. What if this doctor agrees that you need a certain dose of a certain painkiller, say 20 milligrams of physeptone, but tries to send you away with a prescription for twenty tablets of 10 milligrams each and an appointment in two weeks time. However concerned this doctor appears, he or she is making it impossible for you to take your painkillers in an ideal way— regularly. He or she is forcing you to ration yourself, to take them only when your pain is really bad. Don’t let them do this. Tell them you understand it is best to take the painkillers regularly. Ask how long they last if you haven’t already checked it for yourself.

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EXPRESSIONS USED TO DESCRIBE AIMS OF TREATMENT – POTENTIALLY CURATIVE TREATMENT (PART 2)

admin — Fri, 15 May 2009 06:36:01 +0000

Remember that we can only know that a treatment is potentially curative if it has been in use for many years. If your practitioner says he or she can cure you with a treatment that has only been in use for a few months or years, don’t believe them. It’s that simple. It could be true that immediately after completing the treatment there are indeed some patients in whom no cancer can be detected by currently available tests. However, as you already know from earlier chapters in this book, this does not necessarily mean that no cancer cells at all are left. Remember, there are no tests currently available that can pick up very tiny seedlings. We can only say that patients have been completely cured in retrospect, that is, after enough time has gone by for any remaining tiny seedlings to activate and form obvious secondary growths. This time is different for different types of cancer, but is never less than two years. Usually it is from five to twenty or more years.

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