BY MICHAEL STEFANEK AND CHRISTINA D. JORDAN
FOR THOSE UNFAMILIAR WITH THE TERM “INTEGRATIVE cancer care,” simply substitute “integrative oncology,” “complementary cancer care,” “integrative whole person cancer care,” or even, over the protests of practitioners of “integrative cancer care,” the more recognized “cancer complementary and alternative medicine.” While dating back centuries with such practices as Qigong and meditation,1 an emphasis on “mindbody” approaches to curing cancer was re-emphasized in the 1970s with such books as Norman Cousins’ Anatomy of an Illness,2 Bernie Siegel’s “Love, Medicine, and Miracles,”3 and C. Simonton’s Getting Well Again.4 Such books promoted the idea that our mind can cure cancer and that positive outlooks, “fighting spirit,” or imagining your immune system battling cancer cells can directly impact the disease process itself.
As a practicing health psychologist at the Johns Hopkins Cancer Center, in the early 1980s I (MS) was once physically threatened by the spouse of a patient if I ever dared to approach the topic of death during my counseling sessions with his wife. Fortunately, while psychological counseling can indeed be effective in helping patients with side effects of treatment, quality of life and emotional distress, the idea that “the mind” can cure cancer has largely been debunked and booted from the mainstream media. Likewise, while a number of believers of integrative therapies still promote the idea of dramatic cures in the absence of data (one need not go far on the internet to read of Qigong “healing masters” dissolving tumors in less than a minute),5 we hear less of cures from miracle drugs or procedures such as laetrile6 or coffee enemas (cream and sugar?)7