Is there a cancer-prone personality?

The following is an excerpt from the book Maximum Immunity (Weiner 1986). Weiner cites several sources linking psychological factors to cancer.
I am posting this to help further your understanding that detoxifying your health does not only include nutritious organic food and a clean environment but the very way we think, hindered by traps of negativity or helplessness, can very well lead you across the deadly threshold.

Is there a cancer-prone personality? As far back as the second century A.D., the Greek physician Galen observed that depressed women were more prone to cancer than cheerful women. Since then the medical literature has repeatedly reported that cancer
appears to be associated with depression, anxiety, disappointment, and other similar emotions.

In the twentieth century, while medical interest in psychological determinants of disease has been on the wane, clinical psychologists have taken up the question and developed personality profiles of cancer patients. One such profile, developed by psychologist Lawrence LeShan (1977), finds that the lives of many cancer patients have the following points in common:

• marked by feelings of isolation, neglect, and despair as a youth, and having difficult interpersonal relationships

• in early adulthood, a consuming interest in either a strong and meaningful relationship or a satisfying vocation, which became the center of the person’s life

• the loss of this relationship or role, resulting in despair and reactivating the painful feelings of childhood once again

• a characteristic “bottling up” of despair; while cancer patients are often described by other people as kind, sweet, and benign, this sweetness is really a mask they wear to conceal their feelings of anger, hurt, and hostility.

The stress of life changes alone does not induce the development of cancer. There must also be an underlying personality structure that handles such life changes in an unhealthy way. Feelings of loneliness and hopelessness, of being helpless or trapped, often characterize people who develop this dread disease.

Animal experiments also suggest that a sense of helplessness plays a role in cancer causation. In such experiments, rats were injected with cancer cells and then divided into different groups. Some were exposed to electric shock that they could escape, while a second group were unable to escape the shock. A control group received no shock at all. The rats who were exposed to the escapable shock were able to reject the implanted cancer cells significantly more effectively than the rats who had no way of escaping.

That is, the cancer grew fastest and led to the earliest deaths among the animals who had no means of coping with their stress.
The rats who received the same amount of shock but were able to act to evade it had about the same rate of tumor growth as the control group who received no shocks at all (Vistianer et al. 1982).
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About challenyee

Bringing Acupuncture Mainstream - One Talk at a Time
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