ANTICANCER: A NEW WAY OF LIFE

This amounted to a radical change in lifestyle, especially for stressed executives or heads of families with many responsibilities. These were methods long considered outlandish, irrational, or based on superstition. Twelve months later, the results left no room for doubt.

Of the forty-nine patients who hadn’t changed anything in their lifestyles and who had relied simply on regular surveillance of the disease, six saw their cancer worsen and had to undergo the ablation of their prostate, followed by chemotherapy and radiotherapy. Conversely, none of the forty-one patients who had followed the program of physical and mental health required recourse to such treatments. In the first group, the PSA level (which reflects the tumor’s growth) had increased by 6 percent on average, not including the men who had had to withdraw from the study because of the increase in their disease (their level of PSA was still more worrisome and would have greatly increased that number). This first group’s progression suggested that the tumors were growing, slowly but surely. As for the second group, whose lifestyle had changed, the PSA had decreased by an average of 4 percent, indicating a regression in the tumors of most patients.

But what was more impressive still was what happened in the bodies of the men who had changed their lifestyles. Their blood, presented with typical cancerous prostate cells (cells from the LNCaP line used to test various chemotherapy agents) was seven times more capable of inhibiting the growth of cancer cells than the blood of men who hadn’t changed anything in their lifestyles.

The best proof of a link between changes in lifestyle and the arrested development of cancer cells is that the more diligently these men had absorbed Dr. Ornish’s advice and applied it to their daily lives, the more active their blood was against the cancer cells!

In short, the statistics we are shown on cancer survival don’t distinguish between people who are satisfied with passively accepting the medical verdict and those who mobilize their own natural defenses. In the same “median” are found those who go on smoking, who continue to expose themselves to other carcinogenic substances, whose diet is typically Western—a fertilizer for cancer, as we will see—who continue to sabotage their immune defenses with too much stress and poor management of their emotions, or who abandon their bodies by depriving them of physical activity. And within this “median” are those who live much longer. This is most likely because, along with the benefits of the conventional treatments they receive, they have somehow galvanized their natural defenses. They have found harmony in this simple quartet: detoxification of carcinogenic substances, an anticancer diet, adequate physical activity, and a search for emotional peace.

There is no natural approach capable of curing cancer by itself. But there is no inherent fatality either. Like Stephen Jay Gould, we can put statistics in perspective and aim for the long tail on the right-hand side of the curve. There is no better path to this objective than to learn to use our bodies’ resources to live a richer, longer life.

Not everyone follows this route through conscious decision. Sometimes the disease itself leads us there. In Chinese, the notion of “crisis” is written as a combination of the two characters “danger” and “opportunity.” Cancer is so threatening that its effect is blinding; it is hard for us to grasp its creative potential. In many ways, my illness has changed my life for the better, and in a way that I could never have imagined when I thought that I was condemned. It started shortly after the diagnosis. . . .

Reprinted by arrangement with Viking, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., from ANTICANCER by David Servan-Schreiber, MD, PhD

Copyright © David Servan-Schreiber, MD, PhD