This is a very heavy subject. On the one hand, the doctors ought to and will always seek to help and provide treatment. But, on the other hand, doctors are also people and they, like many, may lose faith in recovery. If this happens, they will say that there is almost no hope. It makes sense to them, because they see a lot of people die from cancer and this is what informs their prognoses.
Yet I refuse to understand why, when talking to their patients about the diagnosis, some doctors add emotional remarks about the impossibility to overcome the disease. Doctors are not gods, they do not weave fates, and, therefore, as medical practitioners, it behooves them to mind their language.
It is known that, doctors’ words carry a lot of mental weight: patients are very strongly influenced by the words coming from these figures of authority. There is even a scientific term for it: iatrogenesis, which describes a situation where a disease is caused by careless statements or actions of a doctor. Such statements negatively affect the mental state of the patient and his or her relatives, which may aggravate and exacerbate the disease. There are many cases in oncology (not just a singular precedent) where a misdiagnosed patient over the course of a few weeks developed symptoms of the fake disease. Such is the weight of information coming from trusted sources: it programs people who are used to trusting doctors.
Imagine, for example, a mother whose child is hopelessly ill with brain cancer while the doctors say that there is close to no chance of recovery and that they should prepare for the worst.
Despite that, the mother should never give up, even if the doctors say there is no chance of survival. There have been cases of miraculous recovery. Man proposes, God disposes. There is always a chance. One just has to be willing to grasp it. In this situation, it is very important that parents immediately begin to work on themselves, or rather, on changing their own inner world. Above all, this applies to the mother. After all, the child stays connected to the mother by an invisible link until he or she comes of age. It is one thing if the mother becomes completely overwhelmed and crushed by the news, and quite another when she becomes obsessed with her belief in her own child’s recovery. It is clear that in the first case the child has no chance, while in the second case there is a chance. Consider the parable of the two frogs who end up in a jar of milk. One of them gives up and drowns, and the other begins to thrash about and whips the milk into butter, which allows it to escape. Just like that, in life one has to strive to always keep up the energy to do the seemingly impossible.
Modern evidence shows that the mother and child are connected with a strong link of information and energy. That’s why when a mother is obsessed with her desire to help her baby and is keeping her energy up, the so-called miracles can happen. It all makes perfect sense: the child receives positive energy from the mother and recuperates strength to fight the disease.
For this to happen, however, the mother has to radically change her inner world, preferably, with help from a specialist. When it comes to child cancer, there is no time to think, it is time to act! Self-cultivation paired with conventional treatment gives a real chance to overcome even the most difficult situations. Remember, it’s better to do something than suffer and do nothing!
Doctor of Psychology (Psy.D), Practicing psychologist, systemic oncopsychologist. READ MORE
