Complementary therapies?!
Question: I am currently studying complementary therapies. The field that I am most interested in is offering complementary therapy to Cancer patients/ Patients with serious illness.
How can I find information on how to get into this particular line of complementary therapies?
Answers: I am currently studying complementary therapies. The field that I am most interested in is offering complementary therapy to Cancer patients/ Patients with serious illness.
How can I find information on how to get into this particular line of complementary therapies?
Whew. This will be a hard question to answer fully, but I'm gonna give you my best.
With cancer, our (US) medical system's current approach is, "we don't really understand what causes cancer, it's some mysterious process that occurs within your genetics. One of the few things we do know is that cancer cells have a lower tolerance to stress factors than normal cells. Therefore the best way to cure people with cancer is to flood their body with a kill agent (ie. cytotoxin in chemotherapy) and hope the cancer dies before the patient. Other options include cutting it out and hoping it does not spread/the unknown cause does not recurr or bombarding it with radiation to kill it, and hoping that does not also trigger further cancer growth."
Because our medical system for lack of a better term "sucks," this understanding has not changed much in the last 50 years, other than the therapies becoming progressively more expensive and profitable. Other approaches to curing the cancer are ignored, as are understandings of what the actual nature of cancer is, or their true common causes.
In regards to using complementary/alternative medicines, they generally tend to do one of the following:
Boost the persons immune system, so the cancer is more easily dealt with (cancer patients almost always have poor functioning immune systems). Depending on how this is done it can either get rid of the cancer by itself or make chemotherapy able to work.
Help the body repair itself from the damage done by cancer treatments. Most competent chinese medicine practiconers tend to believe in doing this rather than claiming to actually cure cancer. One of the major problems with conventional cancer treatment is that it kills the immune system, so it becomes possible other cancers to pop out without the immune system preventing them from doing anything.
Address root causes of cancer. Typically this is either chemical consumption (or bad diet), or psychological problems. Sometimes correcting diet can be sufficient to fix cancer related problems, as can detoxing a nasty carcinogen in a persons body (ie. agent orange from vietnam vets). I'm more familiar with the psychological aspect. It's fairly consistent that people over 20 who get cancer have some deep emotional problem/loss they never dealt with. Curing the actual loss almost leads to a remission. I've read a lot of studies done on this by psycologists, and I know a chinese chi gung doctor who worked in china with terminally ill patients that told me "every single time I got a remission, the person had to admit to me some 'sin' they'd committed and been carrying on their shoulders their whole life. Sometimes it was something really trivial like breaking a sisters toy, but if they did not do this I never saw a remission."
Do something to the body to boost the effeciacy of conventional cancer treatments, and thus lower the ammount needed. Strengthing the immune system as previously detailed can do it (or making the bodie's PH become more basic), and I've also seen a lot of research which shows hydrogen peroxide being injected into the blood vessels which feed the tumors does the same.
Use a better kill vector to kill cancer. There are some kill vectors existing which will mainly target cancer cells and leave the rest of the body alone. These include raising the temperature of an area (cancer cells have way lower tolerance to this one), running a ressonance frequency of cancer through the tissue, doing something to dramatically stimulate the immune system, or putting ozone into the blood (I personally used the resonance frequency approach since it seemed to be the least likely to have side effects).
There are some other approaches, but that's the basic idea.
The same chi gung doctor I referred to earlier told me that he found one specific chi gung form that seems to deal with cancer (he knows around 1000, for some reason only this one does anything). He recommends it to his students, and I know quite a few of them have gotten a lot of positive results from it. For reference it's called Dragon and Tiger, and I decided it was probably effective since it forces oxygen into the cancer cells (cells turn most commonly turn cancerous when their oxygen supply gets cut off, and cancer cells are essentially cells which don't consume oxygen).
So, that would be the general overview for your question in regards to cancer. The unfortunate thing about this debate is that there are so many falsehoods on both sides on the debate. A lot of alternative medical people do not really know what they are doing, and just exploit the disease for money. On the flip side, the mainstream medical establishment has locked out every approach except the few that don't fully cure it and generate a lot of money. If you plan to pursue this field of work, you need to be aware of how polarizing the entire issue is, and decide what you want to do.
Do you want to advocate an alternative form of cancer cures that bypasses the medical system, do something thta makes the chemo more likely to suceed, or just focus on helping chemo patients recover?
If nothing else, you could consider how much psycological well being plays into cancer, and the fact that most cancer patients have an isolated depressing dehumanizing experience in the the hospital you could help make more enjoyable.
With other serious diseases besides cancer, I have found a few things tend to run consistent through them. First, they normally have an unrecogonized cause which is never addressed (ie. aspartame causes lupus and MS), and if you want to help people with these conditions, you should look into the specific "hidden causes for them," then see if you can do anything to fix them. If you have questions about a specific disorder, I might be able to tell you what the cause is, but truthfully I'm only familiar with about 15 conditions, each of which I've been forced to learn about.
The second thing is that crappy nutrition and stress tends to make the conditions worse. Most people eat bad diets, and improving their food intakes often can have amazing effects regardless of what the condition is. This would of course be the realm of naturopathy.
The third is that practices which boost homeostatis can often help any disease (technically what's listen in the second part can). Out of the available options, the best I've found for boosting it was a good Chinese chi gung form (to put it in perspective, reiki can somewhat do this as well, it's just a very basic version with a much lower degree of effect). I know the most about this approach, but if you are interested in learning about it, I would be happy to send you a good place to start learning. I'll admit I'm baised towards this approach since I have the most experience with it.
So let's see, beginning resources I'd recommend.
For a good database on a lot of the alternative health stuff and various things which can cause disorders, I'd recommend www.mercola.com . He skips a few things, and is a bit focused on selling his stuff, but the information there is free and covers a lot of the important basics.
If you want to learn the Chi Gung/energy stuff, the best place to start is with a book called "opening the energy gates of your body." I read the reviews for it on amazon, and quite a few people who read it (and did what it said) got a lot of positive results from it in their health and stopped needing to see doctors.
The cancer puzzle is a good thing for giving you a broader picture of the whole cancer issue. It was definitely one of the more worthwhile books I read. It did not mention some of the more "fringe" cancer therapies, but that's partly due to the fact people tend to get arrested for practicing them and they are kept underground.
A book detailing what oxygen therapy can do for people is helpful. You also might want one of the naturopathic textbooks (ie. the encyplodia of natural medicine).
To say more than that, it really depends specifically on what you want to do. I tried to give the general answers that would hold true for most possibilities, but if you suddenly decide theres one specific field of practice you want to focus on, you need to read their literature. I've tried to become familiar with most of the stuff out there (I'd say half=good, half=waste of time), so if you want any specific advice on certain treatments to try I'd be happy to help.
Also, the one resource I would advise avoiding is quackwatch.com. That site has a very clear bias of "all alternative therapies are bad, do not ever use them" and is used to spread the commercial interests of the AMA through doing so. I've found a lot of things said on there were blatant falsehoods, so I hold the opinion you cannot evaluate the veracity of any information held on there.
Try www.mhra.gov.uk .and follow the links
You could read this book, it is sometimes used in cancer hospitals in US & this author is highly respcted in metaphysics; the philosophy is that of changing the underlying cause of disease, & using affirmations to change the negative thought patterns that create it:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Heal-Your-Body-Z...
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Heal-Your-Body-L...
(both are basically the same book but I thought I'd let you know about both).
God Bless your work & wishing you every success!
Merry Christmas
gooogle Fourfold Path to Healing
if you google quackwatch try the site below
http://cectic.com/016.html
Complementary medicine is a waste of money that involves mixing medicine that works (i.e. scientific medicine, with cancer patients this usually means surgery, radiation and chemotherapy) with methods that don't work but cost extra money.
Some of the methods used are pretty much harmless (except to the wallet of those who get them) but others could interfere with drugs used to treat serious conditions (i.e. if you do get into it DO NOT tell anyone to hide what they are doing from their physicians) though others can be harmful. Probably the biggest danger from much quackery is that it prevents people from getting effective medical treatment until it is too late but complementary medicine since it is done alongside effective medicine doesn't suffer from that problem very much.
About the only thing that complementary medicine actually offers any patients is a good feeling but when it comes to recovering from cancer it doesn't matter if the patient has a positive attitude or not so you wouldn't really be offering much.
If you are intested in this particular area I would suggest looking into the "Cancer Treatment Centers of America" - they offer allopathic medical treatment (in a more favorable approach) and incorperate complementary therapies into patient treatment. Best way to acheive total health is to utilize both types of medicine (they are beneficial in different ways). Another treatment you can research is the Gerson Therapy diet. This is a diet designed by Dr. Max Gerson specifically for cancer and has had a great deal of success treating patients with complementary therapies.
Regarding the recommendation of "Heal Your Body A-Z, a book by Louise L. Hay:
Louise L. Hay believes:
*Cancer is caused by "long-standing resentments", deep secrets or "grief eating away at the heart", and can be cured by "filling your life with joy".
*Lower back problems are caused by "fear of money".
*Diabetes is caused by "longing for what might have been".
*Blood problems reveal a "lack of joy in the system".
Hay claimed to be diagnosed some time ago with cancer. She decided to follow a regimen of affirmations, visualization, nutrition, and psychotherapy. Six months later, she claimed to be cancer free...
Louise Hay got her education at the Maharishi Institute, and took a "Course in Miracles".
Louise Hay's influence in real metaphysics is exactly zero, though she is a prominent New Age figure. Nothing more need be said about Hay's credibility.