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Upbeat Attitude Doesn't Affect Cancer
Reality Master 101 writes "Defying years of conventional wisdom, researchers announced that your attitude doesn't influence your outcome, and 'patients shouldn't feel pressured to stay positive'. I particularly liked the phrase, 'the tyranny of positive thinking'."
It may not save your life to think positive. But if you are skulking and depressed your final days wont be pleasant ones. Everyone, cancer or not, should do thinks that make them happy and think positively all the time. Your lifetime is limited, even if you are very healthy. Make the most of it and don't waste time by being depressed.
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If you're going to die, you might as well die happy. If I'm diagnosed with something terminal, I'm not going to spend the last days of my life sulking around. What a waste that would be..
"I'll say it again for the logic-impaired." -- Larry Wall.
This paragraph is quite telling in the real story:
" Researcher Mark Petticrew, PhD, and colleagues examined 26 studies assessing the role of psychological coping styles on cancer recurrence and survival, and concluded that none conclusively linked any one style to positive outcomes. "
They [Petticrew & colleagues] are not even talking about the results of their own study, but a study of 26 studies whose net result is that the big picture is inconclusive.
Sheesh - talk about making a mountain out of a mole hill here.
Anything you say will be held against you.
I know this is anecdotal, but... when doctors found that my mother had a second cancer, they told her when they thought it had started. It happened to be six months earlier, exactly when she had learnt that her brother had a late-stage cancer discovered and v.soon died. The fact that my brother and I spent almost every day with our mother helped her immensely to overcome grief and find the strength to go through cancer treatment, battle depression, and survive. Positive thinking, close support, and adequate medication go a long way; I'm convinced any missing part would be an obstacle to recovery/survival.
"To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." -- Tennyson
A positive outlook does correlate with a higher number of immune system T-cells, increasing resistance to most infectious diseases. (Search Google if you want a reference.) It's not surprising this doesn't help with cancer, since cancer wouldn't be a problem in the first place if the immune system actually recognized it as a problem.
For great justice.
I'm really annoyed with the faith people put in "scientific studies".
What do you suggest people put their faith in when it comes to health matters? Alternative medicine? Prayer/God? Their own gut feeling/experiences? I would argue that all these are obviously much more dubious than scientific studies when it comes to something important like your health. Granted, scientific studies are often wrong. But eventually the truth will come out. People put faith in scientific studies because (1) they are performed by intelligent, cautious people, (2) they're gonna get reviewed by other intelligent, cautious people, (3) people have seen how science has lead to incredible medical breakthroughs in the past.
Also, IMO, Science definately has *NOT* figured out what affect the human mind can have on human health, and how, regardless of this single study.
And what are you basing your opinion on? Your exhaustive search of the medical literature? Your own personal research? A chat with a medical friend over drinks? I'm guessing it's just your gut feeling. I happen to agree with you on this but I find it odd that you decry the faith people put in scientific studies and then follow that up with your own faith-based (not talking reglious here) statement.
If you want to be annoyed with something, then target your frustration at science reporting in the mainstream media. Or direct your anger at our pathetic science education system that gives most people a poor understanding of the scientific process. Don't get pissed off about the fact that people look to science for the answers to life's most vexing questions. It's not flawless but it's the best system we got.
GMD
watch this
Two separate issues entirely.
IMHO, getting old is better than dying young, all else equal.
As for "not so bad because he was old and lived a good life," there is a kernel of truth to that. I certainly hope for my kids to bury me, and would be devastated at the converse. Eventually, we're all supposed to make room for our descendents. (metaphorically as well as physically)
Getting cancer is no good, no matter how you slice it. But how you approach your end will have an effect on your loved ones after your gone. I don't think that's quite "not so bad because he was positive."
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
I was diagnosed with cancer a little over four years ago. Somehow, I managed to take a positive outlook on it. (If you'd asked me to predict my reaction beforehand, and if I'd answered honestly, I'd have predicted that I would have melted down.) I found that if I woke up in the morning committed to projecting a positive attitude, I actually started to feel it.
Where I do think it helped is getting through the discomfort and especially the chemo. I think it also made me more approachable by my friends and colleagues, and their willingness to talk and listen was a significant source of strength through that time.
Nonetheless, even as a new believer in the power of positive thinking, one of the most irritating phenomena I faced was the advice that my attitude was all-important, and the (perhaps unintended) implication that a bad outcome would be my own fault if I didn't smile.
Positive thinking is it's own reward, whether it's medically efficacious (sp?) or not. But one must be very careful about pressuring people to adopt the attitude and becoming part of the problem instead.
This is actually an important subject, as trite as it sounds, because what i think they are getting at is NOT that laughter doesn't help, but that, in the words of one survivor, "Cancer doesn't give a rat's ass whether you have a positive mental outlook."
The point isn't that people with good attitudes don't have a better chance; the point is that the general public for a very long time has been encouraged to believe that cancer is affected more by the mental than by the physical, and this leads to a lot of misconceptions about cancer. There's no question that laughter, or even the anticipation of laughter, is good for you. It boosts endorphins, it helps the immune system, but while these things may make cancer easier to deal with symptomatically, they don't address the underlying causative issues, and the implied connections encourage people to believe that you just aren't playing or praying hard enough.
The point here, of this article and the growing movement behind it, is that people feel guilty- horribly, horrendously, unnecessarily guilty- when they get sick or have to watch someone else get sick, and it's going to take a lot to make that social environment change. I volunteer time to help a group of people online who deal with chronic illnesses, and this study is of unimaginable relevance to them. It means that for once, someone in the medical community is shaking their head and saying- by the way, it's not your fault that you have cancer. You should do everything you can to stay upbeat, but the 'cure' doesn't exist yet, it's not your failure to utilise this particular 'cure' that is keeping you from being healthy.
And that's important. That's important on a lot of levels, and treatment is one of them, because when a patient knows that they don't have to fake their way into a smile every day, they can get down to processing the very real grief and loss that go with a chronic illness- and this can substantially increase their quality of life, however long that life may extend. I've had to watch people day in and day out coping with this, and feeling worse because those around them feel that they must stay cheerful in order to survive. It becomes the last defense for a lot of family members who can't otherwise deal with having someone near them sick- to blame it on the patient, to try to make sense out of it by describing it as a failing- they were sick and they just lost hope, so they didn't get better... Just as it's beginning to be recognised in the medical community that depression is a symtpom of, and not the cause of, many other illnesses. Remember when ulcers were entirely attributed to stress?
I'm all in favour of a positive mental outlook. But i'm not in favour of letting our prejudice for cheerful patients create a false image of what it takes to get through it- good cheer and optimism are only a part of the puzzle. Bad things really do happen to good people, and being a better person isn't always going to make it stop. I think this article is a good start- and i think it's true. Cancer doesn't care. We care, so we will cling to anything that we can. And miracles do happen, but not necessarily because of the reasons that we attribute them to. As we come to understand illnesses better, there may be more studies like this, just to remind people that while we hold a lOT of power to change things, we need to know where the buttons are before we can press them- and a smile apparently didn't do it for an illness like cancer.
However, i'll keep reading the funny pages and slashdot comments, because passing the funny ones along seems to at least have cheered people up. (and there are occasional ward uprisings... do you hear a sound, as of somebody playing with the wiring? um- gotta go check and see what folks are feeling energetic enough to be destroying today!!!)
"I'd say 'Have a good time,' but arson is still illegal.