As a cancer support professional – and as a cancer survivor – I won’t tell you or advise you on the best way to treat or cure cancer.
People want me to. People want me to – sometimes really badly – I think just so they can argue with me about it. This weekend, someone approached me at a Wellness Fair and asked me what treatment options I espouse and recommend. I told him it’s not my area – I do not endorse or recommend any particular treatment over another one, or try to advise or guide people towards or away from any one treatment option. I support people in whatever option they choose based on the information, values and beliefs they have.
He said he didn’t believe in chemotherapy. He told me only 5% of people who have chemotherapy survive 5 years past that treatment.
I told him that makes me about 2.15 x dead then.
He told me it must’ve been because I changed my diet. I told him I didn’t change my diet. He then stated it must’ve been because I did a “detox” after the chemo. I said I didn’t do a detox, or anything else to de my tox for that matter. And yet, here I am, 10 years later. He became quite angry. Clearly I was challenging his beliefs about chemotherapy, but not through anything I said. He was angry because I had the audacity to be sitting here talking to him 10 years after chemotherapy when in his mind I should be dead.
You’d have thought he would have been pleased I didn’t die within five years of my chemo, but he was not happy about it. You’d’ve thought he’d also be happy to know most of the people I knew who’d had chemo were still alive and kicking too more than five years later. But it was clear he was not very happy about this at all.
And I wondered what it was he valued most – the idea he had in his head of how people should be cured of cancer, or the fact people are being cured of cancer all the time, by different methods, with some of those methods being ones he doesn’t believe in, and how great it is those people are alive today?
I often have coffee with people who would like me to give out their brochures or promote their products and services to my clients, and write or speak about their particular treatment or service. I am happy to refer my clients to which ever practitioner I feel they’re best suited to, but I refuse to enter into any dialogue which condemns a particular treatment option as categorically wrong, or bad.
And I never, ever enter into discussions with people who say about a particular cancer treatment “_____ never works.”
They all work. And they all don’t work too.