By Rachel Naomi Remen — 1999
“Even when disease cannot be cured, there is often a way to use this difficult experience to know more intimately the value and purpose of your life.”
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CLEAR ALL
For the first time in forever, Nathan Adrian truly has no idea if he’ll have a strong swim Friday. And at this point, it doesn’t really matter to the five-time Olympic gold medalist. He’s simply elated to be back.
‘Skin cancer worked its way into my lymph nodes. I was devastated.’
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When you discuss a complementary therapy with your health care team and they agree that it is safe to try as part of your overall cancer care, this is called “integrative medicine.”
To understand the minds of individual cancers, we are learning to mix and match these two kinds of learning — the standard and the idiosyncratic — in unusual and creative ways.
A cancer diagnosis brings a wealth of psychological challenges. In fact, adults living with cancer have a six-time higher risk for psychological disability than those not living with cancer.
I need to slowly add the important things back into my life.
It wasn’t until I was awakened early one morning by a phone call from my urologist who informed me that I had prostate cancer that I started to panic. It took me a few seconds to comprehend what he was saying. He then ticked off a list of things I had to do.
An added component of cancer treatment is discovering what is most meaningful in the patient’s life and using that to buoy them during difficult moments. That, in a nutshell, is the psychiatrist's role.
Most genetic studies completely ignore the science of epigenetics, which is how the environment actually turns certain genes on or off.
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Frankl’s thesis echoes those of many sages, from Buddhists to Stoics to his 20th century Existentialist contemporaries: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”