Tag Archive for: cancer

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Video: Social Support Reduces the Odds of Developing Cancer

In a very famous epidemiology study, one of the most referenced of its kind because of its impressive sample size, UC Berkeley researchers Dr. Lisa Berkman and Dr. Leonard Syme studied seven thousand residents of Alameda County, California.…
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Video: Social Support Reduces the Odds of Developing Cancer

In a substantial study of three thousand breast cancer patients, all of whom were nurses, completed in 2006, researchers found that women without close friends had a mortality rate of four times that of women with a close circle of friends. In…
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Video: Openheartedness and Love Confer Health

Studies by James McKay found that people who are open and friendly to strangers had half the rate of major illnesses of those who kept a cold and distant attitude toward strangers. These “affiliator types” (people who value relationships)…
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Video: Hope Helps Kill Cancer

In a large study of oncologists, the doctors were all asked what single attribute among all the cancer patients they had ever treated, was most strongly a contributor to the patients’ recoveries from cancer. The patients had a wide variety…
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Video: State of Mind Can Improve State of Health

Norman Cousins had been an editor of the Saturday Evening Post and later went on to help UCLA start what, after his death, became known as the Norman Cousins Institute for Psychoneuroimmunology. This became one of the first centers for serious…
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Video: Mind Moves Matter

When Deepak Chopra was a young medical resident, training in endocrinology, he had a patient with widely metastasized liver cancer. As was sometimes the case fifty years ago, doctors would sometimes lie to the patient about the seriousness of…
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Self-Limiting Beliefs Limit Happiness

One of my mentors, Dr. Jeanne Achterberg once said: “No thought, no emotion, is without biochemical, electrochemical activity; and the activity leaves no cell untouched.” There is an ancient expression that is often said to someone who worries…
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Video: The Importance of Hope

When oncologists diagnose patients with cancers that carry a very high fatality rate, they need to give them hope. They can do this by focusing on the patients who got well rather than on the ones who died. For example, with cancers that carry…
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Video: Lawrence LeShan’s Cancer Patients Go Into Remission

Psychologist Lawrence LeShan spent his entire adult life practicing psychotherapy with advanced metastatic cancer patients. When he threw out the old Freudian model in which he had been trained, his patients began to unexpectedly go into remission.…