So you got cancer.  After assimilating the new situation you decide to learn more about your disease. You ask your doctor and other experts, discuss it with friends, read books, and surf the internet. The more you read, the greater the confusion. Even  experts speak in many voices. You turn to alternative treatments, meet healers, and shamans, yet the doubt does not diminish. Why does the picture become blurred?

The answer seems paradoxical: Their cancer differs from yours. Even renown experts do not experience  your cancer as you do, and leave many of your questions unanswered.

Painless disease

It starts with the swelling  in your breast. Before detecting it, you felt healthy, and planned your next vacation. Now you are alarmed, and rush to your doctor. He tells you that you are ill. Before detecting the swelling you felt good and healthy. Now you are alarmed, but feel healthy. Can't you trust your feelings anymore? Your doctor reassures you, that your body deceives you.

You remember a similar swelling in your buttock. A painful remainder from your last skiing holiday. Your doctor advised you to leave it in peace since it will heal by itself. You wonder, why doesn't he advise you to do  so with your swelling in the breast? It does not disturb you, nor does it hurt. Later on in your investigation you will discover that cancer starts as a painless disease. Usually, pain and discomfort drive the patient to the doctor. Only a 'dis-eased' patient seeks medical help. Apparently no 'dis-ease' accompanies your swelling.  Why is it so?

His gentle hand examines the swelling and he advises to remove it, otherwise it will grow, spread into remote organs and kill you. You ask why not wait and observe how it behaves? Perhaps it might stop growing. Never! says the doctor emphatically. You mention that you have friends who  for years live with cancer in peace. Why should I be different? Since they were lucky, is the answer. How can you be so sure that I am unlucky?

Evil Disease

You observe the swelling  and feel somewhat attracted to it. Somehow it is your own creation, why should it be so dangerous? It feels like a new organ which is growing  in your breast, does it have a purpose like other organs do? Your doctor is alarmed: What a nonsense. The tumor is not your creation. It started as a mistake. A random mutation in your genes created this little monster, and unless  removed it will encroach on your body and kill you.

Monster? While surfing in the internet you met the renown physician Galen, who lived in the second century AD in Rome, and said: Nothing is done by Nature in vain. He was wrong! says your doctor, He was only a Placebo-Healer. Somehow you cannot accept this verdict. Galen, one of the greatest physicians of all times was a placebo-healer?

Shin-Ichiro Terayama

You stumbled upon the story of Shin-Ichiro Terayama, now President, Terayama Consultants Holistic Management. Initially he was a successful and workaholic physicist. One day he got kidney cancer. His doctors withheld the diagnosis from him and removed his kidney. Soon after surgery, the disease spread into his lungs. Before advising him to get chemotherapy, the doctors reveled to him his condition. Terayama was terrified,  fled from the hospital, and found refuge in a Japanese garden where he spent some days, contemplating his condition. Finally he realized that the tumor was the creation of his body. An integral part of himself and as such it should be loved. From then and on he embraced his cancer with love and it disappeared. He now teaches  how to love your cancer. I dedicated to this remarkable man a poem in Hebrew.

You proceed with the treatments advised by your doctor and notice another remarkable aspect of cancer. Your doctor implies that you are unable to resist it. In all other conditions the doctor proposes ways how to strengthen yourself: For diabetes he suggests a diet, or exercise for strengthening your ailing heart. Only in cancer he does not have any suggestion, and after the treatment is over, he says: Now since you are cured, just forget that you had cancer. And what shall I do if it returns? You ask anxiously. Can't I prevent its return? What about a diet or exercise?  The doctor answers calmly: Why bother? Let's cross the river upon reaching it.

Balance

Apparently you are at mercy of your doctors, and if they fail you are doomed. Is it really so? Galen said. . "So the body is most healthy when it has these elements in balanced proportion to each other"  The body maintains a balance with any disease as well as cancer.  When cancer progresses, the balance is tipped in its favor, and by strengthening the body it may be tipped in your favor. You rush with your discovery to your doctor, and he responds with a blank face. Yet balance is a key concept of many alternative healers.  Why not ask them about it?

You stumbled upon the tip of an iceberg concealing a vital facet of life, balance. An important treatment dimension, which is ignored by medicine and was adopted by alternative healers. This ignorance is new to medicine. The balance concept guided physicians in ancient times, and was abandoned since by modern medicine, which regards the body as a sophisticated machine which does not have to be balanced. After all you would not attempt to balance your car engine (except for its wheels). This ignorance explains why your doctor regards your organism as helpless, and implies that your time is running out. Yet if properly balanced you might regain some lost time.

Cancer Research

Suddenly you realize that with all his expertise and good will your doctor does not know how to balance, and you have to find it out by yourself. You have to study your own cancer, and find out how to balance it. You are now a cancer researcher with one aim: To balance! Now you understand also why their cancer differs from yours. Their cancer is unbalanced.

You wish that your cancer be cured  and follow the advice of your doctor.  Yet when treatment fails and his advises are exhausted, you may still balance. Although you can't get rid of the cancer, you may slow down its progression. This is what balancing is about. Prolonging remission, or figuratively speaking, putting your cancer to sleep.  But why wait until treatment fails? Start balancing from the very beginning. You interleave balancing between traditional treatments. You may start even earlier. Suppose that your family is cancer prone and you carry the BRCA gene, why wait until a swelling appears. Start balancing now!

From now on you visit doctors and healers, check their ways of balancing, and test them on yourself. You proceed from healer to healer like a bee flying from flower to flower collecting only  tasty nectar. You apply only treatments which make you feel better, otherwise continue to the next flower.  Remember, your mission is to put your cancer to sleep!