The guiding principle of mind/body medicine (specifically psychooncology) is that the individual, not the disease, is at the heart of the treatment. Healthcare delivery has often devalued the importance of keeping the person, at the center of the diagnostic and treatment process.

Your beliefs and attitudes are the most protective factor that you have against cancer. This is important to understand as your consciousness represents the upstream informational template that drives all of the other downstream regulatory biochemical and genetic mechanisms that suppress tumor growth and keep the body in a healthy balanced state.

The speed of healing, including spontaneous remission, correlates strongest with a person’s beliefs and attitudes — more than their specific diagnosis and treatment (whether it be traditional or alternatively based).

This is what is not understood by the majority of people in the country, and scientifically impacts the cure rate nationally and globally.

There are two distinct ways of looking at cancer, and from those ways two distinct and separate solutions to treating it emerge.

Physicians in traditional medicine view cancer as a local disease, in which a generalized illness follows.

Professionals involved in functional or biological medicine and alternative medicine view cancer as a generalized disease of the body. First comes the illness, and only afterwards the tumor.

Through the centuries, according to the late Joseph Issels, M.D. — a German doctor considered by many to be the “father” of integrative medicine — many physicians saw cancer as a complex disorder of regulation, metabolism, and central nervous system disturbance. They also saw it as an inability of the body to eliminate the toxins, which constantly accumulate, and in general agreed that cancer was caused by systemic disease.

Dr. Issels, who had remarkable success rates, thought the “Whole Body” therapies, which include mind-body medicine, offered true causal treatment for every malignancy, and actually offered a strategic mode that can be applied to the prevention of cancer.

Although there are different theories about how the mind and emotions are exactly connected to cancer, researchers agree on one point: The mind is very powerful in the recovery process.

In fact, healing seems to accelerate when the patient makes the decision to get well.