My Comments on a New Cancer Treatment (Tumor Treating Fields)
The topic of cancer is quite broad, and there are many areas to discuss from a Heilkunst perspective. In this blog post, I would like to make a few comments about this presentation made at a TEDMED conference about a new cancer treatment protocol, ‘Tumor Treating Fields”.
As I wrote recently, there is an urgent need for a truly integrative system of medicine that intelligently brings different health care modalities together to work towards commonly defined goals of health which are focussed on the patient rather than on winning the ‘turf wars’ between the different modalities (with the biggest war occurring between conventional and alternative medicines).
Conventional medicine claims a monopoly over cancer diagnosis and treatment, and this is an unfortunate barrier to establishing a more successful system for patient survival and quality of life. The type of discovery presented in this TEDMED talk is quite promising, at least along the lines of providing a better quality of life for patients (as it creates little to no side effects), but needs to be further contextualized within a broader understanding of what cancer is in the first place.
This new method of ‘Tumor Treating Fields’ is non-invasive (in sharp contrast to the big three modalities of surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy), and without side effects. This point alone is a great achievement in terms of the “miracles” of modern medical technologies, and is worthy of further development and integration into health care of cancer patients.
This is where this, and any, cancer treatment modalities (both conventional and alternative), need to be further understood within the context of the principles of Heilkunst in general, and its understanding of cancer in particular. The key point to start with, is that the conventional diagnosis of ‘cancer’ is only referring to the existence of cancer cells or tumors. The cancer cell or tumor is not the cancer disease, but rather only the manifestation of it. This is why the story in cancer that is heard so often is of cancer returning some time after the apparently successful treatment with whichever modality. The conventional definition of whether cancer was cured, or not, is reduced to a statistical definition of “no recurrence within 5 years of treatment”. Statistics, while interesting, are not able to define essential issues of health, disease, or cure.
The fundamental disease of cancer is both diagnosable and treatable even in the absence of any physical manifestations of tumors within the Heilkunst framework. All diseases, including cancer, fundamentally originate in a diseased state of mind, which will result in physical symptoms developing over time. Whichever method of cancer treatment succeeds in eliminating a cancerous tumor has not succeeded in curing the root disease of cancer, until this deeper state of mind has been reverted to a healthy state of mind. I certainly endorse the exploration and use of any treatment modalities for cancer tumors, such as this new “Tumor Treating Field” technology, but only within an enlarged context of a treatment philosophy which understands this deeper structural aspect of the disease of cancer as distinct from the physical symptoms.
This is the starting point for how we help cancer patients with Heilkunst at whichever level they would like — whether they are choosing to use Heilkunst in conjunction with conventional treatments, or if they have decided that they only wish to use natural medicine, the same underlying philosophy of treating the deeper structure of cancer is applied towards the goal of cure. Quality of life and longevity are some of the highest goals to strive for in cancer treatment, and this deeper structural understanding of the disease of cancer is the surest context to do this in, regardless of which modalities are chosen by an individual cancer patient.