Cancer: Does mindset matter?

About opening up the often mysterious world of how doctors think. The goal: to empower the listener to gain access to the best healthcare possible. Well, good day and welcome to Medicine and Health with Dr. Paul Anderson. That's me, I'm Dr. Paul, and today we are gonna do a program About mindset, but specifically around cancer. And I think the title I chose was Cancer: Does Mindset Matter? Now, there's a couple of things just for orientation, getting kind of our heads in the game. This can apply to the person who has cancer, but it also can apply to anyone who is in their sphere. So if you're a partner or spouse, a loved one, caregiver, just, you know, other family member, etc., all of this applies to anybody in that circle around. All right, sorry for those of you who were on the live feed and lost me. We just had a quick, quick changeover, but we're all back now. Those of you who weren't on the live feed don't, don't even know what happened, so we'll just, we'll just keep driving on. But anyway, this idea of mindset. So with cancer, does your mindset matter? I think it's a really important thing to think about and talk about. And it was underscored today when I got a message on, you know, now that I'm on all these social media platforms, people can message you very easily. And this person said, you know, hello, Dr. A. I am a stage 4 lung cancer survivor given only 3 months to live, but that was 4 years ago. My including— and then they— my healing included, and they listed a lot of different things that they were doing. But they said that I believe that my approach and my mindset connection were the key. And today I'm completely healthy and living a good quality of life. And they also went on to say that, you know, they, they think that not everybody believes that maybe your, your mindset and how you think about things can change things that much. Now, what was interesting was I wasn't certainly looking for comments like that, and I wasn't looking at, you know, the, uh, you know, like fishing for people to come and back up what I'm gonna try and talk about. But it was, it was a serendipitous thing to get that particular message. So I think the first thing to think about is when we start, like, okay, so why don't we start with what is mindset? Because I've listened to a lot of, uh, a lot of different people speak about a lot of different topics that relate to mindset. And sometimes the, the term mindset gets sort of an interesting or a bad rap because people will sort of extrapolate it to a lot of different ideas about what it might be, but then it's sort of the concept behind it becomes a little cumbersome and they'll— they won't draw a lot of great conclusions from that, which is okay because it's theirs to do, but I want to try and clear that up. So when we think about mindset, is, you know, is mindset— is it, you know, wishful thinking? Is it denial? Is it retreating within, retreating inside your brain and your mind? Is it pure, cold, rational assessment, sort of logical, linear thought? Does it include becoming angry and lashing out, or other emotions? Is there depression involved, etc.? Well, if you look at the definition of mindset, at least with respect to how we're talking about it today, Oxford defines it as the established set of attitudes held by someone. So it can be um, really anything. So if it's an established set of attitudes held by someone, it is whatever is going on in your mind, whatever your attitudes are that you hold on to. And I think that that is a very important thing to consider. So if where your brain is, is in this space of, uh, maybe denial or wishful thinking or retreating inside and not communicating with people, or being very rational and linear. Wherever that is, that is what your mindset is. Now, I think then the next thing to consider when you're considering mindset and cancer especially is what would be maybe a best practice way? You don't want to say right or wrong because everybody's got their own things they're working on. Everybody's got their own place that they're going to come from. But what would be a place to consider this from that might be a best practice, best ideas around the idea of mindset? Well, when you're thinking about mindset, one of the things to consider is it has the potential to have a downstream effect on your body, both certainly mentally but also physically. And so when you're thinking of that, one of the things you want to think about is, well, the mindset— your mindset then is the totality of your attitudes, your thought life, all of the things that go in to make your brain think the way that it thinks. So a best practice would be, whether it's cancer or another illness or the illness of a friend or a family member or something, would be to try and have your mindset be in a place where you have the best mixture of both rational thought and logical thinking through things, as well as realizing that you have some control and some level of empowerment that you have over the situation that you're in. And that can be easy for some people to do, very difficult to do. One of the things that is very triggering when you or a loved one has this diagnosis of cancer is it changes the entire calculus of what goes on in your mind. And so while you may tend to be in a kind of bent in a certain direction mentally and emotionally, maybe you're much more on the rational sort of straight logic end of thinking, or you're maybe, maybe more prone to say something like avoidance or depression, or maybe you're more prone to trying, you know, not to think about bad things. Whatever way your brain is, wherever your brain constitution is, you will tend to have more of that go on when you are faced with something difficult that happens, like a cancer diagnosis for yourself or a loved one. So when we look at best practices, I think a place to start is, um, well, what is normal then? What would be normal if a human being gets a diagnosis of cancer? Now, interestingly, I said human being because I mostly work with humans, uh, and those are the people that I get the most feedback from. But I— because I teach a lot around cancer, we do a lot of work with veterinarians who do work with patients, veterinary patients, so animals who have cancer. And what I've always found interesting is that I, I always wonder what, you know, what part of this may go on in the, you know, in the world of the, uh, of veterinary oncology. Um, it seems like the, the animals are a little bit easier to deal with sometimes because there's certain thoughts and concepts that they have that they don't have that we humans have that can get in the way of our progress of having a mindset that's useful. When you get a cancer diagnosis, one of the things that— a way to look at where your brain is going to go is by using the stages of grief that Elisabeth Kübler-Ross published and set forth. A lot has been done since then. Now, are these Perfect and absolute? No. Do they tend to describe the way the human brain processes something unpleasant? Yes, very much. So when we use those, it's just a form and a pathway to use, like a template to say, all right, um, everybody's going to do this a little bit differently, but generally humans are going to go through this in a particular manner. And so in the book, uh, Cancer: The Journey from Diagnosis to Empowerment, uh, which, uh, right now on drabooks.com, D-R-A-B-O-O-K-S dot com, you can go there and you can get a signed copy, uh, on sale. They'll send you a signed copy from me. But in that book, I used the Kübler-Ross idea of the stages of grief as a way for people to both see what's possible in their brain, assess where they are right now, and then look at ways to move forward. So what are those stages? Well, the first stage is denial. And one of the things about these stages is that it could go in a number of directions. You can have a stage that doesn't last very long at all, or you can have a stage that takes up all of your time between now and when you pass away. So people do it very differently. The other thing about these stages is some people are very briefly in one stage and a very long time in another stage. So denial means, oh, I don't have cancer. They must mean someone else. Okay. Now, this is not an uncommon thing at all. And I've talked about in other, you know, around other topics, sort of from a different point of view, There's kind of a different— a couple of different ways of looking at this, because denial kind of can break down into 2 types of denial. One is the sort of completely like pressing a block button on, on the cancer, and your brain doesn't even recognize it or notice it, and you are against your normal logical rational thought ignoring something. That's more of an acute thing. And then it's the chronic sort of denial where you've come to peace with the name— I have cancer, or I had cancer, or something like that— but you completely live out your life as if that doesn't have anything to do with it. Now, there might be components of denial that may be helpful in certain aspects of ways of thinking. But denial generally is not good because if you don't get past denial, you can't process any of the other things that you need to process, uh, to move towards becoming what we would consider empowered. And the reason I bring up moving towards coming to a place of empowerment is empowerment for your mindset is a place where most of the science says We are more healing, we are more connected to what helps us heal, and we can deal with whatever comes up as an empowered person. If you are a person in denial, you are not empowered and you are not able to deal with those things in that positive manner. After denial often comes bargaining. So bargaining is just what it says. It's, oh, okay, I'm not, I'm not in denial about my problem. Um, maybe there's something I can do that would make this not a part of my life. Okay, so, uh, there's the sort of infamous, uh, you know, ideas people have where they make a deal with God or they make a deal with whatever, and they say, if, if only, uh, this goes away, I'll Never do this again, or I'll always do this, or whatever. That's sort of bargaining. Now, again, like denial, bargaining goes on at a lot of different levels. Some people do a lot of bargaining, some people do very little. And again, it's one of those things that just is Going to play out based on the way that your personality is. Okay. Now, another thing that plays out is, uh, if you're reading your show notes and you have new glasses and the words jumped over, sometimes you miss a stage of grieving, which I did. So, uh, no, uh, no, uh, no diminution of bargaining, but in between denial and bargaining, usually we talk about anger. So maybe I just didn't want to look at anger or something like that. So usually it's denial, anger, and then bargaining. But anger is fairly self-explanatory. Now, there's anger I have seen with people, especially with cancer, where it's externalized and everyone around the person is made miserable. The person themselves is miserable. Then there's anger that gets internalized. Okay, this can happen with all of these, whether it is denial or, you know, bargaining or anger or whatever, can be internalized and you wouldn't know it. So you can have people who literally are triggering all of this, um, anger-based hormonal activity and neurological activity is not commensurate with healing, and, uh, they're hurting themselves, but you might not know it. The people you do know about are the ones who are really obvious, who are letting you and everybody else know just how angry they are. Now, they may not say, "I'm angry," but the way that they're acting and the way they're describing things lets you know that this is a very big problem. In the book Cancer: The Journey, I talk about two different patients that are obviously not. Correct names and everything aren't used, but they're real people. And I take you through the story of those people. Now, there's a lot of technical things and how-to in that book, but I take you through 2 people's stories just to show you kind of the 2 ends of the spectrum for these things. And the one, Bob, I call him in the book, he got stuck at anger and he never left. He was one of the most angry people I've ever seen respond to a cancer diagnosis. So you've got denial, you've got anger, you have bargaining, then you have this kind of crash of depression because usually you come full force and look at the idea that you have cancer. And you didn't want this diagnosis. Nobody else wanted you to have the diagnosis, but there it is. And when you get past those initial, okay, I'm going to deny it, I'm going to be angry about it and act out, that didn't help me, I'm going to do bargaining, and then you kind of crash, you go into this depressive state. Now, just like the other ones, depending on your underlying mental emotional constitution, you may find that if you're kind of easy, easy to depress anyway in life, that you stay in depression For a while, it could be very, very bad. And so one of the things that we'll talk about is what you do about these things. But if you're a person who becomes very angry or depressed or anything that pushes you, you know, to one way end of the spectrum or another, you want to make sure that you're getting appropriate help and you're talking about this with people. You don't want to push that inside. It will just hurt you, and you don't need that. Well, then the last stage in the Kübler-Ross sort of rubric for doing all of this is acceptance. Now, in the book Cancer: The Journey, I talk about it this way, that acceptance is really not the end when it comes to a difficult diagnosis. What you want to do is, of course, acceptance is the place after depression and everything else. But really what acceptance should lead you to is empowerment. And the reason we want the acceptance to lead you to empowerment, not simply sitting back and saying, I guess I have to accept that I have cancer— reason we want to do that is move to empowerment, is that empowerment is the place where healing can happen. And that is incredibly, incredibly important. Now, before we talk and kind of break down empowerment, because I want to spend most of the program talking about, you know, things to do and ways to cope and things like that, there's a few things that people bring up when I go through this idea that you go through these kind of similar stages of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance, and empowerment when you're dealing with the difficult diagnosis. So I've seen it with cancer, but I've certainly seen it with autoimmune And other bad chronic illnesses. So one of the things is, do people get stuck in these places? Well, like I was telling you about the story with Bob, yeah, 100%. Bob got stuck in anger, and he literally lived his whole life while he had cancer extremely angry, and he died angry. So it does happen. I've seen people get stuck in depression. Get stuck in bargaining, denial, any of those places. So you can get stuck. Now, is that good or bad? Well, ultimately everything is your choice because it's your body, it's your disease. You can do whatever you want, right? But if we— what's best practice as far as getting me, my mind, body to a place where, where healing is maximally able to happen? Then we want to think about there might be a better way than getting stuck. So in thinking about, you know, why does the mind kind of go through this? A lot of that has to do with acquisition of new information and the way that the brain works when it's faced with brand new information. So when you have acquisition of new information and your brain is working Your brain has to process it. And so the first thing that your brain might do with something that's brand new is deny it, say that I, I've not heard of this before, I'm going to say it probably doesn't exist. Okay. Now if you think about it, that's a suppressive event in your brain. It's pushing down. What happens, because you're still alive and you still have all this stuff going on, When you push down, push down, push down, is your, your inner mind is going to push back away from that suppression of denial, and you're likely to have the feelings and emotions associated with anger, rage, whether it's internal or external. And so you kind of go from this suppressive event of depression to this overexpressive event. You swing up. of anger, and then you hit kind of this middle point of kind of a rational, uh, look at, hmm, well, I've been denial about it, I've been angry about it, maybe I should do something different. And that's often where bargaining comes in, because your brain's sort of on the downswing from the anger, and it decides maybe it could do something about it. Now, uh, I certainly have heard stories of people who were in the bargaining stage and, uh, you know, they did whatever they did and they went in remission. And great, you know, if that happens, wonderful. But what usually happens is there's no big change during the bargaining phase, and so you head down again and you hit depression. So you've got denial, which is forced suppression. You've got anger, which is our reaction. You have bargaining, which is sort of on the way down from anger, something to do with that energy. And then depression is just bottoming out after all that exertion of energy. You can do this in days, you can do it in weeks, months, or as I said, some people will get stuck along the way. So I think the first thing to remember about the process is it's different for everybody, but it's also normal. And you want to normalize these things because if you're going to go through it, you don't want to beat yourself up on the way through. And say, gee, you know, I was depressed. I feel bad I was depressed about my disease. Well, you know what? You— someone told you you have cancer. There's no reason not to be depressed about that, at least for a while. No reason not to be angry about it. There's no reason not to have denial or bargaining around it. It's just that we don't want to stay there. That's the most important thing to consider. So that's kind of why your mind does it. It's this roller coaster of New information we haven't had before. We, we go through this process of learning it, getting used to it, and then on the other end, we hopefully get to acceptance and empowerment. So why is empowerment so important? That's something we want to spend a lot of time on and talk through, etc. So first off, you know, what is— what does empowerment mean? So if we go back to Oxford Dictionary, it's the process of becoming stronger and more confident, especially in controlling one's life and claiming one's rights. Oh, that's a little stronger than I thought the definition of empowerment would be. Now, obviously, there's different types of empowerment if you look it up in the dictionary, but when we're talking about a person becoming empowered, that's the definition that is intended: the process of becoming stronger, more confident, especially in controlling one's life and claiming one's rights. Hmm. So if empowerment is important, and empowerment is where healing goes on, how do we get to being empowered, and how do we claim that sort of healing that we need? Well, things to consider. There's a spectrum that you can think of. And anybody caught in any of the stages of grieving— denial, anger, bargaining, depression— any of those stages, if you're caught there, it's normal. But if you can't move out of it, you're on one end of the spectrum and empowerment is on the other end of the spectrum. So what is the caught end of the spectrum? That is victimhood. Okay, now I want to be really clear that this is not about victim blaming and saying, oh, you know, you have cancer and you need to knock it off and, you know, be empowered and You're, you're screwing up otherwise. Um, that's not what this is about. This is about the reality that you have a process your brain goes through on the way to being in acceptance and empowerment, number one. Number two, acceptance and empowerment is the place where the mind, body, and the power of the mind works to make you maximally able to heal. Okay. And number 3, if your goal is to do everything you possibly can to have maximal healing, you need to be on the empowerment end of the spectrum. Now, I said in the book a number of times, because my example of the guy Bob was the person who was a victim and he didn't want to be empowered, uh, that was Bob's choice. Bob was a real, real person. I remember looking him in the eye and talking to him about this, and, uh, he was so angry. He wanted to stay angry. He wanted to stay stuck. He did not believe anything would help him, and, uh, and he wanted to die angry, and he did. That was the way it worked. Okay, so it's your choice what you want to do, but if you're You know, for yourself as a cancer patient, or you're a loved one, a caregiver, whatever. If your goal is to do the work to move yourself through and become empowered, which is where the actual healing can begin and work, you got to do some work to get there. So I'm not victim blaming. You want to stay there, that's fine. But if you want to go to the place where you can work and things will work, Great, we need to do it. You know, it's sort of like if you're sick, let's say, you know, you will pick an easy one. Let's say you have strep throat and we diagnose you with strep throat and we set an antibiotic substance in front of you as a prescription and say, take this and your strep throat will not be a problem for you anymore. You have the choice to take the prescription or leave it alone. Totally your choice. But if you want to do things that are the most in line with killing the strep and getting you over the strep throat, then you need to do whatever your doctor has said is most important to deal with the strep. And so it's not about blaming or victimizing people, etc. It's about just being realistic about the way healing works and the way these processes work. Now I've had people at this point say, yeah, yeah, yeah, but you know, you can't just say, well, mindset is everything, quote unquote, and all this stuff, because you know you're misleading people and people are getting confused, all this stuff. Of course, nothing is everything. Okay, so just by talking about mindset and talking about empowerment doesn't mean that there aren't a lot of other things going on in your life when you have something like cancer. They're all very real too. The reason I'm talking about all these things specifically in this way is all those other real things, whether it's surgery or biopsies or blood tests or chemotherapy or integrative therapies or naturopathic therapies, radiation, or whatever else it is that you're doing in your whole life, your diet and your exercise and all this, those are all very real too. They play a role if they're part of what you're doing. Whatever you're doing plays a role. But being empowered in your mindset play an equal role. And so this usually brings us to the follow-up question there, which is, well, okay, so I get it. You're not saying, you know, mindset's the only thing you have to think about. You're saying it's an important thing and it's equal to other stuff you're doing. Maybe. Okay, I'll buy that. But is there any proof of that? Is there any science that says it actually makes a difference? Your being able— your mindset and your empowerment, etc. Now, I will not— number one, it would be— it would get super boring if I were to pick this book up and start reading out of it to you, so I will not. As you can see, this is, this is a quick read. It's 130 pages or something. It's written so anybody with, you know, a 5th grade reading level can read it, understand it easily. It's got a lot of good tips and tricks and focusing things and helping you navigate. But one of the things I did in it, um, was to dig into some of the research around the mind-body connection and cancer mindset, uh, empowerment, etc. And so if you want to look— and I didn't overburden— the book could be twice as big if I put lots of references in. I didn't over the book with references because it's not a textbook about The, the, the battle for the mind in cancer. But it's, it's written to help you or your loved ones deal with this and process through it. So I put in some vignettes of recent research from peer-reviewed medical research, scientific research, about the mind and about mindset and about outcomes in cancer. And so if you look through the book again, I'm not going to like list them here or any of that because they're in the book. Um, there's a progression of the way that I talk about this research. One thing is that there's definitely research that shows that assessing a person who has cancer on the area, or the axis, if you will, of their mental-emotional state is as critical as assessing their nutritional status. their tumor markers, uh, all of the other things. Because where the mind goes, uh, the body will like to follow. And so there's research that says, you know, number one, we cannot segregate the mental and emotional place that this person is in from their physical place and all that we divide that up into when they have cancer. But then the next things around empowerment, especially if you look at empowerment research, is empowerment can help some very linear things. One that's very important in advanced cancer— it's important always, but it's more common in advanced cancer— is pain management. People who are So meaning they've gone through those stages of grieving their diagnosis and they're not only accepting it, but they're empowered. They're not a victim. Those people have better pain management, better control of their pain, simply by having that difference of being empowered versus being victimized. They have no less cancer, they have no less pain, but the management of their pain improves. There's other things in research that are shown, mentioned in the book, and there's other research I didn't put in the book where outcomes of certain other therapies are improved when you have an empowered patient group, empowered patients. If you think about it and you're looking at that definition, the process of becoming stronger and more confident, especially in controlling one's life and claiming one's rights. That's what empowerment is about. So if you're coming from that place and you're dealing, you know, physically and medically with things that are going on, then you could imagine if the mind is empowered, you're going to have a lot more ability for the physical and medical things that you're doing to go into fertile soil, to go into a body that's going to do something with them. The other thing that has improved overall, if we look more broadly, is quality of life is better when you are an empowered person. Part of that is because you're not in the victimized category and your brain is not victimized, so you're not looking at the world through that victim lens. But also, empowerment is hard to get to. It's a process to step into. And by doing that, you actually build kind of some new— you could call it building some new mental-emotional muscles by which you're dealing with these things. And you are able then to move forward. You're able to do things, and your quality of life is not diminished as much by the fact that you have a disease that you didn't want. And not as much in the book, but there is emerging research to show that, you know, empowerment probably over time will show better not just quality of life but also length of life. Now, that person that I read earlier who sent me that message about, you know, how they were supposed to live for months and they're alive 4 years later with a very nasty type of cancer, they said, well, epigenetics do matter. Okay, now that is very important because yes, they do. So the first thing you want to think about is genetics, as we talk about, are our code. We all have a set of code, a lot of code, but epigenetics are what affects the code. Epigenetics literally can turn on and turn off pieces of code and make it work better or make it work worse. Epigenetics include things such as the, the way we are physically treated, the nutrition that we have, our overall ability to sleep and rest and do all these things. our mental-emotional status, our lack of toxins, all of these things. So epigenetics become very, very important because they're literally the signals that go in and tell the code how to express. So for example, you can have a very, very high propensity gene set like the BRCA gene set that codes for cancer, especially breast cancer. A very high percentage of people with BRCA positive that have breast cancer. But then you look and there's, you know, 40% of people with BRCA don't ever develop breast cancer. Well, part of that is those genes turned on and off differently in different people. Now, We are— we know through experimentation that all these things can happen, and we are now getting to the place where we're able to actually measure epigenetic signals. It's not quite something you would go and, you know, get readily from your local doctor or something, but that's kind of where things are going, where you can see if I do an intervention with somebody. We know what their gene code is, that's not going to change, but can I flip the epigenetic switches over to a more healthy set of switching? So we know that that happens. Now we're able to get down and more specifically look at how those things are working. So epigenetics become very important. Now, one of the things I was very proud to have is, uh, Dr. Bruce Lipton, the author of The Biology of Belief, all about epigenetics. He's written a number of other books since then. He wrote the foreword to the book, and he talks a lot about that in the front end of the book. Now, as we look here in the second half of the program, I really want to just talk about this idea of becoming empowered and why it is so important. For the— to start, It's a judgment. You do whatever you want, but I believe it matters, and I believe being an empowered patient matters more than almost anything else you do physically with your body. One of the reasons it matters, though, is that that trip from denial, anger, bargaining, you know, on and on and on That trip is a tough road. It is not a road that the human mind wants to go down. And so when you become and you get to the side of being empowered, you, you've earned it. It didn't just fall in your lap. Empowerment doesn't fall in your lap. And so part of the power of being empowered is the fact that you have done the work to go through the normal human process. Remember that up Up and downswing, up and downswing I talked about, to become empowered. And that turns your mind and your mind-body connection into an extremely potent therapeutic agent for you. So it certainly matters. It matters that you go through the hard work of getting through those stages. The whole book is about the hard work of getting through those stages and Helping to guide you through there, to get you through. But it not only matters, but you need to remember that it's specific to you. So something being specific to you is a very good thing, because when things are individualized and we really own them, they work better. Okay. We see this in medicine, especially in chronic illness. You get 5 people, all who have lupus, for example, chronic illness, or 5 people, all who have breast cancer. And while there may be similar things to their treatment between those 5 people, there will be 5 individualized treatment plans if the treatment plans are well thought out, because what one person needs in one area may be a little less than what their neighbor needs. And their neighbor might need more in a totally separate area. And so it's super important to remember that it matters globally. It matters that your mind does get to this place, the hard work of becoming empowered, but it also matters that it's specific to you. Now, I mentioned that one of the specific things that we go through in this whole process Is not everybody is in denial very long. Okay, I've literally seen people where denial was very, very brief. It's sort of a normal thing. You get hit with a really bad situation and your brain wants to deny it. Okay, I often think of— You're in a medical situation, whether it's a hospital or a clinic or something. And the person in front of you who was very healthy, everything's going great, and they suddenly have a medical emergency. You were not planning on that medical emergency happening. And, uh, and I, I've attended a lot of— I've worked in emergency room for a fair amount of time, and I've attended a lot of medical emergencies in offices and also on airplanes and other things. And, you know, part of it is you're, you're not really expecting for something really bad to happen. So the emergency is sort of the analog to being diagnosed with something bad, although the emergency is usually much less of an issue for you. But every time I've seen that, the very first thought that goes through my mind is, maybe that's not happening, or maybe it's not as bad as I thought it was. Now, if you're trained to respond to emergencies, you realize this, and that thought doesn't Stay with you very long because they just go right into whatever you're supposed to do. But even in the mind of, you know, people who are trained, uh, to respond to things that are new and your brain hasn't had a chance to get used to it yet, you still have that moment where it's like, gosh, wish that wasn't going on, or that might not be happening, or whatever. So you might go through denial, and it may be a while. You might also be like, oh, okay, I didn't want it to be true, but it's true. But then you might go really quickly through denial and then be very angry, like Bob in the book. Or you might be really depressed. You might be, you know, just kind of stuck in this loop of bargaining. Seen that with people. The important thing is it's specific to you. So that sort of, you know, denial pressing it down, downswing, and then anger upswing, you know, and bargaining, and then depression, you know, up, down, up, down. You're going to do that. You might be up longer than you're down, you might be down longer than you're up, but you're going to do it. The important thing is that you do it. Because when you do it, you build those internal mental pathways and those mental-emotional muscles, so to speak, to get to not only accepting but being an empowered person. So again, an empowered person is becoming stronger and more confident, especially controlling your life and claiming your rights. So it's not about ignoring things, it's not about liking it, it's about becoming stronger becoming more encompassing in claiming your rights. You are now in charge. I've met very few people who thought cancer— their cancer was a great thing. Oh, that was wonderful, right? You know, I had some patients who were super philosophical about things, and they felt that their cancer was teaching them things and all of this. But, you know, most people, it's like, if I gave you the choice of cancer or no cancer, they would have picked no cancer. Right, so you don't have to like that. You don't have to like a diagnosis. You have to be realistic about it. But being realistic is not being cold and hard and calculating and saying, well, I've got a 22% chance of any therapy working, and that means I've got this big, bigger chance it's not going to work and I'm going to die. You know, yes, those are numbers. Yes, they're germane to numbers. But being empowered is saying all of that is just data, all of that is just what I see, how I deal with things, and the numbers are a way to keep track and keep score. What happens inside of me is largely up to me. And an empowered person is going to be able to be on top of these issues as opposed to, you know, being a victim of them. And when I say victim, I don't— you know, it's not good or bad. It's just when you're stuck in those stages and you can't get out, you're victimized and you can't be empowered. You only have kind of 2 choices. So it is your journey. It's specific to you, and you need to own it. And if you don't want to do it, own that too. Do whatever you want to do. Okay, it's you. It's your body. So I want to spend the last section here talking about, uh, these 6, uh, things in the book. We call them the 6 OKs. So it's OK to— and, um, throughout the book, I describe in each chapter ways to move from each stage. And if you tend to get stuck in areas like bargaining or denial or whatever, you give you some tips on how to move through. In the book also, I give some tips and insight around just the process of when do I get help? What kind of help do I get? Who's going to help me? Who should I talk to? Should I tell my oncologist or who do I bring into all of this? But one of the helpful hints areas in the book is this place with the 6 OKs. So I want to go through those. So the first is, it's OK, it's a process. We know that we're all going to go through it, some slower, some faster, whatever, but we're all going to go through it. And you don't get to be empowered where you're adding not only knowledge and competence, but power and all of that stuff to you Until you go through all this stuff. So the process is the way to, to becoming empowered, which is what you're after. So the fact that it's a process is something you want to embrace. Now, there are other examples— there's thousands of examples in health and medicine of processes that we can either ignore or we can Embrace, right? Um, one of them, and there's sort of a little analogy here, is if you, you know, if you injure yourself, or for some reason you were ill for a long time and now you've regained your physical health, but either through injury or, or inactivity, you now need to rehabilitate your body. Okay, well, rehabilitation is a process not unlike going through these stages of grief and becoming empowered. And you need to look at it and understand you cannot go from where you are right now, post-injury for example, and go right to the level of physical activity that you had before your injury or when you were 18 or something. It doesn't work that way. You may in fact have to do very rudimentary things and some baby steps before you get up to this place where, uh, you regain the healing, you regain your conditioning, all of those things. So the process has to be accepted or you're never going to do it. But part of accepting the process is accepting the idea that You are going to have to go through these stages, and it's going to suck. It's going to really— it's going to maybe hurt for a while. It's, it's going to be, you know, it's going to drain your energy. You're not going to have any stamina. It's going to be very bad in the beginning. But you can move past that. And you know that the process is it might be bad in the beginning, you might have to do baby steps, but now You're going to be moving into an area of actual, you know, healing and reconditioning and all of that. If you go into it, you know, post-injury and you realize you got to rehab, you know, your leg or your whole body or your heart or something, and you go into it and you think, oh well, a day or two ought to be right back, you know, doing everything I used to do before, you're gonna— have a very, uh, quick comeuppance with reality that's going to say, no, this is a process. So the fact that it's a process is important. But especially with this process in cancer or any chronic illness, you want to remember it's okay to go at your own pace. Going at your own pace means not only can it take longer, you know, in an area, but also It's your life. It's your process you're going through. You decide how quickly and how much and what and when and where you want to do. Now, obviously, your goal is to get through it and move to this place where you build those empowerment muscles, because that's where the benefits of healing come in. But you're— you decide the speed. Because maybe you're at a place in your journey where you are so tired and brain fogged and worn out because of medicine you're on, or you just finished radiation or chemo, or you're, or, you know, you're really, you know, beat down from the metabolic effects of the cancer or whatever. And so you might be in a place where you can only do a little bit. Every day to move forward. Or you might be like a lot of people where they're in a position where they physically have a lot of capacity, and they're like, I'm gonna put a lot of effort into this every day because I do want to get my mind-body situation under control. Now, it's also okay. The third, it's okay. So it's okay, it's a process. It's okay to go at your own pace. It's okay to take longer in one area than another. In fact, you would not be human if you were the same in each area. Okay, now, um, one of the things that is a reality with processes, especially when they're human processes and you're working on your mental-emotional set, is you may believe That okay, it might take longer and shorter in some areas, but you may underestimate how long it's going to take in each area. And that's very human. That's a very common thing that happens. It's called human nature. But I've seen and worked with and talked to a lot of people who have said, "Well, you know, gosh, I I work through it all." But you know, I thought, man, I'm going to knock this out in a. week, and I'll be all better and empowered. And here it is 3 months later, and I'm still kind of fighting with some of this stuff. Well, that's, that's reality, man. That's the way it is. But everybody has their places they're stronger, and everyone has places they need more support. So for example, as I mentioned, if you tend to have a depressive constitution And you get to the depression stage and you haven't really prepared for that, it's— I was saying it's sort of like a downswing. It might be a really big downswing for you, may not go well, right? So it's something to consider. This is something to think about. You might tend to get angry, and you may have a lot of things to deal with that are anger-based. That's fine, just don't stay there. Right? So you may have no denial, but you might go right into anger and boom. Or I've seen people that, you know, they suppress their anger, they get to bargaining, and they go into these bargaining loops where, you know, it's, it's great to ask for things from, you know, where your higher source or God or the universe, whatever it is you do, but, uh, they get in these loops where they exclude all other thought and reason, uh, just trying to make deals that may or may not go on, right? So everybody has places that they can stick. Now, people don't like the places they stick because those are the areas that we usually need the most help in. So if you are an anger person, you're stuck there, your denial or bargaining, um, or depression, those are areas you might want to— in fact, I would strongly recommend, get professional help. We talk about this in the book— when, who, where, how— but those are areas where you really, you, you need sometimes that objective observer, uh, or some professional or some program or some plan to help you move out of that stage. And here's the thing, whether it's a cancer diagnosis or a diagnosis of autoimmunity or some other life-changing diagnosis, the place you're going to get stuck in this trip from, you know, denial to anger to bargaining to depression, etc., is going to be the place you've already needed help in. It's just this new diagnosis is going to push on it really hard, and that can be so uncomfortable that you can need outside help to help you with that. Usually you will know because it's the area that either you pretend that you're beyond and better and then it blows up, or it's the thing that you suppress the most, or whatever. You'll, you'll figure that out as you go along. Well, it's also okay to go back and relive a stage or 2 or 3. So you can get to the end and you can kind of get your first notch into empowerment, and then you might slip back into anger again. That's all right. It's just your brain and your body saying, we've got this to process through. There's more to deal with here. A lot of times you have, you know, deep issues in an area, whatever they are, uh, they don't all bubble up and clear out at the same time. Sometimes you clear out a layer, you get over, you become empowered. Now you're empowered to deal with a little bit more there, or a new thing might come up. You, you, you might slip into a real Real bad denial, whatever it is. Okay, it's okay to go back. Doesn't mean you're not there. It means now you're a little bit empowered. So now you're empowered to work on that stuff and keep going. It's also to be super real. Okay to have bad days, right? Everybody has bad days. When you have cancer, you have a propensity to have more bad days, and some of that it can be the cancer, but. be the other stuff happening too. It can be the people around you. It can be the treatments you're having. It can be the metabolic effect the cancer's having on your body. It can be all kinds of things. It's okay to have bad days and just put it on pause. It also doesn't mean you've lost. This is a game you keep playing and you never lose until you leave this earth. As long as you're working towards empowerment, even if you're recycling and doing stuff over, You still are empowered. You still got a leg up and notch up. And the final it's okay is it's, it's okay to want to give up. You would not be human if you were not trying to face all of this and not have the thought that it would be better just to forget all this. Okay. Now, as I said in the book, and I said earlier in the podcast, that is fine. It's, it's your decision. Most of the time, if you have a bad day or you want to give up— a lot of times those go together— the best thing is just take, take a day off and just, just do something else. Let go. And often when you return back to the work you're doing, it'll make more sense, and you might even realize something you didn't before. Having a bad day and wanting to give up is very normal. It is being human. But also sometimes it's when you're about to have some kind of a breakthrough in an area. And the reason that your brain wants to give up and have a real bad day is that that thing that you've been trying to have a breakthrough around is right at the edge trying to go through. So all of this to say, if you choose to go through the process, you want to know that there is a process. You want to know what's in the process. You want to know it's a normal part of human neurobiology to do all of this. And you also want to know that the movement and the ever-evolving movement towards being empowered and literally becoming stronger and more confident. In controlling your life and claiming your rights. That's empowerment. That is the place where healing can come from. The mind-body healing, the epigenetic changes that happen from that, all the other good things we taught in the science we talked about come from that basis of empowerment. I'm Dr. Paul Anderson. I just want to say You can do it. It is possible. Cancer or any other diagnosis. If you want a resource, Cancer: The Journey from Diagnosis to Empowerment, you can go to drabooks.com. Drabooks.com. The book's on sale right now. Get a signed copy and check it out. It's also available as Kindle, e-readers, audiobook, etc. But it is time now for us to end and get on to the next radio program. Dr. Paul Anderson and Medicine Health with Dr. Paul, and I'll see you all next week. Thanks.