Two paths: curing and healing
There is a fundamental distinction between healing and curing cancer that lies at the heart of all genuinely patient-centered approaches to cancer treatment and care. While they often go hand in hand, they are not the same. Understanding this distinction can profoundly change how you approach your journey with cancer.
A cure is a medical outcome: the disease is eliminated, and the person returns to a normal life expectancy. It’s the goal of your medical team to remove the cancer, stop its growth, and restore physical health.
Healing, in contrast, is an inner process through which a person becomes whole. Healing can take place
At the physical level, as when a wound or broken bone heals.
At an emotional level, as when we recover from terrible childhood traumas or from a divorce or a death of a loved one.
At a mental level, as when we learn to reframe or restructure destructive ideas about ourselves and the world that we have carried.
At what some would call a spiritual level, as when we move toward God, toward a deeper connection with nature, or toward inner peace and a sense of connectedness.
Healing can happen even when a cure is not possible. It can bring peace, connection, and meaning, regardless of medical outcomes.
The power of healing
Although curing and healing are different, they are deeply entwined.
For any cure to be effective, the organism’s physical healing power must be sufficient to enable recovery to occur. When a physician sets a bone or prescribes an antibiotic for an infection, they are doing their part for recovery by offering curative therapy.
Yet when the inner healing power of the organism is insufficiently strong, the bone will not knit or the infection will not subside.
Healing is thus a necessary part of curing—a fact with profound implications for medicine, since the authentically holistic physician is deeply aware of the essential role that patients’ recuperative powers play and will do everything possible to encourage the patient to enhance them.
Healing is beyond curing
Healing, however, goes beyond curing and may take place when curing is not at issue or has proved impossible.
Although the capacity to heal physically is necessary to any successful cure, healing can also take place on deeper levels, whether or not physical recovery occurs.
I have had many friends with cancer for whom curative treatment ultimately proved impossible. Yet, even as their disease progressed, the inner healing process—emotional, mental, and spiritual—was astonishingly powerful in their own lives and in those of their families and friends.
Engaging in your own healing
You are not powerless
That you can participate in the fight for life with cancer—by working to enhance your own healing and recuperative resources—is a profoundly important discovery for many people.
People with cancer often experience themselves as losing all control of their lives, becoming passive objects of all kinds of decisions and treatments by their medical teams. Often feeling they must do what their physicians tell them and that they can do nothing to help themselves.
Often, no one has offered them the opportunity to consider the distinction between healing and curing.
Scientifically, we do not know how much difference personal efforts at healing can make in extending life. However, most psychotherapists who work with cancer know clinically that a patient engaged in personal healing work can make a transformative difference in his or her quality of life.
An ever-increasing body of scientific evidence suggests that a strong desire to live—a willingness to engage in the struggle for life—and a continuous movement toward a healthy relationship with life do help some people in their fight for physical recovery.
Conversely, long-term chronic depression, hopelessness, cynicism and similar characteristics tend to diminish resilience and increase physical vulnerability.
Facing the diagnosis
Navigating a life-threatening crisis
People facing life-or-death moments—like mountain climbers in free fall—often describe time slowing down. The survival benefit of this slowing down of time is that the falling climber has every opportunity to notice lifesaving possibilities—handholds or shrubs that might be grasped to break the fall.
But if the opportunities for active self-preservation disappear, the faller then enters a state not of panic but of deep peace. He may experience the often-reported process of life recall, with his life flashing back before his eyes. He may hear celestial music. Hitting the ground is usually experienced without pain—he only hears the impact.
By analogy, the healing response that takes place as we go into the “free fall” of a cancer diagnosis seeks every opportunity to maximize the possibilities for physical life recovery. Intelligence and intuition may be brought together in choices of treatment, hospital, doctor and of complementary therapies or the paths of self-exploration, health promotion and self-care.
The very process that maximizes the opportunities to recover also prepares us to make the best of a long life with cancer, or the best use of whatever time we have available.
Empowered in your healing
Thus, the starting point for informed choice in both conventional and complementary cancer therapies is in your recognition that you can play a crucial role in the fight for your life.
The recognition of the unique role that each of us can play in our own healing reaches beyond choices about therapy to choices about how we intend to live each day for the rest of our lives.
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Miki Scheidel is Co-founder and creative director of CancerChoices. Miki and her family were deeply affected by her father’s transformative experience with integrative approaches to metastatic kidney cancer. That experience inspires her work as president of the Scheidel Foundation, which includes the integrative cancer care portfolio, and as volunteer staff at CancerChoices. She previously worked with the US Agency for International Development and Family Health International among other roles. She received her graduate degree in international development from Georgetown University and a graduate certificate in nonprofit management from George Mason University.