Creating a Healing Environment at a glance
Our physical environments bring us in contact with many exposures every day. What we eat and drink, touch, or breathe in can affect our bodies and our health. Our environment connects to cancer in both positive and harmful ways.
Nature includes beneficial exposures such as many plants and animals, air, water, and daytime light, but also harmful exposures such as some natural chemicals, viruses, smoke, and radiation.
Human-manufactured chemicals, bright light at night, and additional sources of radiation have brought further harmful exposures into our lives, sometimes polluting the food, air, and water we depend on.
In brief:
- Exposures to nature can be helpful with both your body terrainthe internal conditions of your body, including nutritional status, fitness, blood sugar balance, hormone balance, inflammation and more and some symptoms common among people with cancer.
- Light—both the timing and the quality of light—may impact your hormone balance, especially sleep-regulating hormones.
- Ionizing radiation—from the sun and tanning beds, from medical imaging or radiation therapy, and from radioactive materials—is strongly linked to higher risk of many cancer types.
- Many chemicals and a few other substances are also linked to higher risk of some cancer types.
- Nighttime work shows mixed links to cancer, with higher risk of some cancers but lower risk of others.
- Pleasant sounds can be calming and promote healing, while noise shows limited evidence of a link to anxiety.
- A few microorganisms—viruses and bacteria, some of which are common among people—cause several types of cancer.
Evidence related to each of these exposures is in How can Creating a Healing Environment help you? What the research says ›
You can take steps to increase beneficial exposures and minimize harmful ones. Receiving a cancer diagnosis doesn’t mean it’s too late to remove harmful substances and exposures from your surroundings. In fact, your body’s natural abilities to heal will be enhanced by removing exposures that have these negative effects:
- Harm your immune system
- Disrupt your hormone balance
- Increase your stress response
- Disrupt your sleep
- Contribute to symptoms and side effects of cancer and treatments
Increasing health-promoting exposures will further enable your body’s optimal functioning. Creating a (more) healing environment for yourself is a step you can take to promote your healing and wellness. See Making changes in your environment ›
Words of guidance
Read some words of inspiration and guidance from Michael Lerner, CancerChoices co-founder and author of Choices in Healing.