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Page 194
Although the doctors were planning to start chemotherapy in two weeks  at the start of the new year  Russell had surmised from reading the scant treatment literature that chemotherapy is rarely effective for tumors in the liver. After his last CAT scan, he felt he had a decision to make  he could either go home and get ready to die, or he could take this time to change everything in his life that could possibly need changing. Russell did the latter. In the following pages, he relates what he experienced as a frightened cancer patient trying to understand the world of nontraditional therapies.

In the healing literature, I (Russell) found many different holistic and imaginative paths offering promising treatments for cancer. Some researchers described remarkable cures from the use of Laetrile from apricot pits. There were opportunities for coffee enemas in Mexico, and a healing retreat in the Alps run by the followers of Rudolph Steiner, where the doctors played string quartets for the patients after dinner. A highly regarded healing center in Texas was operated by Dr. Carl Simonton, who reported many remarkable cures of patients who took an active part in their healing through the use of self-healing visualizations. 5
In California, the Commonweal Foundation offered a variety of supportive and nurturing therapies.6 There was also the healing imagery approach of Jean Achterberg.7 One that seemed the most appealing to me had the patient mentally picture the bad cancer cells being consumed by the good white blood cells. From the patient's point of view, the good news was that each of these approaches offered a few examples of people with very advanced cancer who followed these procedures and were cured. From the scientists' point of view, the bad news was that not a single one of these healing modalities supplied any statistics describing what fraction of the very sick people who were treated actually survived. It looked as though coffee enemas, string quartets, and visualization could each claim a few astonishing cures, but the odds didn't look very good. Given the choice, as I sat in my easychair surrounded by books, I thought that I would go with the string quartets. I've always loved Mozart.

 
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