Stress Reduction for Cancer Patients – Blowing Bubbles

Breast cancer confronts women with the most profound issues of vulnerability and womanhood. From the moment they receive their diagnosis, women are terrorized on the deepest level with the prospect of losing their breasts to the surgeon’s knife. This is just the beginning of many justified fears that arise when women surrender themselves and their precious breasts to orthodox oncologists. This is of course what every single human being suffers when given the cancer diagnosis independent of what type of cancer it is.

Dr. Daemond Jones wrote, “If there is one word that might sum up the overall feeling of dealing with breast cancer, it is ‘uncertainty’. There is uncertainty about what treatment is the best, how am I going to handle the finances, how is my body image going to change, will I ever get better? Uncertainty adds another level of stress to an already difficult situation. Some signs of stress are sleep problems, weakness and fatigue, body aches and pain, headaches, anxiety, and irritability. Finding ways to deal with the added emotional stress is important for keeping your spirits high during the process.”

Translated—when that doctor hands you that diagnosis and does little to nothing to help you handle these feelings he is allowing the cancer to explode and proliferate because the stress feeds the fire of inflammation, tumor growth and metastases. Bone and lung metastases are responsible for the majority of deaths in patients with breast cancer so it is critical to get stress under control. From the first day we need to pay attention to emotional and psychosocial factors because intense stress shortens the time to recurrence and death.

For addressing harmful stress, I want to talk about a breathing device that was originally designed for asthma sufferers. It will calm a person right down, bring stress hormones under control, and thus provide a new form of treatment for stress that will be highly beneficial for a person dealing with cancer.

After a diagnosis of breast cancer, it is certainly understandable that women are stressed about their treatment plan and the ultimate outcome. A new study finds that women who were unable to cope with stress were more likely to experience cognitive declines—“chemo brain” even before chemotherapy started. Dr. Stephanie Reid-Arndt, an associate professor and chair of the Health Psychology Department in the University of Missouri, examined 36 women with breast cancer who had undergone surgery but had not yet received chemotherapy or hormone replacement therapy. Patients who were stressed and had passive coping strategies to deal with their stress (i.e., denial, disengagement, helplessness) were more likely to experience cognitive declines and performed lower on memory and attention tests.

A diagnosis of breast cancer is a great shock. Some of the feelings and emotions women commonly experience are:

Fear and shock
Denial
Anger
Depression
Sadness
Anxiety
Stress
Guilt (self-blame)
Loneliness, alienation
Hope
Physical responses to strong emotions
Physical responses to the overall stress may be:
Fear – trouble sleeping, headaches, body aches
Anger – change in blood pressure
Depression – fatigue, crying, feeling moody
Stress – pain, irritability, physical tension
Unresolved or unexpressed emotions may lead to other problems.

Your bottled-up emotions and all of these emotions and feelings can actually lead to more aggressive cancer and the increased probability of not surviving the cancer. The loss of a breast, or part of a breast, has an impact that goes beyond the physical fact.

It is normal to be concerned about:

Fear of recurrence
Loss of attractiveness
Difficulty with sexual function
Loss of fertility
Coping with and surviving breast cancer

A woman just diagnosed with cancer can improve her emotional health and reduce her physical symptoms with good coping strategies. A study[1] published in the Journal of Psychosocial Oncology reports that women who get help with pain and emotional distress have lower levels of anxiety, fatigue and depression. A study published in the Journal of Personality shows that women with breast cancer who do express their anger, fear, sadness, and affection in a group setting live longer than women who suppress these emotions.

Normally good doctors recommend cancer patients to communicate deeply with family and friends but this is often ineffective because most people have terrible communication and listening skills. They suggest patients to maintain intimacy with your partner if you have one but many men and woman routinely have deep problems with intimacy.

No matter what a woman’s or any person’s situation is the first and best thing a woman or anyone just diagnosed with cancer can do it to blow bubbles! Not the kind that children play with but serious bubbles that one blows through a simple breathing-retraining device. Blowing bubbles is a serious treatment that can begin as soon as you are diagnosed. Better yet do not wait until you have to suffer from the diagnostic label and start breathing as a cancer prevention strategy.

Dr. Florent Elefteriou, J. Preston Campbell and colleagues used a chronic immobilization stress (CIS) model (immobilization for two hours a day, six days a week) to stimulate the sympathetic nervous system in athymic mice[2] that were injected intracardially with a human bone metastatic breast cancer cell line.[3] Mice subjected to CIS stress developed more and larger osteolytic lesions than control mice (no CIS), and showed an increased number of bone metastases.

Whatever combats stress combats Cancer

Women who suffer stress are twice as likely to develop breast cancer, a study suggests. Recent medical studies suggest that the biggest surprise about breast cancers involves the deepest layer of the skin. This type of cancer resembles ovarian cancer and a type of lung cancer. “It’s incredible,” said Dr. James Ingle of the Mayo Clinic, one of the study’s 348 authors, of the ovarian cancer connection. “It raises the possibility that there may be a common cause.”

Drs. James H. Stephenson and William J. Grace of New York Hospital compared 100 women with cancer of the cervix and 100 with cancer not involving the reproductive system. They found that sexual adjustment among the cervix cancer victims had been poor long before they developed the disease: they had had less intercourse than the others and rarely enjoyed orgasm. In many cases there was actual aversion for the sexual act.[4]

In The Breast Journal, an Essay on Sexual Frustration as the Cause of Breast Cancer in Women: How Correlations and Cultural Blind Spots Conceal Causal Effects has as its main thesis that breast cancer is essentially caused by sexual frustration and dissatisfaction. These are not the common causes that the Mayo Clinic had in mind. We already know that depressed people suffer higher rates of cancer for they die more frequently from it than their happier peers. This is just basic commonsense backed by clinical reality. Individuals who are more depressed are 2.3 times more likely to die of cancer during the following 17 years than their non-depressed counterparts.[5]

Women with advanced breast cancer who have abnormal daytime levels of cortisol, a hormone released in response to stress, are significantly more likely to die sooner than patients with normal levels of the hormone, Stanford University researchers reported back in 2000.[6] The researchers also found that women with these abnormal cortisol levels had fewer immune system cells known as natural killer cells, and this reduced immunity was associated with higher mortality. Dr. David Spiegel, MD, Stanford professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences said, “We found that patients who had abnormal cortisol patterns died significantly sooner.”

Medicine recognizes that breast cancer patients with a history of traumatic or stressful life events have a two-fold increased risk of recurrence. Patients reporting one or more traumatic or stressful events had a median disease-free interval of 31 months compared with 62 months for patients with no such events, Oxana Palesh, Ph.D., of the University of Rochester, and colleagues reported in the Journal of Psychosomatic Research in 2007.[7]

“Extended periods of stress and trauma and its resulting cortisol production may interfere with the body’s ability to fight off cancer progression,” said Dr. Palesh. “When there is consistent, long-term stress in the body, the elevated cortisol level may change the body’s normal rhythms and potentially reduce resistance to tumor growth.”

At the State Institute of Further Medical Education, in Kiev in 2001, researchers showed that elimination of hyperventilation and hypocapnia (low CO2 levels) in patients with breast cancer after the completion of the special treatment led to increased three-year survival rate, better quality of life, including released fear of unfavorable outcomes of the treatment, improved working ability, easier social adaptation and relief of edema of upper extremities.[8]

This is the machine to use for your breathing retraining and it really is quite nice to blow bubbles while increasing the oxygenation of your cells and tissues. Originally from Russia and created to help asthma sufferers, the BreathSlim breathing device is serious medicine. It is now being marketed in the U.S. for weight loss because it increases oxygen and metabolism to a significant enough level as to burn more fat, thus aiding in weight loss and keeping it off.

Love Hot Line for Newly Diagnosed Cancer Sufferers

It makes all the difference in the world if one is surrounded by love and is comforted and if one is assured that everything will be all right. This chapter announces the beginning of an effort to make sure that people in every city in the world have that comfort made available to them.

First we will bring together a group of people who have survived their cancer using the most powerful natural means to do so. Then we will open up an online 24/7 hotline for newly diagnosed people to reach out to, just like a crisis hotline.

Then we will raise an army of people, groups in every city in the world where they can get this support face-to-face and pick up their breathing machines and get support in the most powerful non-toxic medicinals that are legally available. Starting with magnesium, iodine and sodium bicarbonate and cannabinoid medicine these support centers will offer more than helpful resources for cancer patients.

The heavens will open in such groups. Certainly it will feel that way to a newly diagnosed cancer patient who will be surrounded by those who have made it through it all. Angels supported by the heavenly host will populate these centers offering love and healing and the same level of support medically speaking that the barefoot doctors of China gave their fellow men.