Impacting the Body & Whole Person with Cancer
By Jeannine Walston
Why focus on the physical body and whole person in cancer?
Cancer is often a symptom of an altered, unbalanced system. Integrative cancer care for the whole person addresses more than the cancer diagnosis and a collection of symptoms. Comprehensive disease-fighting and wellness-promoting strategies address the entire physical body and whole person.
The body can be one whole integrated system. The state of the physical body is interdependent with all aspects of the individual, including the internal terrain and milieu. Health reflects the internal and external environments of the whole person. This broader understanding of well-being conveys that health is more than the absence of disease.
What are other ways to understand the entire physical body, instead of the disease in isolation?
These fascinating findings from many years ago are timeless and offer critical insights for each person.
1889—Stephen Paget, MD, in the journal The Lancet, published an article conveying that cancer only grows in fertile soil, or a hospitable environment in the body for the diseased cells. He wrote, “When plant goes to seed, its seeds are carried in all directions, but they can only live and grow if they fall on congenial soil.”
1895—Louis Pasteur said on his deathbed, “The germ is nothing, the terrain is everything.” The terrain refers to the internal environment influencing health. His statement represents a significant change in thinking for the father of the theory that germs (small organisms in the body) cause disease.
Understanding this reality provides an intelligent framework and motivation with self-awareness, self-attention, and self-care strategies to support optimal health and healing.
How can I better understand my whole person?
All the whole person components are typically not connected. Integrative cancer care for the whole person is the answer. The whole person comprises body, mind, and spirit, including social and environmental health. All these parts create your whole. In your journey, focus on your whole—the totality of who you are.
How do whole systems influence health and healing?
“The human body is more than a collection of individual parts; it is a whole network system of multiple, interacting parts including molecules, cells and organs that interacts with persons, environments, and a transcendent other(s). The whole system is an indivisible, self-organizing whole that cannot be taken apart. For true patient-centered clinical care and research, the dynamics of the individual and the function of the body in relation to other systems must be the focus of healing, as opposed to the static state of only one component part. This view of healing deviates from the traditional conceptualization of treatment that characterizes western medicine. Within the western medical framework it is impossible to predict the properties of a whole system and therefore how to assess or alter those properties, as the relationships between parts are complex, non-linear, and interactive… Given that all parts of the whole system are
intimately linked and inseparable, it follows that if something on one level of the system changes, all levels or parts of the system are affected to one degree or another.”
-Iris Bell, MD, PhD
How can I better embrace and embody specific dimensions of the whole person for cancer patients and cancer survivors?
The journey over time involves education about the whole person to embrace and embody specific dimensions. The foundation can be positively transformed from integrative cancer care, addressing five major components to improve quality of life, cancer survival, and cancer prevention. Learn about body, mind, spirit, social, and environmental.