In her best selling book, Mind over Medicine, Lissa Rankin, M.D. uses research from the most prestigious cancer centers in the world to show that much of what you feel is related to much of what you think. Many of the studies she references deal with the placebo effect. It is astounding how many patients who get a placebo fair as well as the patients who get the experimental treatment. These studies cover many different diseases and many different parts of the body.
My father is a brilliant doctor with an encyclopedic memory of thousands of illnesses and syndromes. Despite this, he would never in a million years consider alternative treatments or the affects of the mind-body connection for healing. I forgive him this because he is eighty-nine years old. I’m not sure whether or not he will admit it, but I think that even he believes we are starting a 5,000 year old “new” medical revolution.
Whether a woman was diagnosed one hundred and fifty years ago or this morning, the diagnosis is devastating.
What has changed dramatically is that the survival rates for some breast cancers is as high as 98% and there are more reasons than ever to be optimistic. Many women today don’t remember a time when the only way they could be diagnosed with breast cancer was if the tumor was big enough to see or feel. Today, modern technology can find very small tumors and cure them even before the first symptoms appear. I think it might be good to take a look back at how far we’ve come.
In 1992, Evelyn Lauder put the spotlight directly on breast cancer research for the first time. She co-created the now iconic pink ribbon and launched the Breast Cancer Research Foundation®, a non-profit organization dedicated to breast cancer research. The pink ribbon, so simple and powerful at the same time, became a worldwide movement that has funded research that has significantly changed the outcomes of millions and millions of women throughout the world.
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