Integrative cancer and oncology news with articles and the latest news on cancer.
Still A Long Way To Go
Welcome to this issue of icon magazine. When we started back in the summer of 2002, we worried that we might run out of ideas for articles. Indeed some of our friends and colleagues expected us not only to run out of material, but out of steam within 18 months at the most. But the 52 pages you have in front of you now, could so easily have been 60 or more! And that’s without looking for advertisers. We make no apology for taking 10 pages to cover ’Mental State’ and give our readers and cancer patients an easy-to-follow summary of some of the key issues and therapies that they might use.
Sadly, as we found when we went to ’Primary Care 2006’, GP’s simply aren’t routinely trained in issues affecting mental health and how your attitudes might help cause cancer - and even help beat it. Traditionally areas such as diet or mental state fall under the heading of ’mumbo-jumbo’ to many nurses and doctors in the NHS. I can still recall two years ago, a nurse at a nurses conference in Harrogate throwing Chris’s Tree of Life book into my face, with the words ’How could anybody believe diet could cure cancer?’
Well the world is changing. In the last twelve months we’ve been in Australia, Japan, Russia and America. We’ve talked with experts on the influence of mental state on cancer - how your mind can help your body. We’ve talked to the Gerson organisation, experts in exercise and diet therapies, and so on.
It is a complete myth that these complementary therapies have no research to support them. In the USA and Australia there’s stacks of it. Clinical trial level research too.
But we have no equivalent of the US Institute of Complementary Health, our doctors can still publicly ridicule serious complementary practices, with no hard evidence to support their ridicule. Yet doctors are highly intelligent people. They just never see the facts.
This issue of icon is very ’complementary’ - we make no excuses.
We did have a critic recently ring us and tell us her hospital wouldn’t take the magazine because it ’gave no medical references’. But within Cancer Watch we always do.
Elsewhere we often do. But we are not a medical journal; we are a patient journal and we understand that you want easy-to-read, patient-speak not doctor-speak. If you’ve changed your minds, then please let us know.
Finally, we are delighted to announce our recent success in being awarded 45,000 by the ’Awards for All’ programme that is part of The National Lottery. The 5,000 grants are from each of their 9 regional offices and have been given so that we can further extend the circulation of icon magazine and take on a Project Manager to ensure we don’t miss any outlet that should receive complimentary copies. Do tell us if you know of a hospital, oncology unit or clinic near you that we haven’t spoken to yet.
Enjoy the summer. And remember that sunlight on our skin is now thought to be the main ’source’ of vitamin D; read ’Vitamin D - the Mega Vitamin’ on page 40 before you go on holiday!
Lindsey Fealey