A sixty one year old man we'll call Frank was diagnosed as having an almost always fatal form of throat cancer and told he had less than a 5% chance of surviving. His weight had dropped from 130 to 98 pounds. He was extremely weak, could barely swallow his owns saliva, and was having trouble breathing. Indeed, his doctors had debated whether to give him radiation therapy at all, because there was a distinct possibility the treatment would only add to his discomfort without significantly increasing his chances for survival. They decided to proceed anyway.

Then, to Frank's great good fortune, Dr. O. Carl Simonton, a radiation oncologist and medical director of the Cancer Counseling and Research Center in Dallas, TX was asked to participate in his treatment. Simonton suggested that Frank himself could influence the course of his own disease. Simonton then taught Frank a number of relaxation and mental-imagery techniques he and his colleagues had developed. From that point on, 3x/day, Frank pictured the radiation he received as consisting of millions of tiny bullets of energy bombarding his cells. He also visualized his cancer cells as weaker and more confused than his normal cells, and thus unable to repair the damage they suffered. Then he visualized his body's white blood cells, the soldiers of the immune system, swarming over the dead and dying cancer cells, and carrying them to his liver and kidneys to be flushed our of his body.

The results were dramatic and far exceeded what usually happened in such cases when patients were treated solely with radiation. The radiation treatments worked like magic!! Frank experienced almost none of the negative side effects damage to skin and mucous membranes that normally accompanied such therapy. He regained his lost weight and his strength, and in a mere 2 months all signs of his cancer had vanished. Simonton believes Frank's remarkable recovery was due in large part to his daily regimen of visualization exercises.

Psychologist Jeanne Achterberg, director of research and rehabilitation science at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Dallas, TX and is one of the scientists who helped develop the imagery techniques that Simonton uses.

She found that the physiological effects produced through the use of imagery are not only powerful, but can also be extremely specific. For example, the term white blood cell actually refers to a number of different kinds of cells. In one study, Achterberg decided to see if she could train individuals to increase the number of only one particular type of white blood cell in their body. To do this she taught one group of college students how to image a cell known as a neutrophil, the major constituent of the white blood cell population. She trained a second group to image T-cells, a more specialized kind of white blood cell. At the end of the study the group that learned the neutrophil imagery had a significant increase in the number of neutrophils in their body, but no change in the number of T-cells. The group that learned to image T-cells had a significant increase in the number of that kind of cell, but the number of neutrphils in their body remained the same. (Achterberg, ASPR Newsletter, p.20)

She says that belief is also critical to a person's health. She feels even a person with a common cold, should recruit as many images (what she calls neural holograms) as possible in the forms of beliefs, images of well-being and harmony and images of specific immune function being activated. She feels we must also exorcise any beliefs and images that have negative consequences for our health, and realize that our body holograms are more than just pictures. They contain a host of other kinds of information including intellectual understandings and interpretation, prejudices both conscious and unconscious, fears, hopes, worries and so on.

A lot of the process of healing is releasing old programming. Old thoughts that no longer should carry any weight. I encourage people to call back their power. If a Doctor says something can't be healed or there's only a 10% chance, that's only the result of past typical treatment. We have access to the power of the mind/body/and spirit. I encourage people to not give their power to what the Doctors say or not give their power to the drugs. If you expect side effects you'll get them! If you expect only your Dr. can heal you then you are so limiting YOUR role in your healing. True healing is from within. You can utilize the positive aspects of Western medicine while working with the intricate connection of the mind/body/spirit.