Getting Well Again: The Bestselling Classic About the Simontons’ Revolutionary Lifesaving Self- Awareness Techniques

The Simonton’s Admirable Journey
I first heard about the Simontons in the book ‘The Turning Point (1987)’ by Fritjof Capra: a couple of doctors who went out to coin an alternative therapy for cancer back in the 1970s. They had a lot of courage. They did not fear to lose their reputation while they were doing things that were not quite tolerated, at that time, by the medical establishment.Dr. Otto Carl Simonton (1942-2009) and his wife Dr. Stephanie Matthews-Simonton criticized the usual ways of treating cancer.Their account of an alternative cancer cure which became successful is written in an honest and lively manner, not theory-based but sanely experience-based.I think that the Simontons have greatly helped to establish alternative cancer cure in our today’s diversified medical servicing, and thereby have done a great job for all of us. And yet, I have met so many people, even in recent years, who never heard of its existence! It seems that the common man and the common woman get their knowledge from the mass media, and there you see same old soup, even today, with death-blow doctoral injunctions of the kind ‘Your life expectancy is maximum six months’, chemotherapy, and all the rest of it. And of course, you can find the Simontons on the Internet. Here is the address of the place and the reference to their well-done web site about the Simonton Cancer Center.That’s what conditioning is all about, and how the medical system works—systematic disinformation about everything, life, people, the world, resources, disease, hunger, war, death—while health is never mentioned! And for good reason. It could disturb worldwide medical business, for that’s what it is: a business, not something even remotely concerned with healing.Fritjof Capra mentions in his book ‘The Turning Point (1987)’ that he was astonished to find out that the words healing and healer have a pejorative meaning for most medical doctors. In fact, these terms are associated with charlatanism and quackery. That is why, among other things, the Simontons did not have an easy job. Their breakthrough were techniques today called ‘self-awareness techniques’ that at the time when they started where called visualization techniques or mental imaging. It was one of several approaches they had tried out, but as these techniques were more successful than others in helping their cancer patients, they stuck with them. (By the way, there are many other alternative cancer cures; some are based on diet, some on bioenergetic treatment, some on ozone inhalation, etc.).The most important thing in the process of helping the patient to collaborate in healing their cancer is to get them to learn that they have a role to play in their healing. For they are conditioned by traditional medicine to be mere injunction-receivers, and passive sufferers of a fate. The authors write:—Most of our patients, who come to us from all over the country, have received a ‘medically incurable’ diagnosis from their doctors. According to national cancer statistics, they have an average life expectancy of one year. When these people believe that only medical treatment can help them—but their physicians have said that medicine is no longer of much avail and that they probably have only a few months to live—they feel doomed, trapped, helpless, and usually fulfill the doctor’s expectations. But if patients mobilize their own resources and actively participate in their recovery, they may well exceed their life expectancy and significantly alter the quality of life./4One of the most daring ideas that doctors ever came up with was to offer patients placebo drugs, suggesting they got drug XYZ, famous and tested, and proven to be effective according to pharmaceutical publicity. In truth, what they received was a sugar pill. Well, it’s hard to believe that this works better than normal medicine because it has no side effects. But it has been shown over and over that it cures as effectively as a real drug. The authors relate a dramatic case that vividly illustrates the power of the placebo effect.Now regarding the much debated question what causes cancer, the authors review in the book the following etiologies: carcinogenic substances, genetic predisposition, radiation, diet and the immune system.Regarding carcinogenic substances, the authors note that there is no simple cause–effect relationship between harmful substances, chemicals, chronic irritants, and cancer, and that the matter is rather controversial in the literature.Regarding genetic predisposition, the authors note that a human-based research was not yet available, the research being available having been conducted on mice. They concluded that this research left considerable doubt on any ‘it’s genetics alone’ theory.Regarding radiation, the authors note that background radiation, also called cosmic radiation, is too universal a cause to possibly contribute to the cancer etiology.With regard to another possibility being discussed, as to fluorocarbons released from aerosol cans that destroy the ozone layer of the atmosphere, leading to an increased exposure to ultraviolet radiation from the sun, the authors admit that although this could certainly lead to potential health problems, high levels of ultraviolet rays were associated only with skin cancer.Regarding x-rays and other radiation used in medical diagnosis and treatment, the evidence was still unclear because many people who have been exposed to high levels of x-rays and other radiation do not contract cancer.Regarding diet as a possible cause of cancer, which is a relatively recent etiology, the authors note the following quite remarkable details:—For instance, Japan, where the diet is still predominantly based on fish and rice and contains substantially less fat than does the American or European diet, has both a lower / incidence of cancer and a substantially different profile in types of cancers than the other industrialized countries. Since the incidence of cancer goes up sharply among Japanese living in the United States … some researchers have settled on differences in diet as a likely explanation./38-39The authors argue that for understanding cancer, we need to find out why some people have a stronger immune system than others?As problems with organ transplantation showed, the body’s immune system normally is strong. For example, a cancer-affected organ would not be accepted by the receiver, and if forced to do so, as was shown by experiments, the receiver would indeed contract the cancer, but as soon as the organ was again removed, the cancer would quickly disappear. This research, as the authors conclude, has led to a broad medical acceptance of what is called the ‘surveillance theory’ of cancer development.Now, the answer is of course, that the real causes of cancer are related to emotional stress, in the sense that the suppression of emotions, or certain emotions, clearly contributes to the causation of cancer. Another factor is the inability noted in most cancer patients to express their emotions and thus release themselves at times from pent-up emotional tension.For example in a research done by Dr. Thomas A. Holmes and associates at the University of Washington School of Medicine, a scale was designed that assigned numerical values (1-100) to certain stressful events: ‘Death of Spouse’, is rated 100, followed by ‘Divorce’, with 73 and ‘Marital Separation’ with 65. However, even in Holmes’ study, 51 percent of the individuals with scores of 300 did not get sick during the period of the study, which let the authors conclude that an event, even a stressful one, is construed differently from person to person. A decisive study done in the 1920s by Dr. Hans Selye at the University of Prague gave conclusive evidence for the stress-related etiology:—This evidence clearly demonstrates the very real physical effects of stress. But it is still another effect that is of greatest importance to the cancer patient. Selye has discovered that chronic stress suppresses the immune system which is responsible for engulfing and destroying cancerous cells or alien microorganisms. The important point is this: The physical conditions Selye describes as being produced by stress are virtually identical to those under which an abnormal cell could reproduce and spread into a dangerous cancer. Not surprisingly, cancer patients frequently have weakened immune systems. /53Selye’s findings were confirmed by other research and it was found that, for example, lymphocyte function, a critical measure of the potency of the body’s immune system, ‘was significantly depressed in those who had lost a wife or husband.’ (53) Another study the authors report points to mental factors leading to the suppression of the immune system where it was demonstrated ‘that the body’s immunity to tuberculosis can be profoundly affected by hypnotic suggestion,’ which leads to the conclusion that mental and emotional stress impacts on the body’s defenses.But this is not yet the core of the book. The authors went further in their research and found historical connections between cancer and emotions, and that certain beliefs clearly trigger a predisposition for cancer: it is not down the road that we got stress, but how we cope with it what really is the subtle cause of cancer.I always intuitively knew that compulsory morality is a strong factor in the etiology of cancer, and the cancer patients I met in my life have corroborated this insight. They were invariably people who were thinking much more on the lines of ‘should be’ and ‘ought to behave’ than the average citizen who tends to think on the lines of ‘Me first’. Quoting a researcher who published a book in 1893 with the title Cancer and the Cancer-Process, and who stated that ‘idiots and lunatics are remarkably exempt from cancer in every shape’, the authors go on to examine an array of research findings that corroborated their hypothesis of ‘emotional causation’. Among the factors that cause predisposition for cancer, the authors examine the research of Dr. Lawrence LeShan, an experimental psychologist who found evidence that co-dependence and emotional abuse may contribute to the cancer etiology. He identified four recurring elements, something like a fatally coincidental sequence, in the life stories of more than 500 cancer patients.I have scribbled at the edge of page 63 of the book, in big and angry letters: ‘Cancer is a Western plague. These people never had the freedom to express their emotions, and they never developed their real self. This is the real cause of cancer!’After reviewing some of their patient’s life stories, the authors inquire into the psychological process of illness and come to stress certain factors they have seen in all the life stories they reviewed, such as, for example:—Experiences in childhood result in decisions to be a certain kind of person.—The individual is rocked by a cluster of stressful life events.—These stresses create a problem with which the individual does not know how to deal.—The individual sees no way of changing the rules about how he or she must act and so feels trapped and helpless to resolve the problem. /—The individual puts distance between himself or herself and the problem, becoming static, unchanging, rigid./74-75For each of these categories, the authors forward conclusive evidence from the case histories, which I will not discuss here because of copyright. I can only say that this part of the book is perhaps the most important as it provides very concise evidence as to the real causes of cancer, which can be summarized as being emotional, behavioral, and belief-related. But this is not all there is in the etiology of cancer. The authors also provide conclusive evidence for the fact that also the expectations a patient fosters about cancer as a disease contribute to the etiology, and that there is evidence for the fact that the stiff neurotic adherence to a life-denying ideology or religion or otherwise morality-imposing belief system decidedly contributes to the causation of cancer.After this first research part of the book, the authors present their own approach in the second part, that starts at page 100, and thus approximately after one-third of the book. I find that this was a good balance to keep by the authors, and congratulate them, and their publisher, for the good editing and composition of this booklet, which comes with a 19-pages Bibliography and an Index.

Great book
Great book. Someone gave me a copy when I was diagnosed with cancer and it got me through a lot. I now give anyone I know going through a rough time a copy

Execellent resource to help empower yourself.
This book is great to give you the toolsto heal yourself mentally and physically. Helps to understand the power of your thoughtts.

Excellent. A holistic viewpoint on cancer. Really worth the read for everybody and anybody. And not only if you’re sick.

がんの原因は、発がん物質・遺伝・紫外線等々ありますが、発症に個人差があるのは、がんになりやすいパーソナリティの人が、ストレッサーにより、本書が述べる心理プロセスを経て免疫システムが弱くなるためです。心理プロセスですから、予後についても、個人差が大きくなります。人はみな、内に治癒力を持っています：それを最大限引き出す Mental Imagery を中心とした療法です。心と体の関係を書いた本として、今でも多くの本に引用される古典です。

Questa valutazione l’ho data perché e molto utile per chi deve affrontare una tale esperienza. Purtroppo in inglese non e molto fluido per me ma sicuramente non da sottovalutare