Healing Versus Curing Cancer

Michael Lerner, PhD

The words cure and heal are often used interchangeably. The fact is, however, that curing your cancer and healing your cancer are two very different things. References to this distinction are found throughout the best of medical literature. Put simply, healing is fundamentally   your responsibility and choice, while curing is the domain of the physician or health professional. The physician may support or diminish the healing process, but ultimately, healing comes from within yourself.

The Meaning of 'Cure'

Let's examine the word cure. Where cancer is concerned, this word is used in three ways. The first involves statistics. Some people believe you are cured if you live five years without signs of cancer recurring. In my view, that is not a real cure. That is five-year survival.

The second use of the word cure is the one that really matters for you. By definition, you are cured of a disease if you have been treated and the disease disappears, and you live just as long as if you had never had the disease. That is a cure. A cure of this kind can be achieved with any type of treatment -- or even with no treatment -- as long as the disease disappears and you live out a normal lifespan as if the disease were never present.

The third use of the word cure goes beyond the individual, and it is also very important to you. A specific treatment for a type of cancer is considered a cure if the cancer never returns in a substantial percentage of treatment cases. If a conventional cancer treatment exists that is curative for any form of cancer, I always strongly encourage patients to use it, and use it promptly, because, as we will see later, there are no known systematically curative treatments for cancer among the complementary therapies.

Because life is so deeply precious, and because conventional therapies are the only known current treatments that have a scientific track record of systematically curing some cancers, the search for a curative treatment should always start with conventional cancer therapies.

Healing Restores Wholeness

Healing is fundamentally different from curing, yet is deeply connected to achieving a cure. Healing comes from within ourselves. It is the process by which we become whole again. For example:

• Healing can take place physically, as when a bone knits together or a wound heals.

• Healing can take place emotionally, as when we overcome old or recent emotional wounds.

• Healing can take place mentally, as when we replace destructive or outgrown ways of understanding life with wiser and more useful methods.

• Healing can also take place spiritually, as when we evolve in some meaningful way in relation to whatever guides us in life, whatever we hold sacred.

Because healing can take place at all these different levels -- physical, emotional, mental and spiritual -- that also means that healing can be experienced both in living and in dying. Some of the most powerful healing experiences I have ever witnessed have occurred in those who were losing ground to a difficult disease or who were actually dying. Healing literally means movement toward wholeness. Wholeness encompasses both life and death, both losing and finding, both knowing and mystery.

You Create Your Own Healing

Healing, therefore, is what we bring to the table in the confrontation with disease. And because each of us is an absolutely unique person, healing at the physical, emotional, mental and spiritual levels will be different for each of us. This simple fact has profound implications: we must each find our own absolutely unique way to heal.

In medical literature, this distinction between curing and healing leads to a set of fundamental distinctions we cannot afford to ignore. On the one hand, conventional medical treatment is concerned with  curing   disease and alleviating pain. On the other hand,   mind-body medicine seeks to cure disease and alleviate pain,  while also healing the illness and easing suffering.

What you actually experience with a diagnosis of cancer is not the disease itself, but the illness -- your own experience of the disease. And whether or not you are able to change the course of the disease, you can unquestionably alter your experience of the illness. Research into mind-body health suggests that the work that we do to transform the experience of the illness may also have an effect on the course of the disease. This is because, for many health conditions, there are vital feedback loops between how we feel about our health and what course our disease takes.

Healing and Curing Go Hand-in-Hand

Curative treatments mainly come from outside us, while healing mainly comes from within. Still, curative treatments may also depend on the regenerative forces for healing inside us, both physical and psychospiritual. Oncologists will tell you that highly curative treatments sometimes fail to help certain patients – for unexplained reasons. In addition, some patients achieve total cures with treatments that are rarely curative – again, for unexplained reasons. Research has shown a connection between quality of life (psychological well-being and physical well-being) and life-extension in patients being treated for cancer. So healing, as it affects quality of life, appears to be associated with life extension and prevention of cancer recurrence – or curing, in other words.

In addition, healing can be powerfully assisted from outside us by physicians, friends, lovers, children, and other sources of support. We know from years of work in the Commonweal Cancer Help Program that healing can be stimulated by a supportive group of people going through a similar cancer experience, when they seek to heal together.

Focusing your efforts on healing, as well as curing, is a win-win proposition. Healing work can help you experience your cancer in the best way that you can. And healing work may, in some cases, help to prevent recurrence or extend life as well. Keep in mind, however, that healing is not an end, not a static state, not something to be achieved and then we move on. Healing is a continuous evolutionary process within us, never ending, never complete. Healing is the journey itself. Healing is the purpose of life, the development of awareness, the deepening of wisdom and compassion.

Michael Lerner is president and co-founder of Commonweal, a health and environmental research institute in Bolinas, Calif. He is also president and co-founder of the Smith Farm Center for the Healing Arts in Washington, D.C. He is co-founder of the Commonweal and Smith Farm Cancer Help Programs, which offer week-long residential retreats for people with cancer.

Reviewed by:

John Durant, MD, Medical Advisory Board

Barbara Given, PhD, RN, Medical Advisory Board

David Heber, MD, PhD, UCLA School of Public Health

Daniel Nixon, MD, American Health Foundation

Helene Brown, Medical Advisory Board