A Case for Looking: Bridging the Technical and the Spiritual

By Judy Schwimmer

Working for cancer imaging scientists while separately supporting cancer patients with counseling and meditation while they underwent their treatment, the author observed the many clinical benefits of meditation for patients. Noticing that the stabilizing effect of meditation on the patient’s condition was being used for support during periods of conventional cancer treatment, but not in itself being studied scientifically, the author was prompted to write up this “case for looking”. The author takes the reader through a full discussion of observations and ideas to build the case for implementing scientific investigation of the effects of meditation on the body’s cells, as practiced by cancer patients in support of their treatments. This is a must read for anyone who has undergone, or supported someone undergoing, cancer treatment and would like to see medical science move forward in the direction of expanding our understanding of the effects of meditation on the body, to improve the experience of cancer treatment.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Mar 20, 2016
• ISBN: 9781945170218

Book preview

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ISBN: 978-1-945-17021-8

Dedication

Background

Purpose

Chapter 1 Current Conditions for Cancer Patients

Section 1 Some Facts from the NCCIH Website

Section 2 Burden of Orchestrating Disparate Components of Cancer Treatment

Section 3 Lack of Insurance Reimbursement

Section 4 Difficulty in Communicating with Both Conventional Doctors and Complementary Practitioners

Section 5 Separation of Information from Disparate Disciplines

Section 6 Misconceptions about Energy-Based Techniques

Chapter 2 Taking a Look

Section 1 Why Look? - Clues from Empirical Observation

Section 2 What Looking has been Done to Date - Only Changes in the Brain

Section 3 What Looking We Need to Do - Validate that Cellular/Molecular Changes in the Body are Occurring with Application of Meditation/Complementary Techniques

Section 4 Gain Understanding of the Types of Changes, and How This Works in Concert with Conventional Treatment

Section 5 Establish Ways to Monitor these Changes and Report them to Cancer Patients, especially for Advanced Stage Patients who have No Further Conventional Treatment Options

Section 6 Study How to Optimize Combining Complementary with Conventional Approaches to Accelerate and Steer Response to Treatment

Section 7 Ideas

Chapter 3 What Would Happen

Section 1 A New Specialty of Conventional Medicine

Section 2 Increased Self-Participation in Personalized Medicine

Section 3 New Integration of Existing Fields - Psychology, Acupuncture/Chinese Medicine, Radiology, Spiritual Practice, Oncology

Section 4 Expansion of Research Questions

Chapter 4 Correlations of Mind and Cell

Section 1 Mind and Cell - Do they Really Operate Separately?

Section 2 Cancer Cell Characteristics

Section 3 Cell as Computer - Meditation Organizing Mind and Internal Energy

Section 4 Cellular Repair

Chapter 5 Idealized Summary of Hoped For Events

Section 1 Step 1

Section 2 Step 2

Section 3 Step 3

Section 4 Step 4

Section 5 Endpoint

Dedication

This ‘Case for Looking’, inspired by my husband Dennis Brown, is written on behalf of all of the cancer patients I have had the privilege to assist during the past 26 years, and for cancer patients everywhere who are incorporating complementary medicine into their treatment.

The book is dedicated to the disciplined and hard-working scientists and physicians who are advancing the field of molecular imaging at the UCLA Crump Institute for Molecular Imaging, and the Molecular Imaging Program at Stanford; and to the leadership of the NIH’s National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) for enforcing the important goal of gathering medical evidence.

I sincerely thank for their support of my work with patients: Dennis Brown, Leong Tan, Patricia Amrhein, Kristine Waters, Wendy and Robert Kaneko, Kay Calvin and Tom Bolduc, Charlie Connoy, Diane Geller Connoy, Janet Young, Rosemary Rojas, Cye Hoffman, Linda Schorin, Patty Melnick, Georgia Bergman, Diane Reiss, Stu Drexler, Stacy Valis and Dean Chamberlain, Karin Silverstein, Howard Sherman, Bonnie Buenger, Dick and Sandy Orkin, Fred Cunningham, Francesca Gardini, and Murugesan Subbarayan.

Background

I entered Stanford University for college at age 16, and majored in chemistry. In the year following graduation, I worked as a research assistant in the Department of Electrical Engineering. During that year I was accepted to the UCLA Graduate School of Management where I started the following fall. After graduating there, I worked as administrator of a non-profit counseling clinic, and shifted the next year to educational consulting where I tutored math and science to high-school, college, graduate students, and adults returning to school to further their degrees.

While consulting, my work with students and their families led me to obtain my second Master’s degree in counseling from the former California Family Study Center, now Phillips Graduate Institute. Around this time, I was referred by a doctor of chinese medicine to a spiritual teacher from Malaysia. The latter, Leong Tan (SinSeeCenter.com), was teaching in various cities across the US, and I met with him for an individual session in Los Angeles. He invited me to attend his classes and workshops.

My first reaction attending his class where he instructed in meditation, and application of energy, also providing individualized spiritual counseling to each person attending, was the thought This is advanced physics! I continued attending his classes and workshops, over the next 7 years, where he guided the development and deepening of my meditation practice and ability to assist others energetically. He encouraged me to assist others in this form of applied meditation where the energy exuded from the advanced meditator supports the meditation of the recipient and helps to balance their energy that in turn supports their physical body and mental/emotional/spiritual cultivation. He showed me that I had the atypical ability to go very deep very quickly in my meditation, and to impact others including himself, others in the classes, and then others who were referred to me for assistance. I became an initiated advanced student in the third year. My teacher at a certain point said You have worked on 20; now work on 200. This all coincided with completion of my counseling degree, including requirements for licensure. As the licensure did not govern applied meditation and this format of working with clients, after consulting the advisory body, I started my practice as an independent counselor providing meditation and energy work, and not as a licensed therapist limited to talk therapy of a designated scope of issues, at the time.

With no formal advertising, but by client referrals, my practice grew and I assisted on a range of issues including bone fractures, fertility issues, and then various medical conditions, moving into the area of supporting cancer patients undergoing their conventional cancer treatments. Feedback to the clients, of various positive results from their physicians, was encouraging – unusually good healing of complex wrist fracture, cancer patients with fewer treatment side effects in good remission. I developed a unique session format of working with individuals that combined my spiritual training and formal counseling training. A typical 2-hour session included discussion with the patient of their life issues, and physical issues, and input they received from other consultations, followed by meditation together with me, and then my doing applied meditation (referred to as energy work) that I had trained in with my teacher. At the completion of the energy work, the patient and I would compare any images, or thoughts that came to mind for each of us as we had meditated, and often this information would be quite meaningful to the patient as he/she related it to something going on in their life. Additionally, in between sessions, patients would make note of any significant dreams that came up, or unusual life synchronicities; we then reviewed these in subsequent discussions. I worked with patients at intervals that seemed to support their energy best e.g., weekly for shorter-term issues, and monthly for longer-term cancer treatment support.

Over time (~26 years), I had the blessing and opportunity to work on a range of different cancer cases that included brain, prostate, bladder, breast, colorectal, lung, liver, bone, ovarian, pancreatic cancers, melanoma, and lymphoma. I simultaneously noticed the supportive features of the patients’ consciousness and meditative work and the wearing to the body of the chemotherapies and radiation with resulting exhaustion by the time of reaching any experimental immunotherapies. I wanted to help cancer patients in a larger way, and came to work at the UCLA Crump Institute for Molecular Imaging (~19 years ago), and also later for the Stanford Molecular Imaging Program, supporting the scientists in their grant, article, and textbook writing, and in implementing their postdoctoral training programs. These disciplined scientists are developing advanced imaging technologies to look at cells and molecules, and even cancer cell microenvironments at a very detailed level.

I have arrived at this point of presenting this case for looking to justify why we might apply these imaging capabilities to explore the effects of the meditation and energy work on cancer cells, their microenvironment, and the immune system. If effects can be seen, evidenced, and studied scientifically and clinically, perhaps the self and applied meditation can be repositioned (from supportive complementary techniques) to being co-prescribed with surgery, shorter burst and fewer treatments of follow-up chemotherapy and radiation, and swifter transition to immune-building combined therapy of immunotherapy, vaccines, and self and applied meditation. I sincerely hope that this manuscript helps to instigate investigations in this direction for the benefit of cancer patients.

Purpose

It is 2016, and in the world today, certain complementary medicine techniques are considered complementary, and not mainstream, because they have not been validated by basic science study and the accumulation of a body of medical evidence that is required to become part of mainstream medicine. Part of the reason the basic