About Surviving Cancer

Caitlin Flanagan has been a cancer survivor for 20 years. She wrote the following in "I’LL TELL YOU THE SECRET OF CANCER: It’s been almost 20 years since my diagnosis, and I’ve learned quite a bit:

When I began to understand that attitude doesn’t have anything to do with survival, I felt myself coming up out of deep water. I didn’t cause my cancer by having a bad attitude, and I wasn’t going to cure it by having a good one. And then Coscarelli told me the whole truth about cancer. If you’re ready, I will tell it to you. Cancer occurs when a group of cells divide in rapid and abnormal ways. Treatments are successful if they interfere with that process. That’s it, that’s the whole equation.

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New Trend in Psychotherapy: Encouraging Learned Helplessness

A New Trend in Psychotherapy: Encouraging Learned Helplessness. In this video by FAIR, Christine Sefein, a professor of clinical psychology discusses her resignation from Antioch College. She could no longer thrive in a department that now seeks to validate its patients' claims of learned helplessness and identitarian blaming. The new approach also intentionally overlooks maladaptive behaviors. According to Sefein, this new approach destructively locks people into a belief that they are powerless. This new approach endangers patients who are feeling desperate.

This new affirmation therapy taught by Antioch is a major change from traditional approaches to psychotherapy, which properly emphasized empowering therapy, adaptive coping skills, strong social support system, exercise, meditation and, when needed, medication.  

Making this situation all-the-worse is the well documented rise in anxiety depression and self-harm among young adults.  

For more on FAIR (Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism) visit FAIR's extensive website and videos. 

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Beating Type 2 Diabetes Through Restriction of Food

I used to weigh 30 pounds more than I currently weigh. My secret is that I avoided most refined carbs, ate less overall and exercised more. One of the prime reasons I lost the weight was a concern with diabetes. This study should give hope to many other people concerned with diabetes. It was sent to me by a friend who decided to take control of his weight, losing 50 pounds early in the pandemic. The title: "Nutritional basis of type 2 diabetes remission."

Type 2 diabetes mellitus was once thought to be irreversible and progressive, but a series of clinical studies over the past 12 years have clarified the mechanisms that cause the disease. We now know that the processes that cause type 2 diabetes can be returned to normal functioning by restriction of food energy to achieve weight loss of around 15 kg.1 Around half of people who are within the first 10 years of diagnosis and manage to follow food energy restriction can stop all diabetes medication and return to non-diabetic glucose control.23 Remission is achieved when haemoglobin A1c concentrations of 48 mmol/mol are recorded after weight loss and at least six months later without any anti-diabetic medications (box 1).4 Here we summarise the new understanding of type 2 diabetes and consider how different changes to food intake can achieve the necessary weight loss and maintenance required for remission of diabetes.

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What does it mean to be “mentally ill”?

Fascinating. So what is it, at bottom, to call someone "mentally ill? Is it essentially name calling? We are surrounded highly functional people who periodically and temporarily seem highly dysfunctional in specific ways. We have been cobbled together by natural selection, living Rube Goldberg machines, we are also equipped with sophisticated built-in PR departments that make it seem like we are more purposeful, more functional than we actually are. Further, Randolph Nesse has made a strong case that many "mental illnesses" are adaptive. What does it help use a global stamp of "mentally ill"?

Here's an excerpt from Nesse's 2020 book, Good Reasons for Bad Feelings:

The question “What is a mental disorder? ”has been addressed by Jerome Wakefield, a social worker, clinician, researcher, and philosopher at New York University. His pithy conclusion is that mental disorders are characterized by “harmful dysfunction.”“Dysfunction”means a malfunction in a useful system shaped by natural selection. “Harmful”means that the dysfunction causes suffering or other harm to the individual. Wakefield’s analysis grounds psychiatric diagnosis in an evolutionary understanding of the normal functions of brain/mind, the same way the rest of medicine understands pathology in the context of normal physiology. His cogent analysis has, however, had little influence on how psychiatrists make diagnoses.

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