Whole
-being healed
-having all its parts or components
-constituting the total sum
-complete or total
-constituting the entirety of a person's nature
What is the whole person?
The whole person is comprised of body, mind, and spirit, including social and environmental health.
All of the parts of you and your life create your whole—entire physical body, lifestyle, self-care routines, beliefs, attitudes, thoughts, feelings, religion, spirituality, home, work, activities, family, friends, the larger community, culture, government, socioeconomics, and more.
Your whole—the totality of who you are.
Why focus on the whole person in cancer?
Cancer is a symptom of an altered, unbalanced system. Integrative cancer care addresses more than the diagnosis and a collection of symptoms. For people with cancer, comprehensive disease-fighting and wellness-promoting strategies support the entire physical body and whole person.
The body is one whole integrated system. The state of the physical body has an interdependent relationship with all aspects of the individual. Health, and lack thereof, is a reflection of the internal and external environment of the whole person. This broader understanding of well-being conveys that health is more than absence of disease.
Why have many cancers been hard to successfully treat?
Cancer's complexity, conventional cancer treatments, and the science behind aspects of integrative cancer care are discussed in the following excerpt from Life Over Cancer by Keith Block, MD.
"In 1971, President Nixon declared war on cancer. Almost forty years and billions of dollars later, that war is far from won. Cancer remains the second-leading cause of death in the United States and is poised to become the nation's leading killer. Races and walks for ‘cures' are being scheduled for many years into the future. For although we can treat, and even drive into submission, a few distinct cancers—pediatric cancers, for instance, have a much higher survival rate than they did two generations ago—the most common and lethal cancers remain difficult to cure unless they are caught very early, and sometimes even then the prognosis is grim. It is sobering that some of the most vaunted new targeted molecular therapies, billion-dollar medications such as Avastin and Erbitux, extend life span by mere months, on average, if at all. Obviously a ‘successful' cancer treatment is measured quite differently than are treatments for other diseases. In contrast, cardiovascular disease is not the killer it once was: in the same fifty years during which the age-adjusted mortality rate for cancer has remained about the same, that for cardiovascular disease has fallen by about two-thirds.
What is it about cancer that enables it to survive despite surgery to excise it, radiation to burn it, and chemotherapy to poison it?
We have only recently begun to grasp the nature of this disease. Cancer is not an isolated group of errant cells waiting passively to be annihilated by a wonder drug. Instead, it is caused by a cascade of genetic and molecular glitches. That's why cancer does not present a single target for a magic bullet; a tumor is merely the most obvious symptom of an altered, unbalanced system. And that's why both the new targeted therapies and the older weapons of surgery, radiation, and old-line chemotherapy so often fail to prevent the spread or recurrence of the disease: they neither pick up renegade cancer cells, strengthen the body's biological balance, nor reach all of the underlying molecular accidents that initiated cancer in the first place. As a result, even if the original tumor is gone, this biological imbalance creates an environment for cancer to recur: tumor cells use the body's own healthy resources to grow and multiply. This means that cancer is a systemic disruption and perversion of the body's resources and mechanisms. Because cancer will try to use every bit of your body's biochemistry to proliferate, you must strengthen every biochemical defense possible to defeat it.
Cancer is not merely a tumor. It is an underlying condition. It is based on abnormal patterns driven by genetics and lifestyle. It reflects changes in your body all the way down to the microscopic and molecular levels, changes that began long before you had any symptoms of cancer—indeed, long before cancer was diagnosed or even detectable. It therefore makes no sense to think of cancer as a tumor. That is merely its obvious manifestation. A whole slew of physiological processes are also out of whack—sufficient to allow malignant cells to arise, grow, and proliferate uncontrollably."
How do whole systems influence health and healing?
"The human body is more than a collection of individual parts; it is a whole network system of multiple, interacting parts including molecules, cells and organs that interacts with persons, environments, and a transcendent other(s). The whole system is an indivisible, self-organizing whole that cannot be taken apart. For true patient-centered clinical care and research, the dynamics of the individual and the function of the body in relation to other systems must be the focus of healing, as opposed to the static state of only one component part. This view of healing deviates from the traditional conceptualization of treatment that characterizes western medicine. Within the western medical framework it is impossible to predict the properties of a whole system and therefore how to assess or alter those properties, as the relationships between parts are complex, non-linear, and interactive… Given that all parts of the whole system are intimately linked and inseparable, it follows that if something on one level of the system changes, all levels or parts of the system are affected to one degree or another."
-Iris Bell, MD, PhD
What are some related perspectives from history about treating the whole person instead of the disease in isolation?
1889—Stephen Paget, MD in the journal The Lancet published an article conveying that cancer only grows in fertile soil, or a hospitable environment in the body for the diseased cells. He wrote, "When plant goes to seed, its seeds are carried in all directions, but they can only live and grow if they fall on congenial soil."
1895—Louis Pasteur said on his deathbed, "The germ is nothing, the terrain is everything."The terrain refers to the internal environment influencing health. His statement represents a significant change in thinking for the father of the theory that germs (small organisms in the body) cause disease.
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