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Holistic appreciation and treatment of the physical systems of the body

Holistic appreciation, care and treatment of physical, mental, emotional, psychological, psychic and spiritual health

Holistic appreciation, study and application of various modalities of health care and of medicine

Holistic appreciation of synergies among various roles of healers and care-givers in an effort centered on empowered patients.

  1. Total Human Development and Harmony Through Synergism

  2. Holistic Health Care and Medicine

  3. Deep Ecology and Harmony with Nature 

  4. Sense of History and Sense of Mission

  5. Civics and Democratic Governance

  6. Culture as Community Creativity

  7. Light-Seeking and Light-Sharing Education

  8. Gender Sensitivity, Equality & Harmony

  9. Reconstructive/Restor-ative Justice

10. Associative Economics, Social Capital and Sustainable Development

11. Synergetic Leadership and Organizations

12. Appropriate/Adaptive Technology

13. Mutual Enrichment of Families and Friendships

14. Human Dignity and Human Harmony: Human Rights and Peace

15. Aesthetics Without Boundaries: 'Art from the Heart'   

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Full-Range of Options

for 10 Issues in Facing Cancer

By Ed Aurelio C. Reyes

Prof. Reyes is one of the foremost champions in the Philippines of the serious study and conscious application of the synergism principle on various fields of human concern. He taught synergism-oriented subjects of Applied Cosmic Anthropology, the doctoral program of Asian Social Institute (ASI) in Manila.  As encouraged by his wife Cita, before she passed away, he prepared this list of options on ten issues to help empower persons with cancer (PWC) facing cancer to take control of managing their illness. 

This was the talk “Facing Cancer Together Through Empowerment and Synergism,” delivered by Prof. Reyes at the First National Conference on Breast Cancer, October 1998 at Miriam College, QC. The conference was convened by the Philippine Breast Cancer Network (PBCN), then headed by Ms. Rosa Francia-Meneses.

PERSONS WITH CANCER (PWCs) can empower themselves to control their management of the disease if they can only know well in advance the options available to them on cancer-care issues. For this reason, the full-range of options should be available to everyone. One never knows if he or she would eventually contract cancer or be given an opportunity to help one face this dreaded disease.

(Note: for each number, many other options exist aside from, and between, those stated.)

1. Options: whether or not to think and talk seriously about Life and the inevitability of Death even before anything happens or develops that usually causes such talk. (There are advantages in “pre-need thinking and talking” about these subjects, the second one of which is usually avoided by Filipinos, especially the superstitious.)

2. Options: whether to be health-conscious and disease-preventive or to live it up, enjoy life absolutely from moment to moment, and “cross the bridge when you come to it.” This really is a matter of personal choice defining, and defined by, one’s own innermost personal philosophy, and such choice should be freely made without any external intervention or interference.

3. Options: whether or not to go along with the popular belief that cancer is automatically a death sentence. (The belief has long been disproven by all those PWCs or patients with cancer who have had remission. Many of them have outlasted their doctors.)

4. Options: whether or not to believe a doctor’s prognosis especially that which predicts a definite length of time (or “taning”). Any doctor’s prognosis that gives a time estimate is definitely a guess, according to hitherto established statistics on average cases. Such past statistics cannot at all affect any present case; a present case will be part of future statistics, which the doctors will know about even much later. Doctors have been giving “taning” as self-fulfilling prophecies: they intimidate and demoralize their patients into fulfilling the scary prognosis.

5. Options: whether to concentrate one’s thoughts on the billions upon billions of cells in the body that are perfectly healthy or to focus on the hundreds of thousands of cells that are not.

6. Options: whether or not to get second or third or fourth opinions and whether or not to believe any of them.

7. Options: whether to treat a life-threatening illness as a “punishment from heaven,” and wonder “why me?”, or to treat it simply as a biological development that has to be faced.

8. Options: whether to take and keep a firm command over one’s own life even through such crises as life-threatening illnesses or to entrust everything to “those who know best” (the doctors).

9. Options: what respective roles to assign to or allow for members of the nuclear family, members of the expanded family, special friends, close friends, and other friends, associates, the office, etc., and whose advice to take very seriously, to take seriously, to consider, and to simply note.

10. Options: which treatment or combination of treatments to use, if any. So-called alternative therapies have worked miracles and some of them have received the grudging respect of the bio-medical community and gradually “mainstreamed,” considering that promoters and practitioners of alternative therapy systems have been fellow bio-medical (Western medicine) doctors. Some of these alternative therapies concentrate on diet regimens (carrot-rich vegetarian diets), exercise regimens (aerobics, for stamina and enhanced resistance), or place focus on certain body organs to observe (iridology and pulse reading, for diagnostics) or to stimulate (acupuncture and acumassage/acupressure), utilize herbal medicine, or combine physical with spiritual or psychic healing. Standard biomedical regimens are chemotherapy, radiotherapy and surgery (diagnostic & therapeutic), with varying degrees of expected efficacy.

Just to have these thought about, and/or discussed in families and groups, would already be helpful to everyone involved. But we can synergize (sanib-lakas) all of these personal truths by sharing them with one another, and enriching and refining them through exchanges.

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