Can positive thinking cure cancer?

Can positive thinking cure cancer? Personally I don’t think so. That’s not to say that attitude is not important, but the idea that it’s “your fault” if your cancer can’t be cured has no scientific basis. Some of the treatments we have now can cure some types of cancer sadly, not all treatments cure all cancers and I don’t believe that’s because of the state of mind of those individuals. I think we fail to cure some types of cancer because we don’t (yet) have specific treatments aimed at the specific mutations and DNA damage in these particular tumours. Obviously I think with more research and over time (and I do mean a long time 50 odd years) I think many more cancers will be cured as we get better at making new drugs (e.g. we have only just started using new drugs aimed at cell signalling pathways).

This is a rather rambling introduction to a book I read called “Bright Sided – How the relentless promotion of positive thinking has undermined America” by Barbara Ehrenreich (It’s been released in the UK as a paperback cherfully called “Smile or Die”). Not an obvious book for a cancer website. Clearly I wasn’t the only person that read this over the holiday as Ron Ferguson’s opinion piece in Tuesday’s Press and Journal was about the same book “It’s always best to accentuate the positive, but get real, too.”

Wikipedia describe Barbara Ehrenriech as a feminist, socialist and political commentator. As it turns out, she started her career in science with an undergraduate degree in physics and a PhD in cell biology. So why was I reading a book by an American political commentator? She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2000 and while searching the internet I came across her article “Cancerland”, it is a long article but well worth a read, a version of this article appeared in the Guardian last week called “Smile – You’ve got Cancer”. This forms the basis of the first chapter of the book Bright Sided, the rest of the book discusses postive psychology and how it affects American business.

Did I like this book? Yes, with some qualifications. It is refreshing to read something that goes against the grain of the “think positive” mentality. There is little evidence to suggests that environmental pesticides and chemcials cause a large number of cases of breast cancer (this is a point made frequently in the Cancerland article) and this is my one main complaint about an otherwise excellent book.

There is more and more research to suggest that your attitude has little to do with whether you are cured (or how long you survive) after you’ve been diagnosed with cancer. As Ron Ferguson points out it is cruel to give people “the added burden of believing that it’s all your own fault”. For this reason alone I think Barbara Ehrenreich’s book is important and deserves to be more widely known.

The effect of all this positive thinking is to transform breast cancer into a rite of passage – not an injustice or a tragedy to rail against but a normal marker in the life cycle, like menopause or grandmotherhood. Everything in mainstream breast cancer culture serves, no doubt inadvertently, to tame and normalise the disease…

…Breast cancer, I can now report, did not make me prettier or stronger, more feminine or spiritual. What it gave me, if you want to call this a “gift”, was a very personal, agonising encounter with an ideological force in American culture that I had not been aware of before – one that encourages us to deny reality, submit cheerfully to misfortune and blame only ourselves for our fate.

Barbara Ehrenreich Smile or Die – The Guardian

At the end of the day this book made me think more critically about the view that positive thinking is a good thing. This applies not only to cancer, but to accept modern working practices, if you get laid off (or your contract isn’t renewed) then it is somehow “your fault” and if only you have the “right” attitude you’d still have a job. An interesting message in the current financial climate, that maybe instead of questioning our own personal character failings we should start asking questions about the bigger picture and demanding action.

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