Cause Over Cure

DIFFICULT TIMES... We can all benefit from times of constriction and difficulty to help us grow and learn. It can be very challenging to maintain a positive at...titude and a measure of faith when you are in the midst of difficult times. This is partly because we tend to think that if the universe loves us we will experience that love in the form of positive circumstances. However, we are like children, and the universe is our wise mother who knows what our souls need to thrive better than we do. Just as a young child does not benefit from getting everything she wants, we also benefit from times of constriction and difficulty to help us grow and learn. If we keep this in mind, and continue to trust that we are loved even when things are hard, it helps us bear the difficult time with grace. This period of time in history is full of difficulty for a lot of human beings, and you may feel less alone knowing you are not being singled out. There are extreme energy changes pulsing through the universe at every level and, of course, we are all part of the growing process and the growing pains. It helps if we remember that life is one phase after another and that this difficult time will inevitably give way to something new and different. When we feel overwhelmed we can comfort ourselves with the wise saying: This too shall pass. At the same time, if you truly feel that nothing is going right for you, it's never a bad idea to examine your life and see if there are some changes you can make to alleviate some of the difficulty. Gently and compassionately exploring the areas giving you the most trouble may reveal things you are holding onto and need to release: unprocessed emotions, unresolved transitions, or negative ways of looking at yourself or reality. As you take responsibility for the things you can change, you can more easily surrender to the things you can't, remembering all the while that this phase will, without doubt, give way to another. Pleased check out this website for inspirational courses to encourage balance and improved health... By Madisyn Taylor https://www.dailyom.com/#nav

5 STAR reviews of Cancer Coach Professionals of America Inc. are the life-blood of what we do to encourage you to a safe and early recovery. We have many of th...ese 5 star reviews. We have listed a few here and if you would like to see more, please visit our website @ http://www.cancercoachprofessionalsofamerica.com or contact us here and we will be happy to send more your way with the name and date of each review. We are not just a self-made organization: we have medical doctors and oncologists and cancer institutions all over North America utilizing our training and education in integrative oncology. It is the cancer patients and doctors whom have sought us out, the cancer foundations and hospitals who hired us to train their staff/employees in order to better help answer the demands and needs of the individual cancer patients they have in their care. We hope that you never need our services, but if you do, we are here for you 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Jeanette Marshall, Founder Preet Mankoo, President / CEO Dr. Steve Dudley, MD Oncologist

Two Errors Our Minds Make When Trying to Grasp the Pandemic by Arthur C. Brooks Disappointment and uncertainty are inevitable. But we don’t have to turn them in...to suffering. Recently, I checked in on a friend who, like many of us, is sheltering in place during the coronavirus epidemic. I asked how she was doing. Not great, she told me. When she wakes up every day, her first thoughts are about what she would have been doing if it weren’t for the virus. Then she spends hours reading and watching everything she can about what the models are projecting and what the experts are saying about the crisis. She confessed that she is frittering away her time thinking about what might have been and what might happen, and ends her days frustrated and exhausted. A lot of people are feeling this way as the quarantine drags on. There’s so much we are missing from our old livesgraduations, weddings, family get-togethers, religious celebrations. There’s so much uncertainty about what we can expect in the coming weeks and months. It’s natural to feel this way, of course. But many of us are likely fueling these negative feelings more than necessary, because of subtle cognitive errors. With knowledge and a little practice, these errors are easy to correct. By doing so, we can improve our outlook on the current situation and learn to be better thinkers in the future. Error 1: Confusing disappointment with regret My late father was a notorious pessimist. I remember once during a long road trip in rural Montana, he announced that we were probably going to run out of gas and have to spend the night in the car on the side of the road. I looked at the gas gauge and saw that the tank was more than half full. I asked why he assumed the absolute worst-case scenario was going to happen. If I assume the worst, I’m less likely to be disappointed, he told me. https://www.theatlantic.com//a-therapists-guide-to/608161/ My dad might have been an extreme case, but in general, people hate being disappointed. Research shows that they are willing to go to great lengths to avoid it. Psychologists call this prospective outcome bias, and find that people are willing to make more of an effort to avoid disappointment than to raise the probability of success. In one experiment, nearly 90 percent of participants who already had an 85 percent chance of winning a $5 gift card were willing to do busywork on a computer to raise their chances to 97 percent. But fewer participants (just over 60 percent) were willing to make the same effort to raise their chances when the likelihood of getting the gift card was low to start with. (In the second condition, their chances would have gone from 3 to 15 percent.) But disappointment is very similar to another unpleasant emotion: regret. It’s easy to confuse the two. They both involve wishing something better had occurred. Many psychology experiments have thus treated them synonymously, and, indeed, people often process these feelings in a similar way: through rumination and counterfactual thinking. Ruminationliterally, chewing the cudinvolves turning a scenario over and over in our minds, while counterfactual thinking is the process of imagining things turning out differently. This is what my friend was doing when she imagined her life in the absence of the coronavirus shutdown, and what you may be doing as well. Rumination and counterfactual thinking are uniquely human abilities that, in the case of regret, allow us to learn and make improvements after we make an error. Imagine you say something stupid in a business meeting and your boss shows disapproval. You spend the rest of the day turning the incident over in your head and imagining what would have happened if you had said something else instead. As long as regret does not become obsessive, it is beneficial because it trains your brain to do something different next time. https://www.theatlantic.com//regret-is-the-price-o/486077/ No good comes from applying rumination and counterfactual thinking to disappointment, however. The reason is the small-but-important distinction between regret and disappointment: agency. Research shows that when I experience regret, I think, I should have known better. With disappointment, I feel I have missed out on something beyond my control. There’s no point in imagining over and over what could have been different about something I could not have affected; it simply creates a feedback loop that reinforces my disappointment, making me unhappier. In short, rumination on what you would be doing if it weren’t for the coronavirus is a destructive waste of your time. Error 2: Confusing uncertainty with risk Why does my friend spend so much time consuming information about the coronavirus? She isn’t a scientist, and doesn’t work on anything related to the pandemic. Still, she visits the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center every day to see if the curve of cases and deaths is flattening. She watches hours of news in which experts are interviewed about the pandemic’s trajectory and when they think life will return to normal. She is making another cognitive error: She is mistaking uncertainty for risk. Uncertainty involves unknown possible outcomes and thus unknowable probabilities. Risk involves known possible outcomes and probabilities that we can estimate. Risk is not especially scary, because it can be managedindeed, risk management is the core business of the insurance industry. Uncertainty, on the other hand, is scary, because it is not manageable: We can’t measure the likelihood and impacts of the unknowable. At present, COVID-19 is more of an uncertainty than a risk. Will you get the virus? What happens if you do? When will the crisis end? Are we creating an economic depression? People can opine and make informed guesses, but no one really knows the answers to these questions. It’s natural to try to convert uncertainty into risk by gorging ourselves on available information. So we watch 24-hour news channels where hosts interview people with only marginally more knowledge than we have. We scour the internet for predictions. We look at the Dow Jones Industrial Average as if it were the zodiac. Surely, we think, if we just knew enough about something, we could accurately assess how much we're at risk. https://www.theatlantic.com//the-psychology-of-irr/382080/ But all of that is an exercise in futility The information we now have about the coronavirus is incomplete; in an effort to apprehend risk, we have simply wallowed in more uncertainty. And after a few hours of doing that, we will be more anxious than when we began. The solution to these two problems is to follow three simple steps: acknowledge, distinguish, resolve. In the case of disappointment, start by acknowledging the fact that you are disappointed at missing out on some thingsit would be strange if you weren’t. Then, distinguish your disappointment from regret by thinking about your own role in this global catastrophe. Note that while the crisis affects you, you had no role in causing it, so rumination and counterfactual thinking aren’t productive. Finally, resolve not to let your disappointment interfere with what you can affect and the choices you can make today. These steps can help you manage living with uncertainty, as well. Start by acknowledging that you do not know what is going to happen in this crisis. Next, distinguish between what can and can’t be known right now, and thus recognize that gorging on all the available information will not really resolve your knowledge deficityou won’t be able to turn uncertainty into risk by spending more hours watching CNN, because the certainty you seek is not attainable. Finally, resolve that while you don’t know what will happen next week or next month, you do know that you are alive and well right now, and refuse to waste the gift of this day. (One more practical suggestion: Limit your consumption of news to half an hour in the morning, and stay off social media except to talk to friends. No cheating!) Disappointment and uncertainty are inevitable, but we don’t have to turn them into suffering. Ruminating over what might have been and what might happen will reliably deliver unhappiness. If you practice eliminating these mental errors during the pandemic, you’ll be happier today, and better equipped to deal with the hard parts of ordinary life, whenever it resumes. We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to [email protected]. This piece has been written by Arthur C. Brooks a contributing writer at The Atlantic, a professor of the practice of public leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School, and a senior fellow at the Harvard Business School.

Prioritizing Family Health History Make sure to prioritize your family health history to understand your risk of cancer. Family history’s effect on cancer risk ...wasn’t always a major topic in health care. Barriers to the discussion included lack of family history details, cost of genetic testing and a full understanding of genetics’ role in cancer development. However, evolving research has shown that history and risk can go hand in hand. Health care providers are starting conversations with patients, and patients are speaking up among their relatives. Advocacy organizations such as Facing Our Risk of Cancer Empowered, more commonly known as FORCE, have helped bridge the gap and serve as a starting point for women who face hereditary breast and ovarian cancer. More women are also taking steps to discuss genetics with their children. For instance, the book Proactive Genes, written by Shannon Pulaski and published by MJH Life Sciences TM, uses age-appropriate language to help children understand their risk, establish healthy lifestyle behaviors and grow into pro- active patients. Decades ago, some families relied solely on experts in the genetics field to tell them if they carried certain mutations, such as in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes, that put them at higher risk of cancer. Described as the father of hereditary cancer detection and prevention, Dr. Henry Lynch founded and directed the Hereditary Cancer Center at Creighton University, which opened in 1984, and studied thousands of families to track the links between genetics and cancer. Decades later, at least two women whose families were part of his research found flaws, each received a misdiagnosis for the BRCA gene. One was told she was BRCA1 positive but was really negative; the other was told she was BRCA2 negative when in fact she was positive. Within these pages, both women describe how they learned about the mistake and the steps they are taking to regain control of their health. As always, thank you for reading. BY Mike Hennessy Sr., Chairman and Founder PUBLISHED April 15, 2020