Counselling & Psychotherapy Can Give Longer Life
To Some Cancer Patients
In 1989 Dr Spiegel of the renowned and prestigious Stanford Medical School in the USA set up a study that was intended to prove that group therapy did not affect the survival rates for women with the type of breast cancer that had already spread to other parts of their body.
The women, who were all undergoing conventional treatment such as radiotherapy and chemotherapy, were randomly assigned to two groups. One group took part in weekly group therapy sessions for a year and the other did not.
Five years later Dr Spiegel finally got around to collating the results and when he studied them, in the words of Dr Spiegel ‘…I almost fell off my chair’
The results showed that the members of the therapy group lived on average almost twice as long as the non-therapy group.
In fact the only women still alive after the five years were several of those who had been in the therapy group. None of the other patients who were not in group therapy had survived.
These findings were subsequently published in The Lancet, the journal of the medical profession.
A thorough investigation was then undertaken into the results and no significant differences were found between the both groups in the stage of cancer or it’s severity and whether chemotherapy or radiotherapy had been used.
The only variable found to affect survival time was the participation in the therapy group.
After this initial study numerous other studies were undertaken during the 1990’s. The results of these have now led to Dr Spiegel to state that group, individual and family psychotherapies are of “…proven efficacy and deserve inclusion as standard treatment for cancer patients”
The benefits of therapy are shown to include not only the expected reduction in depression, anxiety and pain, but also consistently and repeatedly showed evidence of extended survival time. Basically group participants lived significantly longer.
Reference
Dean Ornish MD (1998) Love & Survival. Harper Collins
A useful book with a lot of easily readable information from numerous scientific studies about ways to improve health, and also prevent and recover from disease.