The first patient with whom an attempt was made to apply our developing theories was a sixty-one-year-old man who came to the medical school in 1971 with a form of throat cancer that carried a grave prognosis. He was very weak, his weight had dropped from 130 to 98 pounds, he could barely swallow his own saliva, and was having difficulty breathing. There was less than a 5 percent chance that he would survive five years. Indeed, the medical school doctors had seriously debated whether to treat him at all, since it was distinctly possible that therapy would only make him more miserable without significantly diminishing his cancer.
Carl went into the examining room determined to help this man actively participate in his treatment. This was a case that justified using exceptional measures. Carl began treating the patient by explaining how the patient himself could influence the course of his own disease. Carl then outlined a program of relaxation and mental imagery based on the research we had been accumulating. The man was to set aside three, five-to fifteen-minute periods during the day-in the morning on arising, at noon after lunch, and at night before going to bed. During these periods he was first to compose himself by sitting quietly and concentrating on the muscles of his body, starting with his head and going all the way to his feet, telling each muscle group to relax. Then, in this more relaxed state, he was to picture himself in a pleasant, quiet place-sitting under a tree, by a creek, or anywhere that suited his fancy, so long as it was pleasurable. Following this he was to imagine his cancer vividly in whatever form it seemed to take.
Next, Carl asked him to picture his treatment, radiation therapy, as consisting of millions of tiny bullets of energy that would hit all the cells, both normal and cancerous, in their path. Because the cancer cells were weaker and more confused than the normal cells, they would not be able to repair the damage, Carl suggested, and so the normal cells would remain healthy while the cancer cells would die.
Carl then asked the patient to form a mental picture of the last and most important step-his body's white blood cells coming in, swarming over the cancer cells, picking up and carrying off the dead and dying ones, flushing them out of his body through his liver and kidneys. In his mind's eye he was to visualize his cancer decreasing in size and his health returning to normal. After he completed each such exercise, he was to go about whatever he had to do the rest of the day.
What happened was beyond any of Carl's previous experience in treating cancer patients with purely physical intervention. The radiation therapy worked exceptionally well, and the man showed almost no negative reaction to the radiation on his skin or in the mucous membranes in his mouth and throat. Halfway through treatment he was able to eat again. He gained strength and weight. The cancer progressively disappeared.
During the course of treatment-both the radiation therapy and the mental imagery-the patient reported missing only one mental imagery session on a day when he went for a drive with a friend and was caught in a traffic jam. He was most upset, both with himself and with his friend, for in missing just that one session he felt his control over his condition was slipping away.
Treating this patient in this way was very exciting, but it was also somewhat frightening. The possibilities for methods of healing that seemed to be opening up before us went beyond anything that Carl's formal medical education had prepared him for.
The patient continued to progress until finally, two months later, he showed no signs of cancer. The strength of his conviction that he could influence the course of his own illness was evident when, close to the end of his treatment, he said to Carl: "Doctor, in the beginning I needed you in order to get well. Now I think you could disappear and I could still make it on my own."
Following the remission of his cancer, the patient decided on his own to apply the mental imagery technique to alleviate his arthritis, which had troubled him for years. He mentally pictured his white blood cells smoothing over the joint surfaces of his arms and legs, carrying away any debris, until the surfaces became smooth and glistening. His arthritis symptoms progressively decreased, and although they returned from time to time, he was able to diminish them to the point where he could go stream fishing regularly, not an easy sport even without arthritis.
In addition, he decided to use the relaxation and imagery approach to influence his sex life. Although he had suffered from impotence for î very twenty years, within a few weeks Of practicing the imagery techniques he was able to resume lull sexual activity, and his condition in all of these areas has remained healthy for over six years.
It is fortunate that the results of this first case were as dramatic as they were, for as we began to talk openly in medical circles about our experiences and to put forward the idea that patients had a much larger influence over the course of their disease than we gave them credit for, we received strong negative reactions. Indeed, there were many times when we, too, doubted our own conclusions. Like everyone else-and particularly anyone with medical training-we had been taught to see illness as "happening" to people, without any possibility to individual psychological control over its course, or little cause-and-effect relationship between the illness and what was going on in the rest of their lives.
However, we continued to use this new approach to cancer. Although it sometimes made no difference in the illness, in most cases it made significant changes in patients' responses to treatment. Today, in the more than seven years since Carl worked with that first patient, we have evolved a number of other processes in addition to mental imagery that we have used with patients, first at Travis Air Force Base, where Carl was chief of radiation therapy, and now at our center in Fort Worth.
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Cancer
