About a year ago, a relative was diagnosed with bowel cancer. He was told bluntly by his doctor he wouldn’t make next Christmas. With those words, and not being prepared to hear them, everything turned to blur.
After one course of poisonous chemotherapy and radiotherapy, the relative changed direction and undertook a more natural approach, cleansing his body and replacing usual unhealthy meals with foods from nature. While he’s not in the clear, he has a new lease on life and has, in effect, become his own doctor, managing his own body. He has taken it upon himself to do his own research. It’s now likely he will indeed see next Christmas. Probably the Christmas after that, too.
So, the question remains: what gives another person the right, doctor or otherwise, to tell another human being when their approximate date of death will be? When did we make it part of the health “care” system to strip away a person’s hope? When did Western doctors become psychics?
Australian cancer survivor, Ian Gawler, is a living example of why doctor’s predictions of a death date are often wrong, and entirely not up to the doctor to predict. He was told he had three to six months to live. That was more than 30 years ago.
Since, Ian has become a high-profile spokesperson for how the power of the mind and nutrition can rewrite our state of health—and why it’s crucial to become our own doctors of prevention. He believes in integrated medicine. He believes in asking questions and not taking diagnosis at face value.
ABC Television’s Compass interviewed Ian Gawler last year, describing his journey from diagnosis to not only recovery but to a new, higher vibrational way of living.
Ian also tells the stunning story of sharing his recovery with this doctors who had given him just months to live:
“One of the things that really confounded me when I got well back in 1978 was I went back to some of my original doctors and I said – look at this [laughs]. Fancy this, you know, here I am, I’m still alive and even better, the cancer’s gone. And you know what happened? Instead of saying – wow, that’s really interesting, what did you do? They got angry with me. And it was incredible. As a veterinarian it was, like, stunning. If I did that in my veterinary practise I’d think I must be nuts and I wouldn’t have a practise. But these people thought it was better to get angry with me because in their view I got well for the wrong reasons. I’d gone off and changed my diet and meditated instead of being dutiful and dying on time.”
Watch this informative, inspiring video here. Also, check out excerpts from the interview below:
A Good Life is a Conscious Life
“I think the best definition I can think of, of a good life, is a conscious life. Where you’re actually awake as opposed to, you know, going to sleep and missing it. What being awake means is to actually be more present. To actually be paying attention to what you’re doing now. It’s sort of about where your attention is. So if I’m planting cauliflowers in the garden, I’m giving the cauliflowers my full attention or if I’m with somebody who’s got a major illness I’m giving them my full attention. Or if I’m home in bed with my wife I’m giving her my full attention.”
Diagnosed with Aggressive Bone Cancer
“I was a twenty-four year old veterinarian, a decathlon athlete – very fit, thought I was very well. Thought I’d strained a muscle in my right leg through my athletics but in fact the strain in that leg persisted and the leg started to swell and when I had it investigated it turned out that I had an osteogenic sarcoma, which is a particularly aggressive form of bone cancer. The treatment of choice was to have my leg amputated through the hip, which was done in the beginning of 1975 and effectively that changed my life completely.”
A Spiritual Awakening
“For me there was a real constant existential dilemma in that I’d go off to the bank at the end of the week and I’d be putting lots of money in the bank from all this hard work I’d been doing but there was this other little voice in me saying – yes but what have you actually done that’s meaningful or of spiritual significance in your life. So the illness, for me, served as a real reminder actually to rekindle that spiritual focus in my life. And that actually gave the whole thing meaning and purpose.”
On Meditation
“I was very fortunate because I’d heard a lot about meditation in the past and I’d been interested in it and I took a book with me into hospital – Chogyam Trungpa’s ‘Meditation in Action’ and so I read that and that got me started with meditation. And the other thing was I took the ‘Bhagavad-Gita’ with me and I read that and that spoke to me very much of the existential dilemma and the question about how do you live in a secular world with a spiritual view.”
A Religious Paradigm
“I never saw a contradiction between the Christian view and the Eastern view – I just sort of added the two together and got a paradigm which worked for me, which… through my illness, actually, I probably got more comfort from my Christian connections than my Hindu or even Buddhist tradition. “
The Grapple with Conventional Medicine
“Being a veterinarian was a bit like a double-edged sword because on the one hand I’d got this profound respect for animals’ ability to heal themselves and thought well that could work for me. But on the other hand I had the medical paradigm. And I’d operated on dogs with osteogenic sarcoma, the same cancer that I had. I’d taken their legs off and I’d seen the cancer re-occur and I’d seen them die very quickly after that happened. So I was around in the times when I needed to heal from this very difficult cancer, in what were the pioneering days of mind/body medicine. And despite, again, the fact that as a veterinarian I was actually trained in nutrition, for me to grapple with the idea that while conventional medicine couldn’t cure me perhaps changing the way I ate, meditating, using the power of the mind – that could help me to get well. That was actually quite a hurdle to overcome. And that took a long time.”
On Dr Ainslie Meares
“I think he was such an extraordinary man, so far ahead of his time. He was the first senior medical figure to recognise the therapeutic benefits of meditation and to devote his medical life to that And I was very fortunate to meet him when he was prepared to go public with the notion that intense meditation might help people to recover from cancer. Ainslie Meares introduced me to meditation in a therapeutic context and I only spent about 6 weeks with him during the time of my illness, and then after I recovered I saw him quite regularly and he became a major mentor and guide in the development of the work I’ve been doing since.”
On Meeting Indian Spiritual Guru Sai Baba
“It was profound and it came as a culmination of a whole lot of experiences that led up to it. I got called in for an interview. Then this disarmingly brief but poignant interview, the key words of which were, ‘You’re already healed and don’t worry,’ and those words catalysing or clarifying the dilemma I was in where I thought it was possible to get well but having doubt about it. And being helped through that experience to come away with the clarity of conviction that I really would get well.”
On Doctor’s Getting Angry at his Recovery
“One of the things that really confounded me when I got well back in 1978 was I went back to some of my original doctors and I said – look at this [laughs]. Fancy this, you know, here I am, I’m still alive and even better, the cancer’s gone. And you know what happened? Instead of saying – wow, that’s really interesting, what did you do? They got angry with me. And it was incredible. As a veterinarian it was, like, stunning. If I did that in my veterinary practise I’d think I must be nuts and I wouldn’t have a practise. But these people thought it was better to get angry with me because in their view I got well for the wrong reasons. I’d gone off and changed my diet and meditated instead of being dutiful and dying on time.”
On Cancer
“If you think there’s only a small chance I’m going to get well and that’s the focus of what you’re doing and so you’ve changed your diet with that thought that you’re going to get well…Cancer is clearly a multi-factorial, chronic, degenerative disease. So multi-factorial means that it’s not just one thing. There’s not just one virus, not just one thing in our food and I think really it’s both physical, emotional, mental, spiritual – all those things can impact on cancer. It’s what makes it such an extraordinary disease in many ways. ”
On Managing Cancer
“Understanding that cancer is a chronic, multi-factorial, degenerative disease really directs us to how we need to manage it really effectively. It’s more than just taking account of what can be done medically. It’s like – how can we restore the health within our own system so that we actually have a regenerative process going on within our body. And we do that, again, through building a healthy lifestyle.”
On Faith
“What I can say, I think, is quite a lot of people who’ve got well have actually gone through that transition from belief to faith. I think for me, I’m talking about an inner process. So when I’m talking about faith, the faith that I’m talking about is an inner state of mind and it involves having this confidence in what you’re doing. If you have a doubt it sort of grabs you and rattle you around before it lets you go.”
“One of the real tragedies of the cancer work I’m involved in is that many of the people who come to our groups have actually been given bad news badly. And by that I mean their doctors have actually told them that they’re in a difficult situation but in doing so they’ve painted a picture that actually takes these people’s hope away. And it seems like for some people in the medical profession if there’s a poor prognosis they have the notion that it’s better to actually be direct, be what they regard as truthful, but what can tend to happen is they emphasise the negative possibilities rather than the positive possibilities.”
On Research
“This is a labyrinth. How many of you have seen a labyrinth before? Just a few? So….
Nobody is seriously studying the long term survivors. And what a waste of money that is. Here’s one of the greatest resources available to people who are freshly diagnosed with cancer is the people who actually manage to do well with it and are still alive, and nobody’s studying them.”
“And one of the nice things about it is that you come to these little dead ends as it were – you’re going along in one direction and you have to turn and change, so it’s quite a nice metaphor for how in life you try something and you go along for a while and then you have to move around and change direction and do something else.
Nobody has ever come to me from a research point of view and said – Ian, what the hell did you do? Perhaps we should look at your DNA, you know, perhaps something’s happened that we can learn from. I’m the one who’s had to do that, you know, go out and confront the medical profession in days gone by.”
A Lifestyle Dis-ease
“If look at the causes of cancer in conventional medicine it’s about 75% lifestyle related. What we eat counts for about a third of all the cancers. Smoking accounts for another third. So that’s, you know, you’re up to 65% already. Then you put in the environmental factors and lack of exercise and lack of sunlight and things like that, you get up to 75 – 80% easy.
What is more controversial is the role of life style in recovery from cancer and the evidence for that’s really growing and I would say it’s quite compelling. I think it’s very reasonable to say that in a most modest level if people have what you regard as a really unhealthy lifestyle compared to a healthy lifestyle, the healthy lifestyle would double their life expectancy in terms of how long they’ll survive a cancer diagnosis.”
On Integrative Medicine
“I’m a very strong believer in integrative medicine, which recognises the benefit of conventional medicine but is happy to question it. So integrative medicine takes the best of conventional medicine, adds to that what can be done through natural therapies, adds to that what can be done through the individual’s own efforts.”
Between Diagnosis and Death
“The sad truth is for some people with cancer the time between their diagnosis and their death is just a misery. They’re really fearful. They’re really anxious. They have trouble communicating. They don’t say the things they’d like to, to the family. There’s just distress all around them and the whole thing can, in the worst-case scenario, be really unfortunate, really unpleasant.”
“By contrast if people are helped and they actually learn what they can do to make the best of that situation, they can actually learn to complete their life and to die with a sense of fulfilment and with a sense of inner peace. And the curious thing is if that’s the case for the person who’s got the illness, it tends to flow into the people around them. And so it encourages communication. It encourages the sense that we can say to this person that we love the things that are important. And sure, it’s still disappointing. There may still be a sense of regret that the person’s died but there’s this real acceptance of it. There’s this real acknowledgment that it’s gone as well as possible. And people are actually left with a good feeling and often quite inspired in fact by the whole process. And the knowledge that it is possible to die well.”
Death as a Friend
“I don’t think there’s any contradiction in hoping to live and preparing for death. I think the best way to live a good life is to be prepared for death, and to see death as a friend, because if you take death seriously, then it informs your life, because it helps you to take into recognise two fundamentals in life. One is that it’s incredibly precious, and the other is that it’s incredibly fragile.”
On Leading a Healthy Lifestyle
“The tragedy is most people know what a healthy lifestyle is and so many people aren’t actually following it. So I think it’s a matter of people trying to get clear on what they’re really interested in actually and then if they do want to be healthy and well thinking about what’s actually the problem. What’s the root problem and the root problem’s the mind. It’s our mental state and the emotional overload that’s affecting the judgement in what we do in daily life.”
On Mindfulness
“So let’s have a look at this extraordinary tree. It’s a Red Oak and if you didn’t know anything about the laws of biology you’d think, “Gosh, where does that come from? How was that made? Who built it?” And again, if you didn’t know anything about the laws of biology and I was to show you this (holds up acorn) and told you that this actually produced that, well, I don’t know. If you didn’t know the laws of biology, you’d think I was nuts. But because we know you can see it grow into a little tree and into a bigger tree, and if you wait nearly 100 years you can have a tree like that.”
“And so, it’s a bit like that with your mind – if you don’t know the laws of your mind and you see things happening around you and you think, “Well, how did that happen?” But if you actually know the laws that govern your mind, you can take a small idea and you can plant it, and if you know how to look after it, if you know how to nurture it and protect it and help it to grow, then quite extraordinary things can come out of the seed of your mind.”
“So for a lot of people what I’m talking about is what’s described as mindfulness, which is this capacity to use your mind to give full attention to what you’re doing, in a way that’s quite deliberate and non-judgemental. And what that means is you actually get the full benefit out of whatever you’re doing. You don’t miss it. It’s like you actually get the full experience of each moment of your life.”
Looking Back
“I can look back and say, well, there’s so much good that’s come out of my illness, but would you ask me would I rather have two legs, that’s a really difficult one, because really what I would have liked is to have learnt these lessons without having to go through the illness, without having to have the loss of a leg, without all that went with that. And if there’s a message that comes really clearly out of people dealing with major difficulties in their life, it’s to the people who are well to say wake up, you’ve got this wonderful life, you’ve got this wonderful opportunity. Don’t miss it, don’t waste it. Do the best you can with it. And one of the ways to do that is to be reminded that you could die at any time. Death’s a real friend when you take it seriously, because it makes you realise that you may not have forever, why not use this precious moment that you’ve got now to best advantage.”
Photo courtesy ACCC Buzz
