Chapter 19: Spiritual Approaches to Living with Cancer by J R Smith

You may consider it brave, foolhardy, presumptuous or just plain not appropriate for a doctor such as me to even enter into this subject. My reason for including a chapter on this subject is that over the last two plus decades I have had the privilege to look after a large number of women who have either been cured of their cancer or have lived with their cancer for a long time before succumbing to the disease. I have become quite convinced that religion and spirituality allows people to cope better with their disease than those who see things in strictly secular, non-religious terms. The term spirituality is used, as meaning, the attempt to experience a sense of the transcendental, independent of religion. I would not dream of suggesting that I think that those with religion live longer with their disease, but I do believe that particularly for those who are living with cancer many of them do ‘live better’. You may think when you start this chapter that ‘I'm somebody who's not religious or spiritual so there's no point in reading this’, or that you are religious and once again, therefore, there's not much point in reading it because how does one change the way that one is? I think it is also important that I state here at the start of this chapter that I have no agenda whatsoever to proselytize for any specific religion. I myself could have been regarded as a non-practicing Christian for the first 35 years of my life and since then have practiced, or at least tried to, Christianity in a liberal Anglo-Catholic tradition. I do also have a keen interest in Eastern Orthodoxy, in particular in aspects concerned with Christian mysticism. I impart this information not through any desire to suggest that what I do is better than what anybody else does, but merely to be clear to you in my own position. Ironically, it has been the juxtaposition of looking after patients with cancer and HIV, watching their coping mechanisms and having to develop some of my own, coupled with a brief but severe bout of personal illness, and difficulty which propelled me along my own personal route…