Maintaining the all important positive attitude is often a challenge. After skimming the cautionary and negative opinions about proton beam therapy by many health care practitioners at The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services comment line I noticed I was being being nudged into second guessing my decision to follow this course of treatment. It required a review of all the positive reports from 10 year plus PBT veterans and the realization that most of the critics were from competing treatment modalities to re-center me in a confident frame of mind.
Today comes another ‘tap on the shoulder’.
The September 1st issue of the International Journal of Cancer contains an article reporting on a study showing that prostate irradiation raises the risk of subsequent colon cancer.
Once again it took me a while to realize that the article referred to ‘external beam radiation therapy’ and did not make mention of proton beam therapy. Nevertheless my tricky mind wanted to posit worst case interpretations.
The Information Age gives our brains so much information to ponder that it is easy to slip into these mind games.
I find the most effective antidote to be the regular practice of mindfulness meditation. (A superb guide to this practice can be found at the Introduction to Meditation page of the AudioDharma website). Catching myself before (or soon after) I spin off into a session of doubt and second guessing is only one of the many benefits of regular practice of this meditation technique. And you don’t need to be a Buddhist to practice! No doubt I’ll write more on this in another post
You said: The Information Age gives our brains so much information to ponder that it is easy to slip into these mind games.
Amen to that. I can’t even begin to fathom the number of messages, both hidden and explicit, that I come across just by checking my email. What is even more scary is how many of those messages I actually take note of without even realizing it. The link to the meditation page is great. Thanks for sharing that. I am going to take another look.
I also was hoping to talk to you about placing a link on your site regarding prostate cancer information. Could you please contact me at curecancer1 at gmail dot com?
Thank you and I hope you have a great week.
[...] Continued here: positive attitude maintenance [...]