Both Conventional and Alternative Therapies Saved my Life

The following is based on a submission I made to Mosaic Magazine regarding my experience with Alternative Therapies. It outlines my own journey in the alternative therapy field and gives an idea of how I wound up a practitioner myself. It is often our biggest challenges that set us upon our paths.

At age 7, I was hospitalized suffering from a serious earache. They treated me for this earache with a high dose of x-rays. At age 15, I had thyroid cancer.(The only known cause of thyroid cancer is exposure to radiation) Because of my youth the doctors decided to use both surgery and radiation to treat the cancer. At age 30, after having two years of walking around with extreme pain in my neck and back, I was diagnosed with a spinal cord tumor in the same area of the radiation I received for the thyroid cancer (C2 to C6). A few months after recuperating from surgery to remove this tumor, I was diagnosed with yet a third tumor, this time quite an aggressive and fast growing one on my salivary gland. Luckily I was diagnosed relatively early and it was removed surgically before too much damage was done.

While not knowing the cause of all these cancers, I wasn’t liking the trend. I also had residual scarring, low energy and a compromised immune system. I was in pain a lot of the time. I had pretty much worn out and exasperated my family physician with my list of complaints that had no discernible cause or solution. I decided that I was going to check out alternative therapies and keep looking until I found my health again.

I had chiropractic care, therapeutic massage therapy, rolfing, reiki, cellular memory reprogramming, acupuncture, Bowen therapy, healing touch, and took a raft of supplements. Each of these helped to send me back on track, and
each provided improvement to my life in some way or another. Later, I
discovered Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) for dealing with many of
the emotional issues from my past that were still triggering me and
causing me to be cranky, unpleasant, and sarcastic ( I called it witty).

Today at 51, I have been pretty much cancer free for 21 years. I have let go of most of those issues that used to provoke an aggressive reaction in me.
I have a better relationship with my husband of 28 years. I have a better
understanding of and compassion for human weakness. I also feel that I
have grown spiritually. I attribute these improvements to my own
willingness to find a solution to my health and personal issues and my
determination to use the tools that were presented to me in the forms
mentioned above.

Alternative health techniques do not attract the interest of big
pharmaceutical companies for research purposes. Alternative health tends
to be under-funded and performed by practitioners who, like farmers,
require some other way of supporting themselves. However, alternative
therapies work. They do not involve adverse side effects or life
threatening surgeries. Although both conventional and alternative therapies have helped me immensely to get my life back from the brink, alternative therapies have not added to my burden by causing me harm.