Can Psychotherapy Cure Cancer?

Description

If you’ll forgive the hyperbole of the title, this episode examines efforts to document whether psychotherapeutic approaches can prolong survival time for people with cancer. What specifically interests me is why this seems like both a very easy and a very hard question to answer - depending on how it is approached.

Notes

Radical Remission: Surviving Cancer Against All Odds, by Dr. Kelly Turner:

https://www.radicalremission.com/

Cured: The Power of Our Immune System and the Mind-Body Connection, by Jeff Rediger:

https://amzn.eu/d/hZYSb8F

Studies by Dr. Alistair Cunningham

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10960930/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14664740/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15312263/

Studies on psychotherapy for cancer:

https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2007/07/support-groups-dont-extend-survival-of-metastatic-breast-cancer-patients-stanford-study-finds.html

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa011871