Cancer Journal #48 August 20

My wife and I went to live music the other night.  We ran into an old classmate of hers visiting from out of town.  He has been diagnosed with prostate cancer for four years with a Gleason score of eight, an aggressive form, just like mine.  He and I have a lot to blab about.  I tell him I've just started having hot flashes from the hormone treatment but that it's not too bad.  He says they will get bad and that he has bought four handheld battery operated fans he has left at various places around the house and that I will be happier if I get some too.  Nice things to get advice about.

I tell him about Vitamin C infusion and he gets a look of concern and wants to know what the authority I rely on for designating this as an effective treatment.  Jeez, I don't know!  I can't rattle that stuff off!  I have a hard time naming the two meds I get from Mayo and sure can't come up with that other stuff.  He takes a dim view of high dose melatonin too.  He's diplomatic but I get the distinct sense that he thinks I do cancer wrong.

I should say at the outset that maybe the man is right.  It could be that standard medical treatment without flirtations with alternate things provides the best outcomes.  He's certainly had more time to look into this stuff and look into it he has.  He recites a complicated multi-step course of treatment he has undergone that I would no more be able to master.  I simply could not have.  It's my shortcoming, not his.  You can't accuse him of majoring in minors when the issue is mortality.  If there's fault to be found, it's my not being more on top of what's going on.

And yet, I can't.  It's not what I am.  Some it is having a brain that might be good at some things but surely not that.  Some though it is just not having full confidence in the medical model.  He sees the best medical authority as the ace of trump.  I see it as the jack or maybe the ten, people with an agenda that you can discern if you follow the money--at least maybe.

My only ace of trump is the Holy Spirit.  That perhaps sounds unpleasantly pious but it creates a fundamentally different outlook.  As we visited, I could tell that we had our eggs in different baskets.  He's all in on medical science.  That's where his hepped up confidence is.  Mine just plain is not.  I don't know that it should necessarily follow that because my confidence is in the Lord, I should therefor be more open to alternate treatments like Vitamin C infusion.  But maybe it kind of does.  Man's efforts are partial and insufficient so why treat experts as the best show in town.  Maybe other treatments are worth a try. 

Let me inject that there are some truly kuku Christians out there who reject scientific evidence on matters where full scale rejection is simply wrong.  Maybe some reservations, some openness to competing evidence but not unexamined rejection.  I don't know where the line should be drawn for not placing confidence in man but I think they are badly off.  I hold no brief for stupid.