Psychophysiological aspects of cancer

"Cancer" refers to carcinoma, sarcoma, lymphoma, and leukemia. Hans Selye, with his stress-adaptation theory, opened the door for the holistic conceptualization of disease. Gotthard Booth laid a solid basis for the demonstration of an often important psychobiological (holistic) aspect of cancer, and also an overall theory of spontaneous regression. Booth was also a leader in demonstrating that severe masked depression generally long precedes cancer. Sir MacFarlane Burnet demonstrated in 1970 in Immunological Surveillance the enormous power and complexity of the cellular immune system, which apparently carries out surveillance against, detects, invades, and destroys many cancer cells daily in the normal human body. Cancer is thus far from a one-way process. The connection of the defensive process to the cerebral cortex is largely a discovery attributable to Selye, and to several Russian scientists. The course and outcome of cancer are notoriously unpredictable when age, sex, and lesion and spread are known. Two surgeons, Everson and Cole, in 1966 thoroughly documented 176 cases (previously published) of histologically proven untreated cancer which underwent proven so-called spontaneous regression. Several investigators, without known contradiction, have found that depression quite regularly long precedes cancer. "Spontaneous" regressions are basic.