I recently heard that an old friend of mine died. He had brain cancer. This may come as a bit of a surprise to those of you who heard my radio program on curing cancer naturally. The sad fact of the matter is that I can’t MAKE anyone well. I can help them heal themselves, but if they don’t want to participate in the process, there’s not much that I can do about it.

One of my radio guests, Richard Gordon says, “A healer is someone who was sick and got well, and a great healer is someone who was very sick and got well quickly.” This simply means that the only person who can heal you is YOU. Not me, not your doctor, not the president, not your favorite celebrity, even God doesn’t seem to force healing on anyone against their will. I know a couple of individuals who have had sudden miraculous healings that I couldn’t explain with anything other than divine intervention, but even these required the person’s willing participation and their willingness to receive healing.

Free will is one of our most precious gifts, but it can also allow us to make some big, even fatal, mistakes. With great power (the ability to make our own decisions) comes great responsibility (to do our homework and make the best choice possible – for us – and also to keep our freedom of choice in our own hands; otherwise, what good is having a choice at all). If we give away our own power and freedom to a professional, how is that different from giving it away to a political dictator or despot.

I spoke with this friend several times and tried to convince him to use the natural cures that I knew would help him (and probably would have saved his life), but for whatever reason, he was only willing to do a very tiny bit of work to heal himself — not nearly enough. He also insisted on receiving chemotherapy and radiation treatments, even though I warned him that those treatments would be more likely to kill him than the cancer itself (which I have seen happen many times).

Now, I’m not saying, “Let’s just through all of modern medicine out the window and forget about it.”

What I am saying is, “Let’s look at each situation in turn and use real science and real experience to decide which approach is best for each individual person in each individual situation.” I think that this is the only sane and responsible way to make a treatment decision. If conventional medicine gets better results for condition X, then let’s use that, but if Natural Healing gets better results, then use that.

Unfortunately, there are people, like my friend, who decide to do what their doctor says, not because it has been shown scientifically to get better results, but simply because it is their doctor who said it! They believe that anyone with the letters “MD” after their name is somehow the ultimate authority on everything to do with health, even though this is certainly not the case. There is no one modality that has ALL the answers for EVERYBODY. And the best person to decide which treatment is best for you is not your doctor, it’s YOU!

If my friend had bothered to get several different opinions from several different kinds of practitioners, prayed about the situation, and chose the therapy that was shown to be the most successful, he might still be alive today; because the fact of the matter is that, in the case of cancer, natural therapies (and certain ones in particular) have been shown to be far more successful and safer than chemo and radiation (even the US government says that chemo treatments are totally ineffective for many types of cancer), yet people still choose the most dangerous and least successful treatments available. Why? Well, if you figure that one out, please let me know.

There are situations for which conventional medicine has clearly been shown to be the best option available, but chronic degenerative disease is not one of them. Instead of choosing the most extreme, radical treatment available, just because it’s there, why not choose the one that has actual evidence to back up its effectiveness and justify its use?

Conventional medicine does has some good things to offer, particularly in the field of emergency medicine, but it is only one of many.

Before choosing a treatment, would it not be the more intelligent thing to do to look at at least 5 or 6 different approaches (conventional, herbology, acupuncture, energy therapies, massage, chiropractic, reflexology, cleansing, exercise, nutrition, lifestyle modification, etc.) and pick the one (or ones) with the greatest chance of helping you heal?

If you hire a contractor to do some remodeling on your house, and the first day, he manages to destroy almost everything he touches, would you not fire him and immediately start looking for someone with a completely different approach who would do a better job? Of course you would. And yet there are still people going to the same doctor after years of unsuccessful treatments. Isn’t it time to fire that doctor and start looking for someone with a completely different approach who can do a better job? That’s what I did, and today all my health problems that were made worse through conventional treatment have been healed with natural therapies – all because I quit what wasn’t working and started looking for something that would work.

There is a saying, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.” My friend kept doing the same treatments over and over again, and kept getting the same results. The cancer would go away and come back and go away again and come back again. I think he should have taken a step back and said, “wait a minute, why isn’t this working, maybe these simply aren’t the best treatments for me.”

Now, I still love this friend and believe that I will see him again one day in heaven, but it still broke my heart to see him go so long before his time (he was only 24)!  I’m writing about this because I hope it will save a life or two so that his death will not be in vain.

So the next time you need to seek a treatment of some kind, remember that medical doctors are only one of many practitioners out there, that they are only trained in one basic modality – one way of thinking – and that the one tool they have at their disposal may not necessarily be the one you need. When your only tool is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail, but what happens if you try to use the hammer on something that really needs needle-nosed pliers?

Just some food for thought.

Listen to “Growing Your Health” on www.realcoachingradio.com every Tuesday at 5:30 pm MST.