Yes! That is indeed the Capital Building in the early 1980s. Picture is Bobbi Campbell, a gay AIDS patient from that era. He is one of my biggest health, TMS, and attitude inspirations. That may sound puzzling to some, but he spoke extensively about the importance of maintaining a fighting attitude while dealing with disease as well as recognizing the overall mind-body connection, which greatly helped me after my Ehlers-Danlos and TMS diagnoses. I posted about wanting to apply for assisted suicide a year ago, but Bobbi fought for his life and saw value in his experiences (both challenging and happy) every single day, which I admire. Back when he had AIDS, patients were treated terribly by the world, and there were no medications available.
Cancer (Kaposi's sarcoma) was one of the opportunistic infections Bobbi developed from AIDS. A nurse practitioner in San Francisco, he was very aware of research on how certain personality types may be more likely to develop cancer. Fortunately, my TMS has significantly improved (I could barely type, hold my cell phone, pet my cat, etc. last year!), so I was able to type up part of a discussion Bobbi had on this exact topic. This transcription is quite literal and raw, so there are definitely some grammatical errors.
BOBBI: I feel very positive about the chemotherapy. Many people who have cancer who are on chemotherapy have a negative view of their chemotherapy.
Some work that has been done recently, especially in San Antonio, Texas and other places, make it clear that cancer is real closely related to one's mental status, and it may very well be that people bring on cancers by their mental attitude, that there's a certain type of personality which is associated with a predisposition to get cancer, and that once a person has cancer, you can either give up and die, quite literally - people who adopt kind of a defeatist attitude are more prone to have widespread metastases or spread of their cancer, and they're more likely to die quicker. Whereas people who have more of a fighting attitude who believe they're going to live, do in fact much more commonly. And one of the ways to do that is through techniques known as visualization which you imagine the chemotherapy as sort of like little Pac-Men eating up the cancer cells and flushing them out. And I've tried to have, well, I have a real positive attitude toward my chemotherapy. One week when I was not allowed to have it because my white count was too low, I really felt cheated.
INTERVIEWER: The attitude that you're talking about, that a positive attitude will help people get over their diseases, and maybe prevent them to begin with. How do you think that works? Is there the possibility of conscious control of the immune system, that's what it sounds like?
BOBBI: I would say indirectly, yes. It seems pretty clear that...
INTERVIEWER: Secrets of the yogi.
BOBBI: Something like that. I think that we in the Western world tend to have a real dichotomy, a real separation in ourselves between the mind and the body, and I don't think that's so. And I'm only just beginning to come to this realization, I'll tell you, but it certainly has been made clear recently that people have control over such things as their heart beat or their body temperature, that kind of thing, things which were formerly believed to be classed under the autonomic nervous system, which by its very name implies that it's not under your control, it's automatic. It seems also to be true that if people can raise their blood pressure or raise their body temperature or so forth, that they can also inhibit certain processes in their body which...
INTERVIEWER: Or activate...
BOBBI: Or active certain processes in their body which either help you or hurt you in certain ways.
It may well be for instance that a person who tends not to take care of themself, through whatever reason, may develop an illness. And this may sort of be the body's way or the organism's way to make you stop and take stock of yourself and start taking care of yourself. It's rather an extreme measure, I must say. I will say that I am taking care of myself more now than I ever did before. I just wish I hadn't had such a firm kick in the butt to do it, but I am. And I'm real happy with that.
INTERVIEWER: Activating one's immune system to work with the doctor's drugs to overcome cancer is a long process, but doctors have written before about "miraculous remissions" and so forth, that they just simply cannot understand. It seems that those are just the power of faith or prayer or whatever has a lot to do with what it does to the attitude of people, and a re-integration of "mind and body," "spirit and flesh," however one wants to do it. Those are only words anyway.
BOBBI: Right. I'm, as I say, I'm just starting to come into this. I was, up until now, quite the empiricist and quite the logical scientist...
INTERVIEWER: Rational Western man.
BOBBI: Rational Western man. And I, up until a few months ago, really did not put a whole lot of stock into that, and I'm coming around on that. I am beginning to believe now that having a, as I say, a positive mental attitude is real important.
It seems pretty clear that people who feel depressed can get sick, and people who are sick can get depressed, that these things can have kind of a feedback effect on one another. And now that I am sick and somewhat depressed, I'm trying to break that cycle by raising my own psychological state and also by making myself as healthy as possible outside of the Kaposi's [a type of cancer that is considered highly opportunistic in AIDS patients]. I'm trying to eat better, I'm trying to get more sleep...
SOURCE:
