If you are interested in the effect that participation in a support group will have on your post BMT survivorship, then you may want to check Dr. David Speigel’s Living Beyond Limits out of the library. It’s definitely worth taking a new look at this wonderful book which was first published in 1993.
Speigel, a professor of psychiatry at Stanford University, has always been interested in helping people who face serious illnesses. A deeply humane physician and researcher, he has come to believe that it is the interaction of the body and the mind that matters most in coping with a life-threatening illness. In 1987, he published a landmark study in the prestigious British medical journal, The Lancet, which proved that participation in a support group can indeed affect both the quality and length of a cancer survivor’s life.
When Speigel began co-facilitating a support group for women with advanced breast cancer during the late seventies; he had no intention of studying their survival statistics at some future date. He simply wanted to help these women through a difficult period in their lives and put some of his ideas about " relating, venting feelings, and controlling physical symptoms" to the test. However, by the mid eighties, Speigel was growing more and more annoyed with what he felt was the "wish-away-your-illness approaches of many workers in alternative medicine." His aggravation inspired him to formulate a new study meant to disprove these practitioners.
In the new study, he revisited the data compiled from his earlier study with a different perspective. Speigel was certain he would prove that for women with advanced breast cancer, the emotional help of support group meetings made no significant difference in the progression of their disease or the length of their survival.
In Living Beyond Limits, Speigel writes clearly and directly about the surprising results of his study. There definitely was a significant difference in the survival time of the women who had been in a support groups versus those who had not. These women lived twice as long as the others. Indeed, the type of psychotherapeutic treatment that a support group offers to its participants can have an positive medical effect on both the length and the quality of their survivorship.
If you’d like to learn more about David Speigel’s fascinating study, as well as the program he outlines to help survivors of chronic illness; then read Living Beyond Limits. It will make you realize that your participation in Stepping Stones is powerfully therapeutic. Remember, as Speigel’s study suggests, the best medical care is probably a combination of high tech intervention, complementary therapies, and compassionate human support.