Why Cancer Research Fail to Produce a Cure?

After decades of research and despite almost inexhaustible resources, huge budgets and unlimited manpower, no medical researcher or doctor for that matter can definitively say what causes cancer with 100% scientific certainty. Sure, you may get an explanation, but it too will depend greatly upon whom you ask and their field of study. How can this be?

No disrespect intended in this statement, and I do mean that. In reality a great deal of progress was made over the years and is being made as I write these lines. The bottom line is that more people survive their cancer today than in any other time. Still, the search for the elusive “cure” continues to no avail.

Could it be that researchers failure to find the Cure is the result of missing or overlooking a vital piece of the puzzle? Well, according to Viktor Frankl, an Austrian neurologist, psychiatrist and the founder of logotherapy, which is a form of existential analysis, the “Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy” the answer is a straight forward YES.

When it comes to understanding the human experience of illness, researchers only study illness from a one-dimensional perspective.

Medical researchers discuss internal and external contributors. They can point to genetic disposition and carcinogenic factors in our environment. All true! Psychologists can discuss the development of illness from a psychological perspective through the lens of Mental Science in the context of social influences, behavioral patterns and certain personality types. Still, all true! Yet, while each field provides necessary and important information about illness, they fail to see illness in its essence as a multi-dimensional event, and as a whole person event.

Viewing cancer treatment as a medical or biological event or only as a psychological event means robbing people of their true spiritual nature as Frankl’s model show us below. It limits their experience to one or two dimensions; we know that there are more dimensions.

Viktor Frankl First Law of Dimensional Ontology

This is illustrated in the image above, which shows a cylinder suspended in a three-dimensional space. In the words of Frankl: “Projected out of its three-dimensional space into the horizontal and vertical two-dimensional planes, it (the cylinder) yields in the first case a circle and in the second on a rectangle. These pictures contradict one another. What is more important, the cylinder is an open vessel (open from the top, hollow) in contrast to the circle and the rectangle that are closed figures.” (Will to Meaning)

In other words, the human experience has many dimensions: a physical dimension (rectangle), a psychological dimension (circle), and a spiritual dimension (the cylinder).

Each projection provides important information. The rectangle reveals its height and width; the circle reveals its circumference. However, neither one of these projections tells us that we are actually looking at a cylinder. We know it is a cylinder only because we can see the original object.

Neither projection informs us that the cylinder is, in fact, an open system, closed only at the bottom. Each projection provides limited information, and therefore we do not have a truly accurate or complete understanding of what the source object really is.

Essentially, in my humble opinion, this is the very obstacle standing in the way of a cure. While the job of the specialist is to focus on a narrow field of study, this inability to see the whole picture is at the core of this issue.