Introduction: Biology, Bodies, and Minds

I framed Glioblastology with an insight from the 20th-century French existentialist Maurice Mearleau-Ponty, grounding our mental and emotional states in our bodies and biology. The identification of our “self” with our bodies shapes the framework through which I share content with you. It is our bodies, broken and dependent on others, which we must acknowledge are central to patient-centered healthcare, placing the person first, before the doctor, before the treatment, before the diagnosis. Our diagnoses do not define us nor supersede us, as persons; yet, neither do they exist independently from what makes each of us unique. We only are our bodies; our conditions and states, symptoms, and feelings are biological phenomena perceived through our experiences.

This is my take, anyway, from an amateur existentialist. My interpretation of the existential framework asserts centrally that a ‘self’ exists in the experiences emerging from our biological foundation. Primary to the existentialist program is the claim that the emergent ‘self’ is not distinct from the body: “I am my body.”

We may also be informed by the Cartesian model of duality. That is, two things exist from which the ‘self’ is derived: there is a body and there is a thinking thing. I played with the famous claim, ‘I think therefore I am,’ suggesting that to cease thinking is to cease being. It’s my intuition that pre-reflectively, many of us understand ourselves by this Cartesian, dualist framework. I suspect a good number of folks have something like the following in mind. There is a body that ‘I’ have, and there is a pilot (‘I’ or ‘me’) at the helm, in the center of our thoughts, charting the course through our lives.

These are competing views. On the one hand, the existentialist claims that there are biological processes that are responsible for our felt experiences that we naturally refer to as the ‘self,’ and say, ‘I experience,’ and ‘I feel.’ Yet this talk of I, me, and self is strictly talk of our bodies and biological processes. On the other hand, the dualist suggests that biology carries on concurrently with our thinking and decision-making, in virtue of the free choice of our will, exercised by our pilot-minds. On this latter view, bodies and minds are connected in important ways, yet distinct. There is a body we have, and there is this mind that we have.

The question we are invited to consider is whether we are our bodies, only, our bodies and minds, working in concert, or only our minds, churning thoughts. Whether we can answer this question, at all, is the stuff of philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, and molecular biology. A more poignant question to consider today is what bearing our attitudes towards this question has on our suffering and illness; treatment and recovery.

Our Notion of Patient Empowerment Evolves Yet Again

My attitude is that patient empowerment calls to action both medical teams and patients to find common ground in asking why? Why is this the accepted origin theory of the disease expressed by my diagnosis or pathology? Why is this treatment regimen prescribed for this diagnosis? This attitude suggests that we must treat the person, the ‘self,’ to effectively treat the body. That the road to treatment and recovery is paved with patient empowerment, facilitated through the open exchange of knowledge. This is captured in my opening remarks that we, as persons, are not distinct from diagnoses, and neither are we superseded by them. Our individual conditions make us unique, but our common bodies that we should be affected by having diagnoses with biological underpinnings, unites us all as persons, and our intellectual acknowledgement of this fact relies for its comprehension on the very same biology that makes this important claim possible.

Hence, our understanding of patient empowerment evolves yet again to include the notion that biologically we are connected with each other through a rich tapestry that includes more than one billion years of cellular adaptation. One goal for the post you are reading is that we find an insight illuminated when we view our ‘selves’ as minds, bodies, and biology. That we think, we move in space, and our cells are primarily involved in enabling our mental and physical lives. This realization is so vitally important because we understand our diagnoses—especially cancer, as something gone terribly wrong with our bodies, our cells, our genes, our DNA, but our bodies just are our cells, and our minds emerge from these bodies, from these cells. Liberating our mental and emotional lives from an attitude of self-deprecation that blames our bodies for our illnesses is an early and important step toward treatment and recovery.

Patient empowerment relies on an open exchange of knowledge with medical teams, an answer to the question why am I prescribed this treatment regimen, and a forgiveness of the ‘self.’

Cells and Bodies: Important for What’s to Come

The trajectory I have followed through these early weeks of documenting my own brain cancer battle has taken us through a technical discussion, describing glioblastoma multiforme (GBM). I introduced patient-centered healthcare by way of an anecdote. Today I offer insight into the relationship between our minds, bodies, and biological foundation. In the coming series of posts I intend to explore this biological foundation through the discussion of topics related to molecular biology. Specifically, I hope to say more about my own journey with Optune, the tumor treating fields (TTF) technology. I also plan to introduce the metabolic theory of cancer as a foil to the presently accepted genetic (or somatic) theory of cancer. These discussions are helpful as a platform to share my narrative as it relates to choosing a plan of care, it creates an opportunity for you to learn more about the frontiers of cancer research and therapy, and it enables me to sharpen my science communication, a skill set I seek to expand, as I hope to offer continuous improvement with the quality of my blog posting and look for opportunities to speak as a patient advocate on panels or events.

I’m looking forward to it!

Cheers —AH

This post originally appeared on Glioblastology. It is republished with permission.