Just Because Not Everyone Is Ready to Hear It Doesn't Mean It Isn't True — What I Couldn't Say to the Man with the Fan
- Alahnnaa Campbell
- 10 hours ago
- 9 min read
This is Part 3 of a series. Part 1 is From All Illness Has 8 Stages to Liver Stagnation as the Root of All Problems and Part 2 is Cancer and Hormonal Conditions — Diet May Be Important, but Resolving Childhood Conflict Is Key. The grandparent article Parenting and Grandparenting Relationships Amongst the Major TCM Organ Pairs runs alongside this series as a personal clinical companion.
The man with the fan
I met someone recently who was wearing fan necklace. I asked about it because I had just bought one for my 6 year old who didn't want to go outside at school for recess when it was too hot. He was excited to share how happy he was with this product because he was on medication that essentially throws him into menopause. I offered the word andropause — the male equivalent of menopause — and mentioned that this kind of hormonal shift, while difficult, can be good for us because it drops the veil on other things that the body needs help with. This is when he offered: "ok, I have stage 4 cancer, but I am doing well, and I attribute that 80 to 90 percent to the medication and 10 percent to working in a positive, low-stress environment."
That felt like as far as I could go.
My Human Design type is projector, which means I need to be recognized and invited before others can appreciate what I know. Offering without invitation will lead me to feel bitter instead of successful. This person has already found a framework that is working for him, it's his life, let him live it! That doesn't mean I can't continue to live my life, which is to wonder, to understand, and to have solutions, for those who decide to invite me in to help.
Why the medication is causing hot flashes
Mainstream medicine's reasoning for hormone blockers in hormone-sensitive cancers is structurally the same as the sugar argument (see Part 2): some cancers use hormones to grow, so reducing the hormone reduces the fuel. For prostate cancer, that hormone is testosterone. For breast cancer, it is estrogen. The logic is — starve what the cancer is using.
It is not wrong that some cancers are hormone-sensitive. The question is whether removing the hormone addresses the root or only the mechanism of growth — and whether the cost of removing it outweighs the benefit. Because the hot flashes are not from reduced hormone, they are from increased yin, that in normal menopause was there all along but the hormones were masking (or accommodating for) it. But when we take hormone blockers, they are directly causing increased yin which causes hot flashes, as sign that the organs are running out of fuel. Starve the cancer, maybe, but over tax the organs, definitely! The RestoreChi supplement bottles can help (if you're curious, please ask, they are currently free).
From a RestoreChi and TCM perspective, hormones are not the problem. The metabolic and informational system that allowed the cancer to grow in a hormone-rich environment is the problem. Removing the hormone doesn't address the problem. The true fuel is not hormones or even sugar, it is continuing to believe things that are not true!
From an Esogetic perspective, hormones are part of how we download our life plan into our body. They give us the awareness and strength to clear out what needs to be cleared. When someone is already dissociated from their individual program — which Esogetics identifies as a primary cause of cancer — removing the hormones that might have brought them back into contact with themselves makes it even harder. The body loses another pathway to reconnection.
Which raises a question: why would a cancer use hormones to grow? Perhaps because the cancer is the body's last attempt to use the same mechanism that was meant to download the life plan. Rock bottom, cancer, fear of death, or fear of more cancer treatment, for some, is the only way to get them to wake up and make changes to their life. Not only dietary and medication, but what grudge are they still holding that they need to let go?
Removing the hormones stops the amplification and it makes it even harder for the body to clear out the damage done by mainstread methods of treating cancer.
The parallel with puberty blockers
I raised the same concern when children were being placed on hormone blockers before puberty to make gender transition (surgery) easier. My argument then was that blocking physical puberty also blocks brain maturation — the way hormones where described when I did my Masters in Social Neuroscience were neurotransmitters (brain chemicals) that can have their effect far away from where they were released.
Now I am raising this concern again, not to be political or to say I'm right and the person who just doesn't feel right in their own skin is wrong, but, without the hormones, how are you going to feel is surgery is your true life path?
Blocking a process the body needs to complete does not make the underlying need go away. It postpones it, at a cost, which ultimately is also death.
Whether it is a child's puberty or an adult's hormonal cycle during cancer treatment, the mechanism is the same. The person is trying to avoid what is needed, which is to process, and they do this because they don't know what they need to process, because there are not enough people like me who know how to bring what needs to be processed to the surface AND who can hold space for what we see when our perception changes, so we can get to the other side. The oncologist is certainly not skilled in this way, and it is not their fault.
There's another aspect - the cancer personality (created from unresolved early conflict)
Gabor Maté's When the Body Says No describes what he calls the Type C personality. Stating that cancer patients are cooperative, patient, passive, suppressing negative emotions particularly anger, people-pleasing, and have a difficulty saying no. He is careful to say that personality does not cause cancer — it is the chronic physiological stress that results from emotional repression that undermines the immune system. The personality is what childhood produced.
This is useful and important. But it does not go far enough. He has his own trauma that he is still trying to work his way out of (we all do).
The doormat and the difficult personality are often the same wound expressed differently. The person who cannot say no and the person who is controlling and hides are both managing the same thing. No one looked up their Unique Psychology when they were a child to know how to hold space for them, support them, and flag what are their Unique Life Lessons, and what are not.
The martyr thinks they are a victim. The difficult person thinks they are the solution. Neither is following their life path. Both are in the same loop.
This is why, for recurrent cancer, the Esogetic treatment protocol includes bardo and prenatal work — not because the person needs to relive their past, but because the bardo treatment closes doors to what is not their path and opens the door to focus on what is their path. Prenatal work is the same, with more openness to interpretation and focus on something went wrong and that's why the person doesn't know their plan, as opposed to just giving them back their plan. To restore health, one must realign with their life plan. It is the only way to get support from above, which is the only support that has no hidden side effects, other than to live the life we were intended to live to gain the wisdom that we seek.
Let me re-iterate: Believing things that keep us angry but are not true feeds cancer. Oncologists cannot go there. They cannot hold your hand, bring up old memories, or challenge the story someone has been telling themselves for sixty years. So they say it is the sugar and the hormones that are feeding the cancer. It is easier. It gives the patient something to control (which the difficult personalities love). And sometimes it buys time.
Time spent not resolving conflict is time the body is still paying for, even into the next life. Which is why I do this work, I know there set up is the hardest part of life to live, the mastery at the end is the most fun, but so many people find mastery hard, they want to go back to the set up and try to get that right again, and maybe they will, but I think it only gets harder until the soul says "yes, perfect, this life is hard enough, i'll engage with my lessons this time, so as not to do this again!"
The woman who could not bring herself to take the Tamoxifen
On a breast cancer forum, a 76-year-old woman described completing surgery and radiotherapy and being prescribed Tamoxifen. She had kept it in her drawer for three months. She could not bring herself to take it. She had read everything about how it reduces the chance of recurrence — and also about the side effects. She wrote: "Quality of life is more important at my age, so I'm going to take my chances as I feel healthy and fit."
She did not have a framework to explain why her body was saying no. She just knew it was. That is the body's wisdom operating without clinical language to support it. Every person has a different breaking point — a different depth they need or want to reach before they are ready to ask a different kind of question. I do not want to take that away from anyone. Some people will keep taking everything they are told to take because someone else did not and the opposite and everything in between and outside of all the lines you can imagine. In any of these cases, even opposite ones, people's fear and convinction is so great that they will not allow a lesson to be learned. This is their right.
The fan I bought for my child — and why context is everything
As I mentioned, I approached the man with the fan because I bought the same fan for my child. Her situation is the opposite. She runs hot — excessive yang fire — cooling her down when she is outside and overheated is the right thing to do. Even if we sometimes overshoot and she gets sinus congestion.
The same object. Opposite clinical contexts. This is why there is no single answer — only the answer that fits the person, their body, in this moment.
While I am here, Master Yan has always said "women suffer from a lot of chill in their dan tian because of short shirts that leave the lower abdomen exposed" the poor organs end up with chill. And then add the hormones and surgeries, and now PCOS is PMOS (see Part 2). You see how we get here, in a patriarchal society, that hurts the men as much as the women.
Keeping the lower abdomen warm from the start would be great, but often we're too late and we need the Specialty RestoreChi tracks to get it out.
Why I work on this even when not everyone is ready
Not everyone will find me. Not everyone who finds me will be ready for what I have to say. Not everyone who is ready will have the resources, the time, or the support to act on it.
Regardless, I continue to do this work because this is my life path, so that the person who finds me and is ready will have something to work with when they arrive.
Every article, every clinical observation, every thing I learn from my own body and from the people I meet, as a result of the choices I make, when following my Unique Psychology, they are not to judge others, they are so I can learn, so I can be of service, so I can learn some more. Life is beautiful in the simplicity of how it unfolds when we allow it and when we don't. It is a love and curiosity of life that keeps me going, not a fear of consequence and death, though they are there too, to keep me honest.
My blog/website is a library does not close because today's visitor was not ready to read.
If the man with the fan ever finds this article, or if someone who loves him does — the RestoreChi hot flashes track exists. So does a conversation about what the body might be trying to say through the specific way that it is breaking down. I am here when the invitation comes.
If you want to explore this further
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