Thursday, October 25, 2007

Reality Show Idea

I have a great idea for a TV reality show called, “Save My Life”. You get somebody with a terminal illness, say… me. Then you get a bunch of candidates who claim they have the cure for cancer.

Line up the practitioners of energy healing, meditation, visualization, color light therapy, soul journey therapy, reiki. Then the foodists who advocate liver detox diets, raw food diets, juice diets, grapeseed diet, herba mate, wheatgrass, spirulina and so on. And if putting the right stuff INTO your body’s not enough, you can go for the ones that take the nasty stuff OUT of your body with colonics and coffee enemas.

Then there are the religious folks who say prayer will cure cancer. Praying Christians, chanting Buddhist monks… we can throw those into the mix too.

And finally, there are those miracle workers who defy categories. These people were born with a “gift”, a mysterious ability to make cancer cells disappear without any medical procedures. Let’s have those as well.

So we take all these candidates and give each one a month to get rid of my cancer cells. I would offer myself up as a guinea pig for the good of all cancer patients and their caregivers who are going bankrupt paying for all these alternative treatments. If they fail, the world will see them for the fakes that they are. If they succeed, they can franchise their operation and the money will roll in. Meanwhile, I’ll be cured. What’s not to like?

I DO believe some of these alternative therapies work to help our bodies fight cancer. I don’t believe any ONE thing can CURE cancer, not even conventional medicine. I can get the best surgeons, the latest chemotherapy drugs, and the most high-tech radiation therapy available, but if I drink, smoke, eat junk and sit on my butt all day and wallow in my misery, cancer will win. Likewise, I can have every priest and monk in the world praying and chanting for me, do the colonics, eat only raw veggies, and meditate all day long, but my cancer will not go away.

I don’t trust any ONE solution. I’m my only solution. So I’ll take the best that conventional medicine has to offer. I’ll take the alternative therapies that make sense to me. And I’ll have faith. Faith in the human body’s amazing ability to heal itself, faith in the good intentions of people around me, and most of all, faith in myself. Yes, I will still die. But I’ll do it INTELLIGENTLY.

I still think the reality show idea is a good one. So to my friends who are in the TV business, feel free to use my idea.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

You know what. Go for it. We, your friends also are very frustrated by this and want to feel like we can do something for you. So, do allow us to offer crazy alternative remedies and ideas. Let us know if any work or what you think. Its fine, the fact you even consider it makes us feel good. Your cancer makes all of us think about our lives and what would happen if we had cancer. You've made most of us do a lot of soul searching and coming to grips with who we really are as people and what and who we want to be remembered as. So, as odd as it sounds. Thank you for your cancer...strange to say that, but you know Shin, you've done your friends and everyone who's life you've touch a lot of good. Thanks. Keep fighting! We're all here tuning into your "Save Shin's Life" virtual TV blog.