No, according to a new study being published today in the journal Cancer by Dr. David Spiegel, associate chair of psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine.
The new Spiegel study is important because in 1989, Spiegel published findings that electrified the world of cancer patients and their doctors. In that study, he found that women whose cancer had spread beyond the breast and who participated in group psychotherapy lived an average of 18 months longer than those who did not get group therapy. That study fed hopes that reducing emotional stress might not only help patients feel better but live longer.
That study also stirred tremendous controversy and ended up being an “unintended cruel hoax” in the view of psychologist and medical sociologist Barrie Cassileth , chief of the department of integrative medicine services at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. The idea that people with cancer could improve their survival chances with group therapy played into the very American belief “that if you try hard enough, you can conquer anything. It’s an unkind burden to place on patients,” she said. Cassileth applauded the new findings as much more realistic.
Since the original study, other researchers have tried, and often failed, to duplicate the results.
Today’s results were “disappointing,” conceded Spiegel, though he added that group therapy can reduce anxiety, pain, and the stress of coping with cancer. “We change patients’ ways of handling emotions so that they are less suppressive of their own feelings,” he said. By expressing their deepest fears and sadness instead of shying away from such feelings patients “feel better, not worse.”
One strange wrinkle: for a subgroup of women — those whose tumors were not responsive to the hormone estrogen — there appeared to be a survival advantage to being in group therapy though it’s not at all clear why this would be