The conclusions provided remarkable information. In particular, it showed that environmental factors were the dominant determiners of site specific cancer. From this perspective, environmental exposure, particularly in regards to foods, and environmental toxins (xenobiotics) and stress is paramount in the causation and treatment of cancer.

Dean Ornish's work at San Fransisco's Preventive Medicine Research Centre is impressive. Over the past ten years, Ornish has demonstrated that a comprehensive group approach which includes an extremely low fat diet, aerobic exercise, smoking cessation, yoga and meditation as well as group support can unclog plaque narrowed coronary arteries.
He published a paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) in 1988, in which two groups of a total of 48 patients with cardiovascular disease were trialed, the control with conventional treatment and the other group with a comprehensive lifestyle approach. The result showed massive differences in cardiovascular morbidity and mortality. At a five year follow up, coronary stenosis was increased 11.8% of controls and stenosis had decreased in 3.1% of the treatment group.

It has also been shown that regular meditation increases the diameter of the coronary artery and reduces the intima media thickness meaning that the coronary artery vessels are wider and better perfused.

The Dean Ornish program in America is supported by forty insurance companies and costs $10,000 compared with an average cardiovascular surgical intervention which costs at least $40,000-$50,000.

We live in a society which is overtly stressed. There are rapid changes in lifestyle based on new technologies and also uncertainties of our future due to the irreversible destruction of our living and non-living resources and the threat of massive climatic change. There is increasing inequality between the wealthy and the poor to the extent that poverty and socio-economic deprivation is endemic even in the so called developed countries of America, England and the USA.

More and more quality of life is judged in terms of wealth rather than in terms of such immeasurable faculties such as happiness, creativity, well being, generosity of spirit and a sense of compassion and connectedness. Even the education system is focused on the needs of big business and children are narrowly focused on aims which do not enhance their health or create a wider knowledge of their understanding of their place in society or the nature of life itself.

The basic needs of freedom of poverty expressed by such people as Galtung, Rawls, Max-Neef and Lasswell and Maslow are not addressed for people even in higher socio-economic groups in the developed world. Such needs would address the needs specifically for affection, understanding, participation, leisure, creation, identity and freedom.