What If Age Is Nothing but a Mind-Set?
The study, which is planned for the spring, is designed to include three groups of 24 women with Stage 4 breast cancer who are in stable condition and undergoing hormonal therapy. Two groups will gather at resorts in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, under the supervision of Langer and her staff. The experimental group will live for a week in surroundings that evoke 2003, a date when all the women were healthy and hopeful, living without a mortal threat hanging over them. They will be told to try to inhabit their former selves. Few clues of the present day will be visible inside the resorts or, for that matter, outside them. In the living areas, turn-of-the-millennium magazines will be lying around, as will DVDs of films like “Titanic” and “The Big Lebowski.” San Miguel de Allende, which has historically been a place known for its nearby healing mineral springs, is a Unesco World Heritage Site, and many of its buildings look as they did a few hundred years ago. “The whole town is a time capsule,” Langer says. (The other group at San Miguel will have the support of fellow cancer patients but will not live in the past; a third group will not experience any research intervention.)WTF.
And what happens when you had cancer in 2003 but got cured, would it come back? Better avoid The Big Lebowski in that case.