by A renowned workaholic and a stickler for his daily routine, it is unlikely that even at 75 years of age, King Charles will find it easy to take a step back as he undergoes cancer treatment.
A man with a reputation for firing missiles at the team early on and continuing his penchant for paperwork while traveling on state visits, he is unlikely to adapt easily to long periods of recovery at home after his stroke chemotherapy or radiotherapy.
But at the same time, doctors believe that there are many aspects of the King’s approach to life that will serve him well in his upcoming health battle. First of all, there is his determined positive attitude that cancer specialists have always found to play too little a role in treatment outcomes.
“It’s anecdotal but when I talk to oncologists, they say that people who have a stronger, more positive attitude do better,” says Dr Louis Fox, a translational oncology researcher at King’s College London.
Last year, Stanford University psychologists provided new evidence that mindfulness can improve the health of cancer patients. They designed a study where they took 361 newly diagnosed patients and gave them an interactive online course to change their mindset from ‘cancer is a disaster’ to ‘cancer is manageable’. Ultimately, all patients who completed the modules saw a 10 percent improvement in their emotional well-being, physical health, and general functioning.
Dr Ziad Tukmachi, a family doctor based in London, says that having been diagnosed at an early stage, the King will benefit from less aggressive treatment, which will make it easier for him to maintain some of his normal quality of life .
“Often when you have intense chemotherapy or radiotherapy, your appetite decreases,” he says. “It makes you very tired and lethargic, you don’t usually want to eat much. Patients tend to get a lot of worm in their mouth so it’s quite painful to eat, and they usually want softer consistency foods or soups, things that are liquid based, rather than things that are hard to swallow.”
More localized treatments such as targeted radiotherapy have less of an effect on the rest of the body. “If it has not spread beyond the edge of the organ, which does not seem to be the case with King Charles, it is likely that targeted radiotherapy is used to shrink the tumor,” says Tukmachi. “This means he may not experience that systemic impact on appetite and food that people get when they have regular chemo cycles.”
Another factor that could stand the King in good stead is the unusually active life he leads, despite being well into his 70s. A lunchtime walk is a common part of the autobiographical monarch’s daily routine sparePrince Harry vividly described the daily stretching and strength routine that his father still follows religiously.
Fox says there is growing evidence that engaging in various forms of exercise after diagnosis can be beneficial in the fight against certain cancers, helping some patients stabilize their condition and prevent disease progression.
“We don’t really understand the mechanisms because this effect could be exerted in a number of ways,” he says. “There is a lot of speculation about the mobilization of immune cells, better tolerance to systemic treatments such as chemotherapy, and the provision of potentially better pharmacological treatments. For example, if you do a lot of exercise, you are more vascular and some of those veins can go through the tumor so that the drugs could be delivered better.”
Although the needs of each individual cancer patient and what they can do are different, Fox says that strength exercises are considered just as important as aerobic exercises such as running or brisk walking.
“The more one can do, the better really,” he says. “There is also a particular focus on strength exercises because these stimulate different cell signaling proteins that we think may play some role in changing the environment in which the tumor wants to thrive.”
The King is also familiar with some alternative therapies such as homeopathy, although it remains to be seen how much of a role this will play in his battle against cancer.
“Homeopathy is more like Reiki or acupuncture in that we are trying to stimulate the body’s own energy to start the healing,” says Neela Prabhu, a qualified Croydon-based homeopath and former community pharmacist, who runs a practice on called Homeopathic Harmony. “It deals with the person. So whether they have cancer or a sore throat, it’s going to be an individualized treatment for them that will look to address the energetic imbalance in that patient.”
But as for the King’s future prognosis, doctors feel that his relatively clean bill of health over the years, along with a diet high in foods such as fish and high-fiber grains and seeds, will hold him well in the coming months. . .
“The healthier you are, the less likely you are to have complications, especially if you need surgery [to remove the tumour],” says Tukmachi. “If you have good, well-controlled blood pressure, a healthy diet, good cholesterol, no heart problems or diabetes, these things will work for you. You are more likely to have a better outcome if you have fewer medical co-morbidities.”
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