Mixed feelings about this book.

On the positive side, the writing was very good. A+ for the prose.

And, I’ve gained a new appreciation for chemotherapy, for the first time.

I am guilty of saying that chemo is only an array of poisons. I was not aware that some of them are much more complicated than that.

I was aware that a small handful of cancers (especially childhood leukemia/lymphomas) ARE quite successfully eliminated with chemo. Of course this comes at a tremendous cost to the health of the child, but they can regain health and live a normal life with a normal lifespan much of the time. I was not aware that some of the more exotic forms of chemo can claim SOME success in outcomes as well.

We alternative people criticize the mainstream for not understanding our methods or appreciating our results, but we are also usually guilty of the same thing at their few appreciable successes with cancer.

Having said that, this history is sad and frustrating. Though it has become somewhat less brutal in recent decades, the frustration for me lies mostly in the complete absence of even a mention of anything resembling an alternative, or complimentary treatment protocol.

There is very little formal study (double blind randomized etc) on alternative methods by themselves, but there are quite a few trials that do use chemo AND some alt therapy - nutrition, melatonin, talk therapy, etc - most of which show that outcomes are improved when conventional is used alongside alternative. These studies are far short of what I’d like to see (eg alt compared directly to conventional AND doing nothing at all, and customized nutrition instead of blanket one-size-fits all doses), but they do show good results. This was not discussed at all.

I have gained some more respect for conventional treatment here, but unfortunately conventional still has little or no understanding or respect for alt methods, at least in this book. And unfortunately the book gives no indication that conventional will do anything other than continue to invest in drugs that block genes and peptides and so on. This to me is a dead end, even if it shows improvement over the surgery and poison methods.

I think us alt people should be better informed about mainstream methods. I recommend this book for that reason.