Breast Cancer: Beyond Convention--The World's Foremost Authorities on Complementary and Alternative Medicine Offer Advice on Healing

Mary Tagliaferri | Debu Tripathy | Isaac Cohen

Medical treatments seem to get more promising every year, but they also seem to get more overwhelming. Faced with a seemingly infinite array of choices in the area of cancer treatment, what's a patient to do when time is of the essence? Breast Cancer: Beyond Convention is both a starting place and a steady companion through the labyrinth of health care. Assembling writing from over 20 experts, including Susan Love, Dean Ornish, and Rachel Remen, this guide intelligently touches on a range of complementary therapies while teaching readers how to choose among the possibilities for optimum results.

Chapters include essays on Chinese medicine, diet, meditation, micronutrients, and guided prayer, which cover issues from scarring and reconstruction to soy and osteoporosis. Each section includes concisely documented research and tips on how to distinguish the genuine healers from the "quacks"; at the end of the book is an excellent contact guide for information on all these topics, as well as nationwide support groups and specialized research clinics. For purposes of either prevention or treatment education, you'll find supremely helpful information that calmly helps navigate the waters of modern medicine. --Jill Lightner

1 THE book to start with on Breast Cancer
This book has helped so many people I know when they found out that they or someone they loved had breast cancer.
Since this book has come out, Dr. Mary Tagliaferri and Isaac Cohen have been doing impressive work at Bionovo (http://www.bionovo.com) to discover and develop new drugs for cancer and women's health. I have heard that they will be publishing a book about menopause that uses the same format as this book soon. What a useful book!

2 An invaluable guide for BREAST HEALTH as well as cancer
After my diagnosis, I waded through shelves of library books on alternative health/breast cancer/healing options in order to find some of the information in this succinct literate volume. This anthology by complementary and alternative medical experts addresses both scientific and spiritual approaches for living with breast cancer. A road map to help with diagnosis, surgery, and after care . Excellent website directory.

3 Reading this book is like having a wise friend by your side
This is a book is about integrative medicine, the emerging field of medicine that attempts to integrate the best therapies from both Western medicine and from non-conventional practices.

As Dr. Dean Ornish points out in his forword, the authors of the fifteen books chapters are striving to build bridges between the two worlds. They have all made profound contributions of their own to the medical community, and the expertise they share in this book may help provide patients with new hope and new choices. There is a great richness of material here, covering many perspectives:

Mainstream physicians such as famed breast cancer experts Susan Love and Debu Tripathy share their experiences and how they came to understand that they had to open their minds and look beyond the traditional boundaries of medicine. Bestselling authors Rachel Naomi Remen, John Kabat Zinn and Michael Lerner share their experiences with the mysterious powers of the mind and heart in the healing process. The role of diet is addressed in chapters by lead editor Mary Tagliaferri and by Larry Kushi. Chinese Medicine, Herbs, Supplements and other natural products are treated in several chapters. Controversial subjects such as distant healing are being explored, and the role of support groups in the well-being of cancer patients is analyzed. There is a portrait of a clinic that has become "a healing place for low-income women", and even tips on how to evaluate health information on the internet.

No one book can cover all the possible alternative and complementary therapies that are being used by breast cancer patients. But one would hope that these thoughtful essays will inspire many more physicians and alternative medicine practitioners to build bridges between their worlds and explore the possibilities of collaboration with open minds and hearts.