New Cancer Therapies: The Patient's Dilemma (Your Personal Health) - Softcover

New Cancer Therapies is a passionately argued yet clear-eyed look at the world of alternate cancer therapy and its ostracism by the conventional medical establishment.

Focussing on treatments that have had their basis in conventional medical research, such as IAT (imuno-augmentative therapy) and F-149, author and cancer survivor Penny Williams paints a compelling and chilling portrait of a North American medical establishment unwilling to look at new ways of treating cancer outside the traditional trio of surgery, radiation and chemotherapy.

Through extensive patient interviews and opened clinical files, Williams builds an argument that some of these other treatments, particularly IAT, have an impressive empirical success rate and that they have been closed out of the North American clinical trial circuit because their discoverers butted heads with the establishment and lost.

Never losing sight of the human cost, Williams shares the stories of cancer sufferers having to hide their alternate treatments from their closed-minded conventional doctors. She tells stories, too, of patients lucky enough to have doctors who could see that the alternate treatments seemed to be having an effect. She tells of patients who survived 17 years beyond their prognosis and of those who did not. She tells stories of hope and laughter and the unbeatable human spirit.

Gracefully written, New Cancer Therapies is compelling and important. It dares the North American medical establishment to set aside its blinkers and allow conventional treatments and alternate therapies to work hand in hand. Anyone who reads this book will not look at news reports of cancer treatments the same way again.

Penny Williams is a writer and editor who lives with her family in Ottawa. She wrote The Other Place: A Personal Account of Breast Cancer, an award-winning book published in 1993. Additionally, she has written feature articles on medical issues for magazines such as Homemaker's, and has been a keynote speaker on topics related to breast cancer.