A Cure Within

Cancer. There are few words in the English language having such a visceral, personal impact. Cancer patient. Cancer survivor. Pretty much anyone over the age of 30 knows one. A family member. A friend. Someone lost too soon. Someone forever changed. But we don't really like to talk about it, because there's really not much we can do. We fight cancer, sure, but we rarely win. Defeating cancer is one of medical science's greatest challenges. So when a novel approach to treatment seems promising, there is an intense interest in its progress and those who are making it. This book is about both - the progress and the pioneers - and its focus is the revolutionary science of something called cancer immunotherapy. This medical marvel, cancer immunotherapy - also called immuno-oncology - is still in its infancy. Yet, mobilizing the immune system to recognize and attack cancer has long been imagined, and occasionally attempted, for more than 100 years: It is only just recently that significant - in fact, unprecedented - progress has been made. With the use of newly approved immunotherapy treatments, there are now reports of hundreds, if not thousands of cancer patients with advanced disease living years beyond all prior expectation. Some of these once-terminally ill patients are now called "cured." This has never happened before. As Dr. Jill O'Donnell-Tormey comments in the Foreword, "It has taken decades of basic research and billions of dollars of investment to build the foundation upon which today's lifesaving treatments are based. This book offers a uniquely entertaining yet inspiring glimpse into the lives and minds of the academic and industry pioneers who forged this new field. It is a story of how an obscure and oft-derided field of cancer research - and the tenacious few scientists who refused to abandon it - came from behind to become the new 'darling of oncology.'" The book's author, Neil Canavan, is an experienced commentator on new developments in medical science. His portraits of 25 of the pioneers in immunotherapy are the culmination of two years of travel to laboratories, offices, and conferences around the world and countless hours of conversation with individuals immersed in a vitally important, promising assault on a dread disease that kills more than eight million people each year worldwide. -- from dust jacket.

"A splendid history of mind-body medicine...a book that desperately needed to be written." —Jerome Groopman, New York Times Is stress a deadly disease on the rise in modern society? Can mind-body practices from the East help us become well? When it comes to healing, we believe we must look beyond doctors and drugs; we must look within ourselves. Faith, relationships, and attitude matter. But why do we believe such things? From psychoanalysis to the placebo effect to meditation, this vibrant cultural history describes mind-body healing as rooted in a patchwork of stories, allowing us to make new sense of our suffering and to rationalize new treatments and lifestyles.

Racing to a Cure is not a cancer memoir. It is a cancer cure memoir. In 1998 Neil Ruzic was diagnosed with mantle-cell lymphoma, the deadliest cancer of the lymph system, whose spread is reaching epidemic levels in the U.S. and Europe. Instead of following recommended courses of chemotherapy and radiation, he took control of his treatment by investigating cures being developed in the nation's cancer-research laboratories. Although chemotherapy harms the immune system and is increasingly demonstrated to be an ineffective long-term cure for the vast majority of cancers, it remains the standard treatment for most cancer patients. Ruzic, a former scientific magazine publisher and originator of a science center, refused to accept this status quo, and instead plunged into the world of cutting-edge treatments, exploring the frontiers of cancer science with revolutionary results. Ruzic went on the offensive: visiting scores of laboratories, gathering information, talking to researchers, and effectively becoming his own patient-care advocate. This book presents his findings. A scathing critique of the chemotherapy culture as well as unscientific "alternative" therapies, the book endorses state-of-the-art molecularly based technologies, making it an illuminating and necessary read for anyone interested in cancer research, especially patients and their families and physicians. Neil Ruzic was expected to die within two years of his initial diagnosis. Five years later he has been declared cancer-free and considers himself cured.

A man diagnosed with terminal cancer and only a few months to live receives an anonymous phone call offering help. Having nothing to lose, he follows the invitation, which takes him to a remote part of east Africa, where he is forced to survive on his own, guided only by his primeval instincts awakened by his sudden disconnect from civilization. As he is forced to rewind the clock by a few thousand years, his body and mind gradually re-adapt to the environment in which humans have developed over millions of years. His dramatic changes in nutrition, physical activity, stress, spirituality, and his relationship to other human beings and to nature in general, save him and he is able to return to his earlier life, completely changed and able to pass on the secret of the cure to others. While the story is fictional, the explanations of the various lifestyle factors and their impacts on health and well-being are all based on solid scientific evidence. Hence the novel is intended not only as entertainment but also as an inspirational self-help book for anyone interested in finding a healthier lifestyle.

Follow along as this New York Times bestselling author details the astonishing scientific discovery of the code to unleashing the human immune system to fight in this "captivating and heartbreaking" book (The Wall Street Journal). For decades, scientists have puzzled over one of medicine's most confounding mysteries: Why doesn't our immune system recognize and fight cancer the way it does other diseases, like the common cold? As it turns out, the answer to that question can be traced to a series of tricks that cancer has developed to turn off normal immune responses -- tricks that scientists have only recently discovered and learned to defeat. The result is what many are calling cancer's "penicillin moment," a revolutionary discovery in our understanding of cancer and how to beat it. In The Breakthrough, New York Times bestselling author of The Good Nurse Charles Graeber guides readers through the revolutionary scientific research bringing immunotherapy out of the realm of the miraculous and into the forefront of twenty-first-century medical science. As advances in the fields of cancer research and the human immune system continue to fuel a therapeutic arms race among biotech and pharmaceutical research centers around the world, the next step -- harnessing the wealth of new information to create modern and more effective patient therapies -- is unfolding at an unprecedented pace, rapidly redefining our relationship with this all-too-human disease. Groundbreaking, riveting, and expertly told, The Breakthrough is the story of the game-changing scientific discoveries that unleash our natural ability to recognize and defeat cancer, as told through the experiences of the patients, physicians, and cancer immunotherapy researchers who are on the front lines. This is the incredible true story of the race to find a cure, a dispatch from the life-changing world of modern oncological science, and a brave new chapter in medical history.

How does an affluent, middle-class, private-school-attending son of a doctor end up at the Aryan Nations compound in Idaho, falling in with and then recruiting for some of the most notorious neo-Nazi groups in Canada and the United States? The Cure for Hate paints a very human picture of a young man who craved attention, acceptance, and approval and the dark place he would go to get it. Tony McAleer found an outlet for his teenage rage in the street violence of the skinhead scene. He then grew deeply involved in the White Aryan Resistance (WAR), rising through the ranks to become a leader, and embraced technology and the budding internet to bring white nationalist propaganda into the digital age. After fifteen years in the movement, it was the outpouring of love he felt at the birth of his children that inspired him to start questioning his hateful beliefs. Thus began the spiritual journey of personal transformation that enabled him to disengage from the highest levels of the white power movement. This incisive book breaks commonly held stereotypes and delivers valuable insights into how regular people are drawn to violent extremism, how the ideology takes hold, and the best ways to help someone leave hate behind. In his candid and introspective memoir, Tony shares his perspective gleaned from over a thousand hours of therapy, group work, and facilitating change in others that reveals the deeper psychological causes behind racism. At a period in history when instances of racial violence are on the upswing, The Cure for Hate demonstrates that in a society frighteningly divided by hate and in need of healing, perhaps atonement, forgiveness, and most importantly, radical compassion is the cure. This publication meets the EPUB Accessibility requirements and it also meets the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG-AA). It is screen-reader friendly and is accessible to persons with disabilities. A Simple book with few images, which is defined with accessible structural markup. This book contains various accessibility features such as alternative text for images, table of contents, page-list, landmark, reading order and semantic structure.

A bold look at how commercial agendas distort the real science behind health and fitness studies and misinform the public about how to live a healthy life. Researcher Timothy Caulfield talks with experts in medicine, pharmaceuticals, health and fitness, and even tries out many of the health fads himself, in order to test their scientific validity, dispel the myths, and illuminate the path to better health.

Never before have two revolutions with so much potential to save and prolong human life occurred simultaneously. The converging, synergistic power of the biochemical and digital revolutions now allows us to read every letter of life's code, create precisely targeted drugs to control it, and tailor their use to individual patients. Cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer's and countless other killers can be vanquished—if we make full use of the tools of modern drug design and allow doctors the use of modern data gathering and analytical tools when prescribing drugs to their patients. But Washington stands in the way, clinging to outdated drug-approval protocols developed decades ago during medicine's long battle with the infectious epidemics of the past. Peter Huber, an expert in science, technology, and public policy, demonstrates why Washington's one-size-fits-all drug policies can't deal with diseases rooted in the complex molecular diversity of human bodies. Washington is ill-equipped to handle the torrents of data that now propel the advance of molecular medicine and is reluctant to embrace the statistical methods of the digital age that can. Obsolete economic policies, often rationalized as cost-saving measures, stifle innovation and suppress investment in the medicine that can provide the best cures at the lowest cost. In the 1980s, an AIDS diagnosis was a death sentence, until the FDA loosened its throttling grip and began streamlining and accelerating approval of life-saving drugs. The Cure in the Code shows patients, doctors, investors, and policy makers what we must now do to capture the full life-saving and cost-saving potential of the revolution in molecular medicine. America has to choose. At stake for America is the power to lead the world in mastering the most free, fecund, competitive, dynamic, and intelligent natural resource on the planet—the molecular code that spawns human life and controls our health.