Describes how to use the Web and other sources to understand about experimental drug trials, effective types of option medicine, and other breakthroughs with the possible for drastically enhancing the odds of successful treatment.
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A terminal cancer diagnosis is a shove through the looking glass into a terrifying alternate reality of imminent death, where medical science has no answers and clinical trials and alternative medicine offer fleeting glimpses of real or perceived hope. This is the experience of millions of people every year, who find they suddenly must trust doctors they have never met to make the best choices for them according to principals of science and the Hippocratic Oath. Seven years ago, Ben Williams heard perhaps the worst of all such diagnoses, Glioblastoma Multiforme. This fast-moving brain cancer carries a devastating prognosis where survival is measured in weeks and where approved treatments add only a few weeks more. In his battle with this ferocious disease, he left the established path to fight on his own terms, mixing conventional, experimental, and alternative medicine. His eventual recovery, and the lessons he learned, are the basis for this book.
‘Surviving Terminal Cancer’ is written in three sections. Section I is a narrative of the onset, diagnosis, treatment, and eventual remission of the author’s own terminal disease. This section includes the bizarre initial symptoms of his brain tumor, and the emotional upheaval of the diagnosis and devastating prognosis. During the treatment course, Williams must struggle with a medical system that denies him obvious treatments; he confronts his doctors and travels to Mexico to obtain the drugs they refuse to prescribe. His treatment plan is a drug cocktail synthesized from his research into clinical trials and other published experimentation. A brain tumor proves intriguing subject matter, as fascinating as it is horrifying, and this creates a charged backdrop for the section’s already interesting storyline. It is an MRI-to-MRI clinical suspense thriller, superimposed onto a very human drama of husband and wife coping with fear and mortality. Ultimately, Williams survives this Nietzschen transformation to complete the book. The resulting Section II delivers a scathing, if constructive, criticism of the American medical system and the FDA. Although well-meaning, this section may disturb many readers as it addresses the basic assumption of trust between doctor and patient. Williams pulls no punches, arguing against the statistical methods mandated by the FDA, the funding and motives behind drug trials, and even the present interpretation of the Hippocratic Oath. He turns the very notion of conservative, scientific medicine on its ear as fundamentally unscientific and irrational. With chapters like ‘Bastille Day for Cancer Patients,’ Williams handles this subject as brazenly as his self-medicated treatment plan in Section I. The theme of a deeply broken system culminates with a call for cancer patients to fix it themselves through direct political action. Section III is a useful summary of alternative medicine, supplements, and clinical trials, and how to effectively research all such options for any particular disease. Although there are a few specific options listed, this section is not a definitive dictionary of treatments. Rather, it is a discussion on how to effectively investigate potential treatments both within and outside of traditional medicine. Through a few carefully picked examples, he illustrates how to find and identify useful information and separate it from advertising and political rhetoric.
Despite the complexity of much of the subject matter, the style is a well-explained, easy to follow prose. Williams uses AIDS as a useful point of epidemiological reference, comparing cancer to HIV on both microbiological and socio-political levels. Perhaps welcoming the inevitable criticism, he carefully includes supporting references at the end of every chapter. Locating these supporting articles in many cases leads to very interesting, and applicable, secondary reading. Williams is even-handed in his treatment of the facts, carefully addressing several perilous topics that could easily have degraded into sour grapes. He carefully draws a distinction between doctors as individuals, for whom he holds obvious respect, and a troubled medical system as a whole. Perhaps most importantly, Williams, a Harvard-educated scientist, does not fall into the trap of arguing ‘alternative versus traditional’ medicine. Instead, he takes traditional, alternative, and experimental medicine, as well as some of their related, rhetorical arguments, and examines them together under uniform scientific scrutiny.
The concepts in section II are universal in their appeal, but the book as a whole best serves those presently facing cancer or similar deadly conditions. Williams’ work is a departure from earlier (and excellent) inspirational works by Armstrong and others, in that it provides the reader specific detail on how to use the basic principals of science and statistics to wage war against their disease. Williams is far too sophisticated to simply preach a particular…
I found this book to contain the most comprehensive, informatative compilation of facts about brain tumors that has been written to date. Ben Williams not only has tirelessly researched this subject, but he has LIVED this first-hand. This gives him an insight that is unsurpassed in it’s ability to convey this information. I have been reading everything possible for over two years about brain tumors and treatments, ever since my brother was diagnosed with the same type tumor as Ben’s. Ben has really taken his professional abilities as a medical researcher and applied it to the area of cancer treatment, the medical issues involved with treatments, clinical trials, and all the related factors. This book is a must for anyone that knows someone that is battling cancer….not just brain cancer, but due to Ben’s insightful treatment of the relevant issues, anyone that is facing a life-threatening diagnosis should read this book. It explains the “whys” of how our medical system works, and doesn’t work. It will give you the power to be able to ask the “right” questions. I highly recommend this book to anyone seeking answers and hope facing a terminal diagnosis.
This book tells a dramatic story of a battle for survival against a dread disease, and also offers a useful guide for cancer patients determined to try to beat the odds. On top of that, the author delivers a scathing critique of the conventional approach to treatment of life-threatening illness in the US. The book starts off with the author’s story: a psychology professor at the University of California, Williams was diagnosed with an aggressive and incurable brain tumor (glioblastoma). Refusing to accept his imminent demise, he launched an unconventional (but nonetheless science-based) fight for survival. Searching the biomedical literature, he was surprised to uncover many studies describing relatively nontoxic compounds — some of them drugs approved for other purposes – which seemed to show at least modest tumor-fighting effects (based on preliminary data, often involving animal models). By traveling to Mexico and other means, Williams was able to put together a cocktail of such compounds that he took on top of the conventional treatments (which normally achieve at most a minor and transient effect with glioblastoma). MRIs showed the tumor at first shrinking and then disappearing completely, and Williams has had no recurrence in more than five years. The book describes Williams’ cocktail, which may be of use to other patients with similar brain tumors. Of equal value, however, is the general approach described in the book, which could be adapted to fight other kinds of cancer as well. The basic idea seems almost obvious: when conventional treatments are unlikely to succeed, combine everything that is reasonably nontoxic and seems (based on however preliminary data) to have a decent chance of some efficacy. Any intelligent person can see the good sense in this (if you are going to die anyway, why on earth would you NOT want to try any nontoxic treatment that has some chance of helping?), but Williams describes the stubbornly hostile reaction of oncologists to his approach. He describes how academic physicians prefer to corral patients into unimaginative trials of single-agent therapies for which even the doctors themselves entertain little optimism (except perhaps for the publication they hope to add to their CV). Experience with AIDS and the few kinds of cancer now considered curable suggests that dramatic results usually occur only when multiple agents are combined to obtain a synergistic effect. Yet the oncology profession sees it as somehow more “scientific” to test drugs in isolation (or occasionally to combine two agents only after each has been thoroughly tested by itself). The book harshly criticizes the role the FDA has played in promoting this approach, which may be rational for ulcer or arthritis therapy but is obviously inappropriate for the therapy of terminal diseases. In summary, this book combines three ingredients in a unique way: a personal survival story, a roadmap, and a devastating intellectual critique of the status quo in cancer treatment. Well written and thoughtful, this book should be of great value to many readers, including those struggling with cancer.
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