Dr David Servan-Schreiber - Anticancer: A New Way of Life

David Servan-Schreiber, MD, PhD, is a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and co-founder of the Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. He has lectured at leading international academic centres, including Stanford, Columbia, Cornell and Cambridge Universities. His first book Healing Without Freud orProzac was an international bestseller and Frances bestselling nonfiction book of the year in 2004, selling over 600,000 copies in the trade edition alone.

MICHAEL JOSEPH
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MICHAEL JOSEPH

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First published in France by Editions Robert Laffont, S.A., Paris 2007

First published in Penguin Books 2008

This revised edition published 2011

Text copyright David Servan-Schreiber, 2007, 2011

Illustrations by Sylvie Dessert

All rights reserved

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Every effort has been made to ensure that the information in this book is accurate. The information in this book will be beneficial to the majority of people but may not be applicable to each individual case so it is advised that professional medical advice is obtained for specific information on personal health matters. Neither the publisher nor the author accept any liability for any personal injury or other damage or loss arising from the misuse of the information in this book.

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN : 978-0-14-197054-7

This book is dedicated:

To my fellow physicians, who tirelessly treat suffering and fear, sometimes with a courage as great as their patients. Above all, I hope they will find it useful and will want, as I did, to integrate these approaches in their practice.

And to my son Sacha, born during this time of upheaval, whose enthusiasm for life is an inspiration to me everyday.

This book describes natural methods of health care that contribute to preventing the development of cancer or to fostering its treatment, as a complement to conventional approaches (surgery, radiotherapy, chemotherapy). Its contents cannot replace a physicians opinion. It is not intended to be used to make a diagnosis or to recommend a treatment.

All the clinical cases I refer to in the following pages are drawn from my own experience (except for a few cases described by fellow physicians in the medical literature, which are indicated as such). For obvious reasons, patients names and other identifying features have been changed. In a few instances, for the sake of clarity, I combined clinical details from different patients in a single story.

I have chosen to set forth a contemporary understanding of cancer and of natural defences in simple terms. In certain cases this hasnt allowed me to describe the full complexity of biological phenomena or the details of controversies over existing clinical studies. Though I believe I have been faithful to the spirit of their research, I apologize to biologists and to oncologists for thus simplifying what for many of them represents their lifes work.

I have always felt that the only trouble with scientific medicine is that it is not scientific enough. Modern medicine will become really scientific only when physicians and their patients have learned to manage the forces of the body and the mind that operate via vis medicatrix naturae [the healing power of nature].

Professor Ren Dubos, Rockefeller University, New York, USA, discoverer of the first commercially available antibiotic, 1939, and initiator of the first Earth Summit of the United Nations, 1972

Eighteen years ago, I discovered from my own brain-scanning experiment that I had brain cancer. From the waiting room on the tenth floor of the oncology building, I remember looking down at people in the street distant and oblivious, going about their everyday life. I had been cast out of that life, separated from its goal-oriented busyness as from its promises of joy, by the prospect of a probable early death. No longer wrapped in the comfortable mantle of physician and scientist, I had become a cancer patient. This book is the story of what happened next; of the return to life and health in fact, to a level of health I had never experienced before while knowing I had cancer. It is the story of how I used my skills as a physician and a scientist to find out everything I could in the medical literature that would help me change the odds. Most important, it offers a new, scientifically based perspective on cancer that gives all of us a chance to better protect ourselves from this disease.

The publication of Anticancer two years ago launched a new chapter in my journey. After having kept my illness a secret for fourteen years, I was able to take what I had learned and bring it around the world to people who were frightened, depressed or had lost hope. I was able to discuss these ideas with doctors, scientists, politicians and activists and to compare my observations directly with their experiences. I also met a considerable number of patients who had changed the course of their illness with the advice that is given here. After publication in thirty-five languages in close to fifty countries, and after more than a million copies sold, my conviction that we can all powerfully strengthen our bodies natural defences against cancer has been reaffirmed. As has my belief that this approach should be a part of preventing or treating cancer for everyone. In the past two years, research has also yielded new proofs, explanations and perspectives on how we can all learn to strengthen our health and improve our terrain by creating an anticancer biology within our body, and it has confirmed the importance of paying attention to how our emotions may affect the course of cancer.

So what exactly is new in this revised edition?

In my many discussions with my medical colleagues doctors, oncologists, psychiatrists and with the public, I realized that the books message about nutrition has been much more easily grasped than the analysis of mindbody factors and the crucial role played by the feeling of helplessness in promoting cancer. If there is one single, clear and emphatic message Id like to send with this revised edition, it is that we must pay close attention to the mindbody connection, especially the negative impact of prolonged feelings of helplessness and despair. When left unattended, these feelings not the stresses of life themselves contribute to the inflammatory processes that can help cancer grow. There are truly effective and simple methods for taming those feelings, experiencing life on a more satisfying level and reducing inflammation at the same time.