Choices in Healing : Integrating the Best of Conventional and Complementary Approaches to Cancer

Written by one of the country's leading authorities on alternative and complementary cancer treatments, Choices in Healing is designed for the cancer patient or health professional who seeks a comprehensive overview of the available choices, both in treatments and in living with cancer.

Choices in Healing offers valuable information and guidance for the whole life cycle of cancer—from the initial shock of diagnosis to decisions about choosing a physician and conventional therapies, selecting complementary therapies, coping with treatment, and the art of living fully with the possibility of recurrence.

There are detailed explanations and evaluations of a wide range of complementary therapy programs, including spiritual and psychological approaches, nutritional therapies, physical therapies, pharmacological therapies, and traditional medicines from around the world. There are sections on prayer and other forms of spiritual healing; psychotherapy, support groups, visual imagery and hypnosis; massage, therapeutic touch, yoga, and Qi Gong; macrobiotic diet and other cancer diets; acupuncture and Chinese herbal medicines; and numerous other unconventional therapies used by American cancer patients.

With an unusual combination of compassion and objectivity, Michael Lerner describes his conclusions following more than a decade of study of unconventional cancer treatments in North America, Europe, India, and Japan. He also draws extensively on his work with hundreds of cancer patients who have participated in the Commonweal Cancer Help Programs, the residential support program depicted by Bill Moyers in his 1993 PBS documentary Healing and the Mind.

A Harvard graduate with a doctorate in political science from Yale, Michael Lerner was a member of the political science faculty of Yale before he moved to California. From 1988 to 1990 he served as Special Consultant to the U.S. Congress Office of Technology Assessment for its landmark study Unconventional Cancer Treatments. He received a MacArthur Prize Fellowship for his work in public health in 1983. He is currently President of the Jenifer Altman Foundation, and President of Commonweal, a health and environmental research institute that he founded in 1976 in Bolinas, California.