Racing to a Cure

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. 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.
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 chemo 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.

In September 1998 publisher and scientific journalist Ruzic was diagnosed with mantle-cell lymphoma (MCL), an aggressive cancer of the lymph system. Even for an otherwise healthy man in his upper sixties, this was worse than a death sentence. He faced a prognosticated further life-span of 18 months, and that would be made insufferable by side effects from the prescribed chemotherapy. For Ruzic, a self-defined "change agent," consuming large quantities of chemical poisons only to allow cancer still to claim his life was unacceptable. In his opinion, physicians too easily rely upon what is considered the gold standard of cancer treatment, chemical therapy. His scientific mind was certain that there were other, perhaps more effective and certainly less deadly treatment options, if one could find them. He made finding a cure for his cancer a full-time job, one in which he emptied entire file cabinets only to refill them with volumes of new research. He discovered that an abundance of biological therapies is being developed in the scientific, rather than the strictly medical, arena; and he reports that those biotherapies and vaccines are proving highly effective for cancer treatment. His well-written memoir recounts a four-year odyssey that took him from splenectomy and diagnosis, through successfully ditching chemotherapy in favor of biotherapy, and to what he boldly calls a cure. Donna Chavez
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