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Summary: Please Be Aware Of His Current Condition
Review: I found this book to be excellent and recommend it as required reading to anyone who is currently battling cancer. However, please be aware that shortly after the book was published, Mr. Ruzic's cancer returned. The knowledge he gained during his hunt for the cure is invaluable - a real eye-opener to world of cancer treatment. He managed to excellently stem the progress of his cancer without using chemotherapy until this past year.If you have cancer or are close to one who does, please read the book, but understand that the author had not yet been cured.
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Summary: A real life adventure with the ultimate stakes--saving lives
Review: I loved this book. Read it!! It really should have been publicized much more; far lesser books end up on the NYT bestsellers list. It is a true adventure story about a man diagnosed with mantle cell lymphoma (one of the worst cancers) who refuses to be just another sheep within America's "chemo culture". Instead, he crisscrosses the country in his own airplane, meeting and talking to scientists (the true cancer doctors) within their own laboratories, at the cutting edge of knowledge, in order to try to find a cure for his disease. This book was truly eye-opening, and it is even worth a second-read. It was written with the painstaking efforts of a great science writer who can effectively communicate to the layman and hold the interest of scientists at the same time, something that's very hard to do. I applaud Mr. Ruzic's achievements and his selfless efforts to help others who haven't been blessed with his intellect and financial advantages in life. We need people like him in government. Things really need to be shaken up in the FDA. Ironically, the slow progress in the development effective new clinical treatments for cancer continues at a time when the scientific understanding of cancer and its molecular bases has grown by leaps and bounds in the past 8 years. One problem appears to be that oncologists have their hands tied by the FDA, and as a result, they often neglect to keep up with the latest developments. This is why we continue to lose so many people to cancer, and so many cancers remain completely incurable (e.g. pancreatic cancer). For instance, even with new cancer vaccines and monoclonal antibodies under development, virtually all clinical trials today require the patient to first take massive doses of highly toxic chemotherapeutic agents. Often cocktails of toxic chemotherapeutic drugs are used that simultaneously devastate the immune system and end up making the cancer refractory to further treatment. What remedies can be taken against this wrong-headed philosophy in order get more of the latest less toxic biotherapies from the lab and into the clinic NOW? After reading this book, it is clear to me that the hospital administrators overseeing the oncology residency programs in America need to be replaced with fresh blood. Also, the FDA needs to be reformed from the ground up. I especially liked one quote in this book, which I have found to be so true, "Welcome to the world of cancer, where doctors are witches and patients are doctors........" Such is the state of affairs in this country, where our government has given us third-rate medical care for cancer, with doctors who fill your body with toxins and then leave you for dead, telling you there is nothing more that can be done. We deserve better treatment, even if that simply means regaining our God-given freedom to treat our own bodies against this dreaded disease.
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Summary: Mr. Ruzic died
Review: Mr. Ruzic died in late January 2004. His illness returned and claimed his life a few months after the book published. Nevertheless, his efforts and spirit as described in this book are heroic, and our medical practitioners have a lot to learn about how to train people and think objectively.
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