It is also for your family members, friends, and health care professionals, but primarily it is for you. It is a book about how to find your way through the unfamiliar and often frightening territory that you face when you are diagnosed with cancer. I believe that the experience of a person who is given a cancer diagnosis is similar to that of a soldier who is given orders by his officers to parachute into a jungle war zone without a map, a compass, or training of any kind. No military expert would claim that it is only the officers who need training. And yet, in medicine, physicians often assume that only the medical team that sends patients into the battlefield of treatment needs training.
Physicians often assume that the patient needs to know nothing except how to follow medical advice.
In recent years, this assumption has begun to change for medical treatment in general. For example, patients are now encouraged to get more than one opinion about their treatment. Laws now require that patients be given extensive information about treatment options and effects. Particularly in cancer, the discussion of treatment options has reached the point where some patients feel that, rather than being given too few choices, they face too many. The central problem, in brief, is that we have not yet recognized the need for systematic education and training for cancer patients when facing the tremendous and traumatic changes that occur after a diagnosis of cancer.