Cancer As a Turning Point: A Handbook for People with Cancer, Their Families, and Health Professionals
Le Shan rightly describes his ninth health guide as a "state-of-the-art handbook," counseling readers on how to realize their self-healing abilities by employing methods dramatized here in case histories. The book details strategies to promote psychological change and teaches techniques (active visualization, classical meditation) that encourage cancer victims to fight the disease. Critical of doctors, nurses and other hospital personnel who regard the afflicted primarily as machines to repair, Le Shan urges patients to insist on their rights to humane and conscientious care: "Many doctors are so completely oriented to fighting disease and ignoring the sick person that, in catastrophic illness, they often seem to be asking themselves: 'How many heroic measures and mutilating operations can be charged to the patient (orto the insurance company) before death--the final method of consumer resistance--is allowed to intervene?' " His advice on overcoming the often debilitating lay and professional attitudes surrounding the cancer sufferer is eminently sound. Author tour.Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.