After You Hear It's Cancer

June 15, 2015

A cancer diagnosis marks the beginning of a long, challenging journey through alien territory. Leifer, a health-care administrator and founder of the Leifer Report, has written an informative guidebook for that journey, intended to help patients "navigate a complex health-care system, feel empowered to make astute decisions at difficult junctures, and manage the emotional turbulence along the way." Chapters cover choosing doctors, managing pain and side effects, using complementary therapies, surviving cancer, choosing to stop treatment, death and dying, and more. Leifer focuses on information to support decision making, offering lists of questions to ask providers and quotes from research findings and patients and caregivers. He offers information that is balanced and medically sound: for example, he describes a valid role for complementary therapies while condemning quackery. The book's one weakness is that it doesn't always seem focused on the intended audience: cancer patients. The reading level is quite high, and information from research articles would have been more accessible if it were paraphrased rather that quoted extensively. VERDICT Recommended for medically literate cancer patients who want to make well-informed decisions about their treatments.--Janet Crum, Northern Arizona Univ. Lib., Flagstaff

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