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Racing to a Cure: A Cancer Victim Refuses Chemotherapy and Finds Tomorrow's Cures in Today's Scientific Laboratories
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 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.
Ruzic went on the 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.
448 pages, Hardcover
First published August 18, 2003
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
August 5, 2012
Even though this book is nearly 10 years old, I took it up because cancer has afflicted at least half of my extended family leading me to a career in cancer genomics. There are some good things about the book (descriptions of how patients have to advocate for themselves) but there's so much pseudo- and anti-science presented that I feel 2 stars is generous. This is even more surprising given his life as someone promoting science.
The good: Ruzic tries to take an evidence based approach to controlling his cancer, descriptions of new targeted therapies.
The bad: flippant disregard for chemo being nothing more than toxic chemicals. Snidely describing 'chemotherapists' - by his own account there are well over 1000 biotech companies in the US alone, many developing therapies for cancer, which at any given moment translate into thousands if not tens of thousands of phase 1 and 2 clinical trials - I challenge anyone to be able to keep up to date on that information. If by some miracle they could, they would have no time to treat patients. Also some of his descriptions of targeted agents (particularly kinesin inhibitors) or no more specific than targeted micro tubule inhibitors (ex: vincristine and paclitaxel), chemicals Ruzic describes all too often as simply 'toxins'. Most appalling however was how he tried to advocate use of celebrex for his MCL group of friends. It seems to have worked for him because COX-2 was a driver in his cancer. Advocating its use with no supporting evidence for activation in individual patients amounts to at worst a snake oil style of 'cure' or at best the same approach taken for administering chemotherapy to unselected patients.
As anyone with a rudimentary chemistry or pharmacology background knows - the dose is the poison, not the chemical. This is true of targeted therapies just as it is of chemotherapy.
The good: Ruzic tries to take an evidence based approach to controlling his cancer, descriptions of new targeted therapies.
The bad: flippant disregard for chemo being nothing more than toxic chemicals. Snidely describing 'chemotherapists' - by his own account there are well over 1000 biotech companies in the US alone, many developing therapies for cancer, which at any given moment translate into thousands if not tens of thousands of phase 1 and 2 clinical trials - I challenge anyone to be able to keep up to date on that information. If by some miracle they could, they would have no time to treat patients. Also some of his descriptions of targeted agents (particularly kinesin inhibitors) or no more specific than targeted micro tubule inhibitors (ex: vincristine and paclitaxel), chemicals Ruzic describes all too often as simply 'toxins'. Most appalling however was how he tried to advocate use of celebrex for his MCL group of friends. It seems to have worked for him because COX-2 was a driver in his cancer. Advocating its use with no supporting evidence for activation in individual patients amounts to at worst a snake oil style of 'cure' or at best the same approach taken for administering chemotherapy to unselected patients.
As anyone with a rudimentary chemistry or pharmacology background knows - the dose is the poison, not the chemical. This is true of targeted therapies just as it is of chemotherapy.
July 19, 2020
9/10 this is a great book about fighting cancer and all the obstacles that must be overcome. Neil Ruzic believes in hard science.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews