Surviving Terminal Cancer: Clinical Trials, Drug Cocktails, and Other Treatments Your Oncologist Won't Tell You About

by Ben A. Williams

A new guide to the often concealed radical options for cancer therapy argues that while news may not be good, the prognosis is not neccessarilly fatal. Original.

275 pages, Paperback

First published August 25, 2002

Reviews

[Ravi Sankar]

If you're considering reading this book, you or a loved one is in a shitty situation. I definitely recommend reading this, for two reasons:
1. It's easy to treat a terminal diagnosis as an immediate death sentence. Reading Williams' story was emotionally helpful for our family to shift to thinking "Long odds, yes, but we definitely can fight this with a real probability of success."
2. Cancer treatment for late stage patients is too conservative—when a median outcome might be 18 months of life, your risk profile _should_ be different, and it makes sense to consider treatments that have some probability of helping and low probability of hurting. But the standard of care is to avoid talking about / recommending any treatment that hasn't gotten past its phase 3 trial. Williams isn't proposing juice cleanses... he points to interventions that had some phase 1 / phase 2 evidence and decided to take a risk on them. Some of the medications/supplements are probably useful, but this mindset is _definitively_ useful.

[Chris]

I was a very motivated reader.

[Colin Maclennan]

Very interesting. I am not a sufferer myself, but read this because I have a relative who has this condition. It certainly changed my perspective of what is best for patients with a terminal diagnosis. I had always assumed that the rigorous requirements for drugs to be tested before being made available operated in the best interests of patients. Now I am not so sure. Ben Williams has done a pretty good job in documenting his own efforts to deal with his condition. I see that he has made a film of the same title as the book, but covering the experience of a number of other brain cancer sufferers. It is available on YouTube. Worth watching.

[Christine Sutherland]

I put it in the bin.

The author has/had glioblastoma and purported that he had survived because of a cocktail of drugs and supplements.

None of these things have any effect on glioblastoma whatsoever and the author is writing from a perspective of survivor bias, where he attributes his survival to inconsequential things that he was doing. This is the "false attribution" effect, not treatment or a cure.

Just so sad that desperate people waste time, money, effort, and even hope on what is essentially snake oil.

[Therese]

Excellent book about alternative treatments for brain cancer written by a brain cancer survivor of 24 years. This book is about 20 years old but sadly not much has changed since then. Some good ideas.

[Nikole Michelle]

Would recommend for any patients, healthcare providers, or anyone involved in research

[Jerry Jones]

Very interesting and informative

A critical perspective of the cancer industry from a very intelligent patient. Good for thought of you ever have to deal with cancer.

[Bernadette Guimarin]

What a great source!

Thank you Ben! GBM patient, diagnosed April 2019. First scan - clear. Now with UCSF and Nutrional Solutions. I'll keep passing your messages on to others - one of these days we'll talk.