Subtitle: A Guide to the Science and Politics of an Emerging Medical Field
Author:David J. Hess, Ph.D.
Subject: Health & Medicine
Cloth ISBN 0-8135-2594-2
Pages: 288 pp.
Description: The first book to assemble in one place interviews with the major opinion leaders in the alternative cancer therapy field.

At least half a million American cancer patients are using complementary and alternative medicine therapies such as dietary programs, supplements, imagery, and herbs, but little has been done to evaluate these therapies or to provide information about them to the public. As North American cancer rates have risen in recent decades so that a person's lifetime risk is now over one in three, the questions that patients and clinicians have about alternative treatments have continued to grow. How can patients and clinicians make sense of the various options?

In Evaluating Alternative Cancer Therapies, David Hess has interviewed the major opinion leaders in the alternative cancer therapy field-clinicians, researchers, patient advocacy leaders, and journalists-who explain their philosophy of evaluation, their therapeutic preferences, and the political and economic hurdles to getting the necessary research done. Both a guide to the guides and a survey of the field, this innovative book provides a framework for evaluation problems that clinicians and patients face-from patient needs and the quality of potential clinical care givers to research methods, proposed policy reforms, and the therapies themselves.

Evaluating Alternative Cancer Therapies does not recommend any therapies, doctors, or institutions, and under no circumstances is the information presented in this book intended as medical advice for individual patients.

David Hess is a cultural/medical anthropologist and professor of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He is the author of nine other books on science and the public, including Science and Technology in a Multicultural World and Science Studies: An Advanced Introduction. His current research includes a book on the controversial research tradition on bacteria as possible agents in cancer causation, Can Bacteria Cause Cancer? and Women Confront Cancer, coauthored with Margaret Wooddell.

Praise for Evaluating Alternative Cancer Therapies

"Hess has performed an invaluable service to all those concerned with learning more about alternative cancer treatments. It is clear that he has joined the ranks of his interviewees as one of our nation's experts on the subject."

-Robbie Davis-Floyd, coauthor, From Doctor to Healer: The Transformative Journey

"An important book for anyone who has cancer, or treats patients with cancer."

-Alan R. Gaby, M.D., past president, American Holistic Medical Association

"David Hess combines history and usable decision-making information all in one book. He clarifies so many issues."

-Ann E. Fonfa, breast cancer patient and activist, The Annie Appleseed Project, New York, N.Y.