cover image BREAST CANCER: BEYOND CONVENTION: The World's Foremost Authorities on Complementary and Alternative Medicine Offer Advice on Healing

BREAST CANCER: BEYOND CONVENTION: The World's Foremost Authorities on Complementary and Alternative Medicine Offer Advice on Healing

, . . Pocket, $26 (496pp) ISBN 978-0-7434-1011-3

More and more Americans, especially those with serious illnesses such as breast cancer, are turning to complementary and alternative medicine to supplement their Western treatments. This collection of essays—edited by oncologist Tripathy and acupuncturist/herbalists Cohen and Tagliaferri (who herself is a breast cancer survivor)—is intended to serve as a guide to the alternative therapies most often used by women with breast cancer. The book includes dense and sometimes meandering chapters on approaches such as Chinese Medicine, vitamin and mineral supplementation, meditation and prayer. The authors maintain that little research has been conducted on these therapies because of lack of funding and the difficulty in evaluating alternative medicine separately from conventional, but that data has become increasingly available. Although most of the chapters are largely based on research, others rely simply on seemingly improbable anecdotes (for example, one chapter describes a patient who recovered from inflammatory breast cancer after she began following a macrobiotic diet). Despite its inconsistencies, women with breast cancer looking for alternative therapies might find this book to be a good start in their own research. (June)

Corrections: Carol Winkelman, the author of The Complete Guide to Pregnancy After 30, was a Pulitzer Prize nominee, not an award winner (Forecasts, Feb. 18).

The author of Glorious Indoor Gardens is Michele Driscoll Alioto (Forecasts, Apr. 1).