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The Activist Cancer Patient: How to Take Charge of Your Treatment

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I just read an extraordinary new book and I'd like to share my thoughts with you. "The Activist Cancer Patient" by Beverly Zakarian is an important new book and anyone with cancer should own this unique and exceptional resource. Ms. Zakarian, a cancer survivor, has written a moving, inspirational, and practical aid for cancer patients. While "empowerment" is the main theme, "The Activist Cancer Patient" is also a step-by-step guide on how to improve your odds of surviving cancer. It teaches people - in the midst of crisis - how to become activists for their own most effective cancer treatment, how to gain access to the newest therapies, and suggests how they can apply what they've learned to the public arena - and why they must! It provides numerous resources for getting the information needed to become informed, empowered, effective patients. Be your own advocate. "It's your life... you need to fight for it!" I know that millions of people would benefit greatly from "The Activist Cancer Patient." It's truly a "Life-Aid!" Elana Hayden

In 1985, Beverly Zakarian was a wife, a mother to a 15-year old girl, and a newly diagnosed patient with Stage 3 ovarian cancer. She lost her uterus to surgery and her hair to chemotherapy, but she found her passion for patient empowerment.

Zakarian learned the hard way a lesson that has now become a touchstone in successful cancer treatment - that patients must take an active role in their cancer care. Her experience with the "don't ask, don't tell" medical establishment, confusing federal bureaucracies and unresponsive insurance companies, led her to found the Cancer Patients Action Alliance.

Instead of being a care-based group by providing access to services, emotional support and other important but reactive resources, Zakarian and CAN-ACT advocated direct patient action via political, social and personal agendas.

Her book, published one year before her death in 1997, still speaks with the fire of an evangelist. Many of the chapters were written before the large scale availability of Internet-based resources. Ironically, the outmoded chapters support Zakarian's argument in the transformative power of information.

This ground-breaking work is a historical reference point to the birth of the cancer-patient advocacy movement. It also provides an excellent overview of the mind-boggling and multi-agency drug approval process required for cancer treatment.

Zakarian's most enduring vision - and what keeps this book relevant today - is that life and death decisions belong to the community most impacted by the disease. And by organizing, cancer patients can be an important voice not only in the conversation, but in their outcome.