Healing Outside the Margins: The Survivor's Guide to Integrative Cancer Care (Hardcover)

by Carole O'Toole (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
Of the one million Americans diagnosed with cancer every year, 70% choose complementary therapies, such as acupuncture, massage, and guided imagery, to support conventional cancer treatment for coping with their illness. "The responsibility for selecting complementary therapies while facing such a serious illness can be daunting," says cancer coach and cancer survivor Carole O'Toole in her thorough new book, HEALING OUTSIDE THE MARGINS: The Survivor's Guide to Integrative Cancer Care. O'Toole was diagnosed in 1994 with a relatively rare, advanced and virulent form of breast cancer and given 18 months to live. Alive and vibrant today, O’Toole knows first-hand how effective combining therapies can be and how confusing the options are. "I believe that both saved my life," O'Toole says of conventional and complementary treatments, "and feel extremely blessed to have chosen a more integrative form of care."

With growing numbers of licensed and credentialed providers of reliable and effective complementary care as well as organizations that provide credible and objective information on them, O'Toole's mission is clear: "We need to share more information that supports cancer patients' choices, not inhibit this process. Media coverage, like a recent Prime Time Live segment, that perpetuates negative stereotypes of patients using complementary therapies as naive and desperate, and those who offer alternative treatments as quacks and charlatans, discourages patients from becoming involved in their health care."

Not a rose-colored endorsement of complementary therapy, she recommends that "all patients seek out the best conventional treatment" and amend their care with complementary modalities. Bolstered by a surge of hospital cancer-care programs that have adopted a variety of complementary therapies, as well as a recent Harvard Medical School study which reveals that 50% of patients who tried alternative therapy reported continual use of the methods 11 to 20 years later, O'Toole sees that complementary care is here to stay.

HEALING OUTSIDE THE MARGINS provides a variety of tools needed to reach decisions and establish a personalized, integrated plan. O'Toole – now a coach to others who face this overwhelming array of choices – offers accessible, up-to-date information on 25 popular complementary therapies, from acupuncture to osteopathy to spiritual direction; whether to use them; what to use and when, and how and where to find them. She also explains the role and value of both conventional and complementary cancer therapies, assembling and communicating with a health-care team, and coordinating care. Called a "wise, compassionate and illuminating approach to dealing with cancer.... A sensible road map to guide the baffled cancer patient out of the wilderness of well-meaning but conflicting advice that invariably shows up," by noted guided imagery therapist and author Belleruth Naparstek, HEALING OUTSIDE THE MARGINS is a well-organized, timely and essential guide for anyone living with cancer.

From the Inside Flap
If you or someone in your family has been diagnosed with cancer, you’ve felt the rush of fear. “How will I get through this? What are the doctors telling me? What hope do I have?” Then you face the big choices: Is surgery the right thing? Chemotherapy? What about radiation? And somehow, in the quiet moments, you decide to move forward. You determine to be one of the more than 8 million cancer survivors today, and to live a life as wondrous as ever before.

Healing Outside the Margins can help you do just that. It’s not a book of “miracle” cures. Rather, it’s a book about making the right choices about your own cancer care. It’s about integrating the treatments your doctor has suggested with new and exciting therapies that have helped millions of cancer survivors. And most importantly, it’s a book about separating the quackery from the real and effective treatments. It’s about making important choices that will help you physically, mentally, and spiritually. In Healing Outside the Margins, author Carole O’Toole shares the results of her extensive research. After being diagnosed in 1994 with incurable breast cancer, Carole spent the next seven years researching alternative healing therapies, studying their benefits, and determining what works and what doesn’t.

Healing Outside the Margins gives you reliable, extensive information on the enormous range of complementary treatments, practitioners, and resources available today. You’ll learn:

-Step-by-step guidelines for constructing your own “action plan” for choosing complementary therapy

-What to expect from treatment sessions

-How to determine which therapies work for you

You’ll find detailed explanations of 25 valid and credible healing techniques that can help you regain energy, including:

-Massage

-energy healing

-reiki

-shiatsu

-meditation

-yoga

Healing Outside the Margins also includes interviews with over 40 complementary therapy practitioners and provides hundreds of additional sources for further information.

Healing Outside the Margins is the most important companion you can have on your path to healing and total wellness

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 317 pages
• Publisher: LifeLine Press (November 25, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0895261936
• ISBN-13: 978-0895261939
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,347,579 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Solid, well researched, and from the heart--indispensible!, April 15, 2002

By A Customer

As a bodywork practitioner presented with the dilemma of offering help and services to clients confronted with the trial of their lives, I had high expectations of this book. I wasn't disappointed. This book is solid, well researched, and substantive. I will recommend it without reservation to my clients. Not just clients facing cancer, but any client troubled by a chronic or acute physical condition or discomfort who seeks resources to improve their health and well-being. This takes effort, education, information, and resources. What this book offers is a structure and framework to evaluate "what's out there", and help a person to decide "Is this for me?" "Is this for me now, or later?"

What I especially appreciate is the author's emphasis on trusting your own intuition---and backing that up with succinct, well-organized information to facilitate rational decision-making in support of one's intuition. This book isn't just another nice book about a cancer experience; it's a well thought out resource to think through and make decisions on developing your complementary health care. Thank you, Carole O'Toole!

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Empowering and Respectful, June 8, 2002

By A Customer

This book offers the reader a factual, non-biased compilation of available complementary therapies. As a cancer survivor, she teaches us that when facing a cancer diagnosis and standard allopathic therapies, we can, no we must, be an active participant in assessing all the possible treatment paths as we make our decisions and choices in our path to healing. Not only do we hope to understand what is happening to us, we must take an active role in regaining our good health.

Ms. O'Toole teaches us that we must trust our selves and our abilities in this process. For when we do, we make the best possible decisions for our lives. This book is a wonderful guide for those facing treatment as well as their loved ones.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a gift, April 18, 2002

By A Customer

This book is such a gift, written with authority, clarity, and empathy. For anyone who wonders what to expect from different complementary therapies, this book is invaluable. For those facing decisions about maintaining health while fighting cancer, this book is a blessing. The author transforms her struggle to stay alive and maintain well-being into a resource for the rest of us.