The Gift of Cancer
by Lawrence Doochin
Genre: Nonfiction / Health
ISBN: 9780981699028
Print Length: 124 pages
Reviewed by Lisa Parker Hayreh
A transformative book about how our beliefs can impact our health
Lawrence Doochin offers a unique and compelling perspective about evaluating ways that our thought patterns and beliefs influence the development of cancer and our overall health. Based on his own personal journey healing from cancer, he details ways to acknowledge and transform our beliefs regarding cancer.
He confronts the labels of “cancer” versus “healthy” and urges his readers to find a kinder, more nuanced, and healthier set of personal beliefs which will directly improve healing from cancer. He clarifies that he is not offering recommendations of any particular treatment nor any professional expertise; rather, he is vulnerable in sharing his personal battle coping with a cancer diagnosis and how he healed from cancer by consciously tackling his erroneous beliefs that stood in the way of his living a truly healthy life.
In addition to sharing his own struggles with limiting beliefs about himself and his health, he identifies general faulty assumptions the reader may face, similar to his faulty assumptions. He highlights ways in which he challenged these faulty assumptions with more adaptive and accurate views and how these adopted views transformed his overall well-being on all levels.
The Gift of Cancer raises alarms about the limitations of the US health care system, the dangers from pesticides and hormones within our food supply, and the staggering impact of medicating our distress through the use of substances, fast food, and technology. Lawrence Doochin shines a spotlight on the beliefs driving our unhealthy behaviors and lifestyles which dramatically increase risk of cancer diagnosis and maintenance of active disease in general. He also provides wise guidance about ways to begin to tease apart the beliefs at the very root of our unhealthiest behaviors and how to build healthier assumptions and habits moving forward, challenging multiple extreme notions that many endorse upon receiving a cancer diagnosis.
For example, he highlights that people may blame themselves or may feel like they have been struck at random with cancer. He confronts both of these extremes as faulty thinking. “Your health issue, whether cancer or something else, is highly likely to be a combination of choices you have made which weren’t aligned with your highest good – the part that’s your responsibility – along with choices that were made for you, often without your knowledge or consent. These relate to the world we live in.”
The Gift of Cancer is thoroughly compassionate, consistently humble, and extraordinarily wise. This self-help book offers compelling arguments for taking responsibility for our self-care while simultaneously offering generous compassion and nonjudgment of the factors and choices that may have contributed to a cancer diagnosis. Lawrence Doochin clarifies throughout this book that he hopes to help others find true healing by honestly sharing his own hard-won transformation.
His unflinchingly candid and raw testimonial of how he wrestled with his worst challenges with cancer is an inspiring and wise example of transformation and healing. He writes expressly to readers with a cancer diagnosis and maintains a kind and compassionate attitude to all throughout the book. He empowers readers with his conviction that it is up to each of us to evaluate and determine our best way forward. Although he repeatedly points out his lack of professional training or expertise, his discussion of how to identify and change our beliefs is astute. He provides extraordinarily kind wisdom and guidance without presumption or preachiness.
Although the writing may appear at times contradictory and meandering, this writing style mirrors Lawrence Doochin’s commitment to achieve a more balanced synthesis of extreme and limited potential viewpoints in the search for a more cohesive and accurate personal truth for his readers.
The Gift of Cancer urges all of us to look at a more conscious and comprehensive view of self-care. Doochin encourages us to listen to our bodies and our hearts as well as to sound medical advice, and he offers transformative guidance wrapped in extraordinary compassion and admirable authenticity.
Thank you for reading Lisa Parker Hayreh’s book review of The Gift of Cancer by Lawrence Doochin! If you liked what you read, please spend some more time with us at the links below.
What did you think?