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http://www.amazon.com/Cancer-Short-Introduction-Nick-James/dp/B00C2HBPG2Book DescriptionPublication Date: July 1, 2011 | ISBN-10: 0199560234 | Edition: 1stEvery year around 10 million people are diagnosed with cancer, around 80% of whom are destined to die from the disease, accounting for 1 in 6 of all deaths worldwide. And while research into cancer is bringing huge improvements in the range of options available to cancer patients, these new therapies bring with them massive challenges for healthcare systems struggling to find the huge sums of money for the large numbers of patients involved. This Very Short Introduction explores the facts underlying these figures, starting with the basic facts about the disease before moving on to the bigger picture of the economics and politics of cancer care. Nick James, founder of the CancerHelp UK website, examines the trends in diagnosis of the disease and the constant improvements in treatment techniques that result in better cure rates and increased quality and quantity of life for cancer patients. The book also considers issues surrounding expensive drug development, highlights what can be done to reduce the risk of developing cancer, and discusses the use of complementary and alternative therapies.About the AuthorNick James is Professor of Clinical Oncology at the University of Birmingham.5.0 out of 5 stars Comprehensive and Informative August 16, 2011By Dr. Bojan Tunguz HALL OF FAMETOP 50 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICECancer is a terrible disease. It is one of the leading causes of death worldwide, and it is the disease that we still don’t have a very good handle on. There is hardly any family that has not been touched by cancer. The tragedy of a death or impaired life due to cancer is usually so dreadful that we can hardly bring ourselves to understand it better, especially if our understanding seems to have almost no effect on our lives. However, it is important to understand cancer for many reasons, not least of which is the impact that this understanding can have on public and health-care policies. This very short introduction aims to give the reader a quick, yet fairly comprehensive, view of cancer.Strictly speaking, cancer is not one, but many different diseases. Even though the basic underlying cellular mechanism behind all cancers is essentially the same, the ways in which various cancers manifest themselves varies greatly. Furthermore, cancer affects people at different stages of their lives differently. These are just some of the complexities that one encounters when taking a closer look at cancer, and this book does a great job of exploring those issues. The book deals with the size of the cancer problem, the development of cancer, the treatment of cancer, cancer research, the economics of cancer care, and the alternative and complementarity approaches to cancer care. All of these topics are dealt with very objectively and dispassionately, and yet this book is not a dry read. It is written with a lot of care and insight into the vastness of the problem that is cancer.I have to admit, this was a very hard book for me to read. I could only read about a dozen or so pages at a time since the topic of cancer has such a powerful and morbid impact on me. Nonetheless, I would strongly recommend this book to anyone who wants to understand the basic facts about cancer.Please contribute back by OCRing and Spellcheck/Proofreading this book. I recommend ABBYY Finereader 11 (or similar) for doing this work in a relatively easy way. If you plan to do that please leave a comment here so the effort won’t be duplicated by others. Please upload back the final pdf. Thank you.Please note that the high quality scan images are posted here for a specific purpose – to make it easy to OCR/spellcheck the book and not spend 100 hours doing that from a crappy, lossy compressed pdfs that are sometimes posted here. So please don’t waste your time asking why this is not a pdf file. Instead please contribute a few hours of your time and OCR and proofread the posted book. Thank you.