Not The Last Goodbye: On Life, Death, Healing, and Cancer

By David Servan-Schreiber

David Servan-Schreiber was a neuroscientist on an urgent mission to bring hope and alternatives to those with cancer. Nineteen years after being diagnosed with the disease, an emergency MRI confirmed his greatest fear: his brain cancer had returned. Here, he shares his coming to terms with the news and, with courage and candour, examines his life from the perspective of one who understands that his illness is terminal—nevertheless living every day fully and with purpose. As the author of Anticancer and a doctor who has given hope to millions around the world, Servan-Schreiber frankly acknowledges the ways in which he departed from his own advice. Reaffirming the Anticancer program—nutrition, exercise, rest and meditation—he also weaves in the stories of a number of clinical cases and offers a rebalanced approach, emphasizing certain elements that he himself tended to ignore.

Not the Last Goodbye raises many of the most complex and personal questions about how we choose to live and how we prepare for death, striking a delicate balance between the limits of medicine and the hope that sustains us as we confront them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Nov 22, 2011
• ISBN: 9781443410908

David Servan-Schreiber

David Servan-Schreiber, M.D., Ph.D., was Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and co-founder of the Center for Integrative Medicine. He co-directed an NIH laboratory for the study of clinical cognitive neuroscience and has published more than ninety articles in scientific journals. His last book, Anticancer, A New Way of Life, became an international bestseller and was translated into more than forty languages. His previous book, Healing Without Freud or Prozac was also an international bestseller. Following a yearlong battle with a relapse of brain cancer, David died in July 2011.

Reviews for Not The Last Goodbye

[aussiemandas · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A comfort to those facing terminal illness!

[susan.macura · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is an insightful look at facing one’s mortality after being given a terminal diagnosis. The author stresses the need for and importance hope, even as one is dying, as well as how to embrace the time left and to die with dignity.