The Gospel Coalition

Of all the books to make their way onto the bestseller list this year, Anticancer is the one I’ve wanted to read the least. That explains why it’s been hanging around my “list of things to do” for weeks now without any noticeable progress. But finally I caught up on all my reading and I could procrastinate no longer. And the book was just as bad as I had feared; or very nearly so at any rate.

Now let me explain. It’s not that the book is devoid of any good information. Servan-Schreiber is a former cancer patient who has twice survived brain tumors, so he writes about this subject from hard personal experience. He is a doctor and researcher so he deals with the subject from the medical perspective as well. He nicely blends the scientific with the biographical and this gives him credibility on two levels. Unfortunately, he has also read too many New Age books and has spent too much time doing yoga.

Anticancer succeeds where Servan-Schreiber attempts to describe the kind of lifestyle and diet that can prevent cancer, assist in beating the disease and help recover from it. Here he shares the latest wisdom on the foods and components of food that have been found to promote good health (the usual suspects: garlic, fish, omega-3, etc, etc) and those that have been found to hinder good health (processed and synthetic sugars, trans fats, and so on). He shares good and common sense about getting sufficient amounts of exercise and avoiding undue stress. All is well and good.

Where Anticancer fails is where he deals with all of this from the mental and spiritual angles. Here we find him speaking more from personal experience than from scientific fact. He has dabbled in eastern religions and has absorbed more from them through New Age practices. And so he promotes eastern-style meditation as a necessary component to a healthy lifestyle. He also writes about the importance of embracing one’s “true self” as a crucial component to holistic good health, going so far as to say that denying one’s natural homosexuality can inhibit the body’s immune system (which is a real head-scratcher if you consider that sexually-active homosexuals are hardly known for their strong immune systems).

So I suppose we have an interesting mix of good and bad. I appreciated Servan-Schreiber’s attempts to view health as more than just a sound body or a strong immune system. Certainly a well-rounded understanding of health has to go farther than just the physical. At the same time Servan-Schreiber appears to deny the Creator, the one who gave us both body and soul and who prescribes how we are to live holistically in both the physical and the spiritual. For a book of this nature to truly minister to the Christian in times of illness, it would need to minister at both levels. So while Anticancer’s teaching on the physical dimension may be sound and well worth reading, its teaching on the spiritual level is sorely lacking and, worse, patently unbiblical.

It would only be with some hesitation that I’d recommend this book. Admittedly I have not read much else in this category (and hope I never have to), but I assume there must be books out there that would offer similar wisdom on the body while leaving the spiritual angle for a true physician of the soul.

Verdict: Read it if you can find nothing better on the subject.