RISE AND THRIVE ABOVE CANCER

Zinggrebe presents a wide-ranging primer that asserts the health benefits of alternative medicine, meditation, a proper diet, and spiritual growth.

The author, a German physician and life coach who founded a nutritional supplements company,revisits his struggle at the age of 40 with lymphoid cancer, which he survived despite a dire prognosis in 2017. He underwent conventional chemotherapy, but he also attributes his recovery to a “toolkit” of alternative therapies, lifestyle changes, and other practices. His regimen included simple meditation and breathing exercises that relieved stress, anxiety, and depression; visualization exercises in which he imagined scenes of medications killing cancer cells and doctors telling him he was cured; verbal affirmations, proclaiming the effectiveness of healing processes; law-of-attraction drills in which he practiced emotions of certitude while contemplating goals; and “power moves” that expressively mimed robust health: “I stretch both arms up to the sky, splaying my fingers and making myself look as tall as possible,” he explains of his own power move. “I then stick my chest out and hit my chest with my fists firmly twice.” Zinggrebe also recommends moderate exercise, fasting for 16 hours a day, and nutritional supplements, including vitamin D and polyphenols such as curcumin. He also has practical tips for cancer patients, from searching questions to ask doctors—“If your son, your mother, your partner or you were sitting here instead of me today, what treatment would you recommend to them?”—to the importance of noteating favorite foods before chemotherapy because the ensuing nausea may put one off them. Later chapters survey other healing modalities, including sessions with a medium.

Zinggrebe’s treatise is aimed at patients facing new cancer diagnoses who feel understandable panic and disorientation; he knows this terrain well and writes about it in moving, evocative prose: “On the outside, I had plenty to keep me busy. But on the inside, I was slowly collapsing….I asked myself if there was even any point to life now that I had nothing left to give and I found myself capable of doing less and less.” The author provides lucid, easy-to-follow instructions for various therapeutic exercises and explains the scientific rationales behind them, as when he writes of an activity that he says will “activate your parasympathetic nervous system considerably and sink your blood pressure and heart rate.” Much of the book is a searching disquisition of the influence of the psyche on the body, and Zinggrebe writes about it in rich, colorful language that makes the topic feel accessible, even playful: “imagine the actual radiation as…brightly colored rays of energy whose only mission is to attack harmful cells,” he suggests in a passage on visualizing successful radiation treatments. “You can picture [cancer cells as] the bad guys in a movie, clinging to the abyss with their last ounce of strength before falling to their death.” Cancer patients interested in exploring nontraditional approaches to treatment will find much intriguing and hopeful information here.

A practical and warmly reassuring guide to fortifying the body and mind for the fight of a lifetime.