For modern women, the fear of cancer is almost as epidemic as the disease itself. Throughout the media and on many health forums, advice abounds on how to prevent oneself from getting cancer. These bits of advice range from recommendations to lose weight, keep an alkaline diet, avoid meat... the list is endless. Katrina Bos’s book adds a new perspective: renewing one’s mind and committing to living a true and a happy life.

When the author – who came from a family plagued with cancer – discovered a lump, she naturally assumed that she would probably die of it. Yet she had read enough about it to understand that conquering cancer had a lot to do with the ability to put up a good emotional fight. But how could she?

Coincidence, synchronicity, luck, or God brought the answer to her in the form of a healer who taught her to deal with the issue behind her cancer. According to Bos, it turns out that women who get certain kinds of breast cancers tend to be selfless types who are loved by everyone because they deny themselves. Her mother had died of cancer, and her mother was a sweet self-sacrificing woman who had not learned to live for herself. Of course, there are genetic and nutritional reasons that cancer may run in a family. But heck! There might even be spiritual and emotional reasons. The problem is to work on beating the cancer in the right way, with or without conventional or alternative or supplemental medicine.

Bos traces her path toward healing, a path filled with returning to spirituality and the Bible and to finding out who she is, in the process often challenging what others might expect of her. She knew that, in order to live, she had to change. After all, why would the body – which was created to heal itself– give her an illness that refused to be healed?

This self-help book will definitely come in handy for many women who need to get in touch with truly feeling free to live (as opposed to seeing death as the only way out of a life that is self-denying and thus creating a mindset that suppresses the immune system). There are several sections in the book that some Christians might think of as New Age-y.  If it is, it’s New Age Lite, and those same passages could easily have been found in a Christian anti-cancer book. What If You Could Skip the Cancer? is also good for those women who fear the disease. It’s another weapon that helps to arm the reader against the cancer phobia rampant in our society. The book probably helps; it definitely won’t hurt, and it will cause many women to re-examine their lives - and perhaps believe a bit more that the miraculous is always around us and often in our own hands. It’s an easy read that packs a lot in a little package.