As can be gleaned from a number of features, book reviews and letters within this issue, cancer is hardly the good news it is sometimes presented as in the Media. In the words of Beata Bishop, herself a survivor of more then 20 years of malignant melanoma, having been given a prognosis of 6 weeks to live "…A life-threatening illness, such as cancer, pushes the patient into a narrow, grim, body-centred existence, where all interest and care are focused onto the endangered body and its symptoms. The diagnosis itself unleashes terror and a sense of helplessness." (See The Role of the Transpersonal Dimension in Life-Threatening Illness pages 15-17.)