For Square One Publishers’ founder Rudy Shur, Beyond the Magic Bullet—The Anti-Cancer Cocktail: A New Approach to Beating Cancer, which his company released earlier this month, is the culmination of a three-year personal connection he forged with the book’s author, Dr. Raymond Chang.

“Approximately three and a half years ago, a close relative was diagnosed with a very rare cancer and was told that it was fatal,” said Shur. “She would have between three weeks and three months to live. Having been involved in alternative health for over 30 years, I e-mailed or called all my medical contacts around the world. Unfortunately, all their responses were the same. The type of cancer I had mentioned was indeed rare and very few, if any, alternative approaches they could recommend would be effective.”

But during his relative’s radiation treatment, Shur found an article in the Wall Street Journal about a nutritional supplement and off-label drug cocktail. He and his relative agreed to try the treatment after her radiation and found Dr. Chang, who they knew was familiar with the approach. Two weeks later, under Dr. Chang’s supervision, she began the anti-cancer cocktail. “Two months later, three small tumors were found in her right lung. They were removed surgically. However, these tumors had negative margins, as opposed to the original tumors, which had positive margins. Positive margins mean that the surface of the tumors had hairlike growths extending from them. A month later, another scan revealed that there was a small growth in her left lung. This, too, was removed surgically, and the tumors also showed negative margins. She continued to stay on the cocktail, and since that last operation over three years ago, she has been cancer-free.”

Beyond the Magic Bullet argues that the most effective way to fight cancer isn’t in modern medicine’s use of surgery or chemotherapy, but in a combination of Eastern wisdom and Western science. Shur said the experience made him think other people deserved to know about the cocktail option. “I continued to speak to Dr. Chang for about a year and a half after my family’s success,” said Shur. “He realized the importance of a work that might help save the lives of others.”

The book, said Dr. Chang, “springs from the fact that no single drug for most cancers works very well. Instead of looking for new drugs, we should look at combinations of conventional drugs and unconventional choices that can work better than a single ‘magic bullet’ drug. So, ‘cocktail’ is just a way of describing a different strategic approach to treatment, instead of dishing out a treatment one regimen or drug at a time in a linear fashion.”

Dr. Chang, founder of the nonprofit Institute of East-West Medicine and an extensive lecturer on herbal medicine and integrative oncology, believes that traditional treatments like chemotherapy will diminish as time goes by. He specifically cited the use of a targeted nonchemo agent called Tarceva, which may be used by a small sample of lung cancer patients. “Old treatments still have a role and could be part of a cocktail,” said Chang. “They will not disappear anytime soon. Very gradually, we’ll see patients being shifted to entirely nonchemo approaches.”