David Khayat is Chief of Oncology at Hôpital de La Pitié-Salpêtrière, in Paris, and a professor at Pierre-et-Marie-Curie University. Editions Odile Jacob published his earlier work, Les Chemins de l’espoir, as well as the more recent and highly successful Le Vrai Régime anticancer (sales of 100,000 copies) and Les Recettes gourmandes du vrai régime anticancer (50,000 copies).

This is not a memoir, but a unique, intimate work that enables us to understand what goes on in the mind of an eminent physician as he cares for his patients and how he cares for them.
David Khayat reveals how he relates to death, hope and failure; to science, which continues to progress; to obsessive questions; to his patients; to healing, suffering and fragility (his own as well as the patients’); to patients’ rights; to his commitment to accompany his patients in the struggle against cancer; and even to occasional attacks…
This book is a declaration of love to a marvellous profession that consists in caring for patients with sincerity and dedication and with the humility that is learned from failure. The author offers us here a profound, heart-felt reflection on his thirty-year cohabitation with death, and on what keeps him active, optimistic and happy — in spite of everything.