For more than three decades, Dr. Azra Raza has cared for cancer patients. An oncologist at Columbia University, Raza has had a front row seat to our country’s war on the disease – tracking medical breakthroughs and keeping current with the latest research.

At the same time, Raza says, she watched the price tag attached to cancer treatments continue to grow, along with the suffering of her patients and their families.

And it is a suffering Raza knows well. For five years, she tended her husband as he was dying from leukemia. His illness confirmed for Raza what she already had started to believe: modern medicine is getting it wrong.

Azra Raza traces her own journey as a doctor and wife, and suggests a new approach to the fight against cancer in a new book titled, “The First Cell: And The Human Costs of Pursuing Cancer to The Last.”