The first sentence of the introduction to LIVING WITH PANCREATIC CANCER is “Pancreatic cancer is extremely unfair.” For anyone dealing with this disease, either directly or through caring for a loved one, that tone of immediate empathy will be incredibly comforting. Any diagnosis of a life-threatening disease will be disturbing and frightening, but cancer carries with it an extra dose of terror. That makes this book a very welcome tool for patients and their caregivers alike.

Dr. Earl Campazzi is a primary care physician, and concern for the specific circumstances of every individual patient shines through in this book—especially in the way he acknowledges the different levels of access and the different financial resources that patients will be dealing with. He takes care to provide plenty of information and advice around what’s necessary, what’s good to have, and what should be at the bottom of priority lists.

The book is structured, helpfully, as a series of standalone chapters that can be consulted depending on your specific needs. For example, if you need to find an oncologist and don’t know where to start, there is a chapter that offers guidance. Another chapter discusses a broader team of specialists that can be helpful in finding the right treatments, and a thorough chapter discusses paying for treatment and living expenses with clear language and practical advice that many people will appreciate. Take this excerpt: “It’s important to follow all the rules. If you don’t, the insurance company might not pay for your treatment. For example, if you get a treatment without getting the needed preauthorization, you almost certainly will have to pay for it yourself.”

Dr. Campazzi is very up-front about his use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools in writing this book, primarily OpenAI’s large language model-based chatbot, ChatGPT. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with using AI tools in the creation of a book like this, and Dr. Campazzi should be applauded for his transparency. However, the way this material is presented undermines the authority of the work. He frequently opens passages with phrases like “According to AI,” or “Here are some questions that AI suggests,” which imply that he is simply copying and pasting information from ChatGPT into the manuscript (often with an extremely unhelpful citation that simply reads “OpenAI. (2023). ChatGPT [Computer software]. Retrieved from https://www.openai.com”). Without any information on the precise prompts used to generate this material, or how much it was edited by Dr. Campazzi before inclusion (if at all), the impression is one of convenience for the author. Readers attracted to the book in part because of the perceived authority of an experienced physician may be put off by this reliance on a tool that often makes mistakes or pulls information from dubious sources.

Overall, this is a book that will benefit patients and caregivers dealing with pancreatic cancer. At a time of confusion and fear, Dr. Campazzi has assembled a book with clear, direct information people can use immediately to plan their treatment, their finances, and how to move forward with their lives. The inclusion of quotes from people who are dealing with the disease or who have survived it is both a comfort and a resource that will be appreciated as well.

Earl Campazzi’s LIVING WITH PANCREATIC CANCER is an information-packed book written with empathy, albeit one that’s undermined by the heavy use of artificial intelligence-generated writing.

~Jeff Somers for IndieReader