Getting Well Again

Getting Well Again introduced structured mental imagery as an adjunct in cancer care. Its central claim is that attitude, stress, and the will to live influence cancer outcomes, and that patients can support their treatment by vividly imagining their immune cells attacking and destroying tumor cells.

Developed by the radiation oncologist Simonton with the psychologist Stephanie Matthews-Simonton, the protocols pair conventional radiotherapy with relaxation and guided visualization. The legitimate core of the approach, that relaxation, imagery, stress reduction, and active coping improve patients' mood, pain, and capacity to tolerate treatment, is now widely integrated into supportive oncology.

The book's stronger claim, that visualization meaningfully extends survival or shrinks tumors by directing the immune system, has not held up in controlled research, and its implication that patients who fail to fight hard enough bear responsibility for their disease has drawn sustained criticism. Read with that boundary in view, the work remains a founding text of psycho-oncology.