There are now more than 4,200 hospitals and clinics in the United States that consider themselves major cancer treatment centers. Each has a web site that you can visit.

The issue of choosing a treatment center will vary from simple and straightforward for many new patients, to exquisitely complex for others. Many factors contribute, but the patient's sort of cancer and its stage of progression are always core considerations.

If this is a process that has you stymied, or if more information is needed, please see Living with Cancer , Section Three, and particularly Chapter 7.

Several important healthcare authorities want to help you make sure that the hospital you choose is the best available to you. Medicare leads the way with a general evaluation process that includes all but some 60 of the nation's general hospitals. The Leapfrog Group and Health Grades Inc. also provide general information designed to compare hospital services fairly. The Medicare site, Hospital Compare, is at www.hospitalcompare.hhs.gov.

If you are a recently diagnosed cancer patient and have not yet been introduced to an oncologist, ask your primary care physician for the reason. Carefully evaluate the answer you get. Cancer is complex and nasty. Its treatments are constantly adjusting to the latest scientific findings. It behooves you to get state-of-the-art care from a specialist.

A cancer patient should not go to any part of the examination, testing or treatment processes alone. The reasons abound. Here are a few:

•  The patient is really sick, and probably weaker than usual. Help on the trip to and from may be more than a luxury.

•  A cancer patient can be made sicker by being required to exert beyond a reasonable level. Help should not be considered optional, even if the patient protests.

•  A potentially fatal disease will be discussed. A little loving support matters.

•  Two people need to listen to what is said, to be sure that all the information is retained and that none of it is distorted or misunderstood. In those cases when there is really bad news, it is vital that a partner be there to continue careful listening, after the patient's ears have started to ring and heart begins to pound.

•  Examinations and treatments go better with pleasant company.

•  Sometimes medications have to be administered that make it dangerous for the patient to travel alone. These treatments and their effects are not always predictable in advance. Having a partner there is smart insurance.

•  Sometimes the partner can take care of business office matters while the patient is in treatment. This lifts another burden from the patient.

•  Later, a meal, a laugh, a movie, with a friend, takes some of the curse off a rotten, maybe painful day.

From the very beginning of human awareness of its Creator, people have prayed for healing and believed that their prayers were answered. There has also been skepticism, buttressed by notable voices in physical and psychiatric medicine. In general, the naysayers have prevailed during the last 150-odd years. The notion that God could heal on request was beaten out of most medical students by their professors, until very recently. Then computers, munching on huge databases of facts about cancer patients in the 1980s and 1990s, began isolating "recovery factors" having to do with "religiosity."

There have been over 1,200 scientific studies conducted in the United States since 1975 concerning the therapeutic effects of active worship, according to Dwight L. Carlson, MD, prominent psychiatrist and best-selling author. In over 800 of them, a positive result was documented. "Documented" is a word that is reserved in medical parlance to describe something that has been rigorously questioned, using scientific methodology, and found to be potent. Simply and directly stated, an active relationship with your higher power has been certified to be an effective cancer fighter.

If you have a faith, cancer may have shaken it. Others have come to this page with long-held skepticism. Both views are very welcome, healthy points from which to examine the evidence, presented in detail, Living with Cancer , Chapter 10.