Let’s not police the language we use about cancer | Letter
I am a 35-year-old survivor (my choice of language) of childhood acute myeloid leukemia and, not coincidentally, now a pediatric oncologist. I’ve never really liked metaphors of war and fighting in the context of cancer discussions, but I hear relatively often from parents or relatives that a child is “a fighter” or “incredibly brave.” From my own experiences as a patient (four cycles of intensive chemotherapy alternating with five episodes of near-fatal sepsis) and as a doctor (I care for children who are awaiting a bone marrow transplant, who are undergoing high-dose chemotherapy, who have amputations or other major surgery or who have undergone years of chemotherapy), I can completely understand why people turn to this language.
It’s good to be reminded that, like Simon Jenkins (Let King Charles’s illness finally change the way we talk about cancer: It’s not about ‘winning’ or ‘losing’ a ‘war’, February 16) and your correspondents (Letters, February 22) The experience of many people with cancer is that of a single mass found early and completely removed before it spreads, or of a once fatal condition turned into a chronic disease by modern medication . Of course, we have to be careful about the way we talk about cancer. But please let people choose their own words. And if your own experience with cancer has been a relatively happy one, don’t be too heavy-handed on the language of those who feel like they are in a life-or-death struggle.
Regarding Richard Nixon, Mr. Jenkins might be interested to know that the war on cancer speech was created in support of the National Cancer Act of 1971. In 1969, the US spent less than 90 cents per person on cancer research, and talking about cancer was taboo in polite society, as Mr. Jenkins rightly decries. Nixon was convinced by experts that a well-funded national effort was needed to improve cancer treatment, and that this could be his administration’s Apollo program. His language was understood by a nation for whom World War II was a recent memory, and the Cold War a current reality, and he got his funding. It’s impossible to say what cancer treatment would be like today if that hadn’t happened when it happened. A delay of even a few years would probably have been fatal to my chances in the late 1980s.
Dr. Chris Howell
Liverpool