Cancer Patients Often Suffer More From Society’s Reaction to Them Than They Do From Their Disease

Congratulations on the Jan. 24 article, “When the Resume Includes Cancer: Ignorance, Fear Turn Patients Into Victims.” I have known many patients who have suffered more from society’s response to their condition than they have from either the disease itself or the stress of the treatments they have had to undergo to get well again.

I have long urged that the best and quickest solution would be to abandon the use of the word “cancer” in medicine. We should send it back to the places where it properly belongs and where it does no harm, namely to invertebrate zoology and astrology.

Practitioners in this field of study already have opted to be called “oncologists” rather than “cancerologists,” and I suspect the reason is the negative connotation of the latter term.

There is no single disease called cancer. There are hundreds of different kinds of abnormal cell growths, just as there are hundreds of different kinds of infectious diseases. To call all forms of abnormal cell growth cancer is as inaccurate, insensitive and inhumane as it would be to call all infectious disease “the plague.”

The problem is that society has made much use of the dramatic word cancer, and of the fear that it generates, to promote fund raising for research and treatment. It might be hard on the American Cancer Society, the National Cancer Institute and others to avoid using the word. In the long run, however, we would be infinitely better off if we dropped it from the medical literature. Support for research and treatment might even increase if appeals were directed toward positive rather than negative emotions.

BERNARD TOWERS, M.D.

The writer is a professor of anatomy and psychiatry at UCLA and director of the UCLA Medicine & Society Forum.