Cancer

the facts; the truth; the real, genuine information

      Chiefly because of the bad old days? - when ‘The Big C’ was viewed as being an especially cruel sentence of death; as if there were no cure, no-one died of anything else and no other disease caused pain? There is better understanding of the disease now, good treatments for some cancers, many true cures and much better care when a cure is not possible. Although the overall situation is still bad enough we can claim a colossal advance over the fifty years of the writer’s medical career. Then to cure childhood leukaemia was a pipe-dream, now it happens more often than not.

       Cancer in a child or young person is distressing to everybody. The vast majority of cases occur in late adult life, however, and if it is true that we shall all die in the end then a hard-nosed way to look at cancer is ‘just another way to go’; even more so if we learn that the origin of a cancer is most often the accumulation over many years of little errors or acts of sabotage to the machinery of the cell, the result just of being alive. Of course we should fight against this disease as we do against any other, but a sense of balance is also worth something. It is only another of the Captains of Death: to die of cancer is neither worse nor better than to die of tuberculosis.

      Much more should be done; much more can be done; but it will need new thinking, outside the box.