Here's why I hate the rosy portrait of cancer survival you see everywhere nowadays.
1. it's a lie, medically speaking. Survival means you made it 5 years. That's not the same thing as being cured. Doctors use that artificial milestone to make themselves look better. Don't believe me? Google it.
2. Cancer treatment center ads make it sound like if you do the right things, or go to the right center, or spend the right money on the right doctor, you will be cured. (Therefore, it's your fault if you're not. A little bit your fault. Or maybe a lot, but you're dead and also you can't sue us.)
3. They make it sound like cancer isn't such a big deal. It's curable! Look away, and forget there are causes. Causes that you as one person have very, very little control over. Look how healthy random former patient looks now! They're eternally indebted to us for saving them! (It's still your fault.)
4. So what if the environment is so toxic that you lose the cancer lottery, it's NBD! We don't have to regulate, we can just fix the random outliers who succumb to it. Plus sunshine can give you cancer! The cancer centers and societies might as well be bankrolled by the very corporations that are destroying the air, land and food and water supply-- oh wait, they are!!
5. Come to our center and spend everything you got. Did we bankrupt you? No worries, we can use you to blackmail your family, too. And your neighbors, your community, entire nations of running, walking, telethoning suckers.
6. Special hate goes out to the meme that cancer is a lottery, and it's just your bad luck you got it. There are causes, and we are making more of them every day. Eating them, drinking them, pouring them into the world around us. Shirley Jackson wouldn't need to edit much.
7. One more thing: cancer doctors who treat patients like experimental animals because, hey, they're going to die anyway. They don't state this to you overtly when you're in their facility. But they think it, and they act on it. Worse, they don't really know why you're sick, and they don't really know how the shit they pour into you or cut out of you changes that, or for how long, or what it's going to do to you afterward. All they know is you have no other option but to die.
1. it's a lie, medically speaking. Survival means you made it 5 years. That's not the same thing as being cured. Doctors use that artificial milestone to make themselves look better. Don't believe me? Google it.
2. Cancer treatment center ads make it sound like if you do the right things, or go to the right center, or spend the right money on the right doctor, you will be cured. (Therefore, it's your fault if you're not. A little bit your fault. Or maybe a lot, but you're dead and also you can't sue us.)
3. They make it sound like cancer isn't such a big deal. It's curable! Look away, and forget there are causes. Causes that you as one person have very, very little control over. Look how healthy random former patient looks now! They're eternally indebted to us for saving them! (It's still your fault.)
4. So what if the environment is so toxic that you lose the cancer lottery, it's NBD! We don't have to regulate, we can just fix the random outliers who succumb to it. Plus sunshine can give you cancer! The cancer centers and societies might as well be bankrolled by the very corporations that are destroying the air, land and food and water supply-- oh wait, they are!!
5. Come to our center and spend everything you got. Did we bankrupt you? No worries, we can use you to blackmail your family, too. And your neighbors, your community, entire nations of running, walking, telethoning suckers.
6. Special hate goes out to the meme that cancer is a lottery, and it's just your bad luck you got it. There are causes, and we are making more of them every day. Eating them, drinking them, pouring them into the world around us. Shirley Jackson wouldn't need to edit much.
7. One more thing: cancer doctors who treat patients like experimental animals because, hey, they're going to die anyway. They don't state this to you overtly when you're in their facility. But they think it, and they act on it. Worse, they don't really know why you're sick, and they don't really know how the shit they pour into you or cut out of you changes that, or for how long, or what it's going to do to you afterward. All they know is you have no other option but to die.
But then, I'm not the most objective person in the world.
