Beyond The Commons

Aaron Wherry covers all the goings-on in and around Parliament Hill. Follow Aaron on Twitter: @aaronwherry

Categories: Beyond The Commons, Capital Read

The ‘fight’

by Aaron Wherry on Tuesday, August 23, 2011 3:22pm - 2 Comments

Carly Weeks takes apart a cancer cliché.

“It does set up a battle with a winner and a loser, and I think that some people certainly think that there would be better ways of talking about this,” said Dr. Ellis, who is also an associate professor in the department of oncology at McMaster University.

Instead of fixating on the idea of a cancer battle, Dr. Ellis and a growing number of experts in the field say, it is more important to focus on learning to live with cancer. For those undergoing treatment, this can be much more empowering than the idea they can somehow control the ultimate outcome if they fight hard enough.

Tags: cancer, Jack Layton

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Anonymous

I understand the bit about “fighting” and “defeating” and “willpower” and like rhetoric, and though it’s an argument I’d never heard before, I can see how some of that phraseology is, or can be, problematic.

However, this part I TOTALLY don’t get:

Similarly, saying someone who is now cancer-free is a “survivor” conveys
that he or she is somehow better than the people who didn’t make it,
said Peter Ellis, staff medical oncologist at the Juravinski Cancer
Centre in Hamilton, Ont.

WHAT???

How does calling someone a “survivor” “convey that he or she is somehow better than the people who didn’t make it”??? The OED defines survivor as “One who (or that which) survives”, and “survive” as “to remain alive, live on”. Didn’t cancer patients who are still alive survive? If you survive something, doesn’t that make you a “survivor”. Isn’t that axiomatic???

It seems to me that referring to someone as a “Holocaust survivor” doesn’t in any way, shape or form imply that they are “somehow better than the people who didn’t make it”. It just implies that they survived the Holocaust. Being a cancer survivor is nothing more than being a person who had cancer and didn’t die. Just like being a plane crash survivor, or a tsunami survivor, or, well, any kind of survivor. I don’t see how the term “survivor”, when used to describe someone who survived something, conveys any sort of moral implication whatsoever, nor does it assign any personal credit to the survivor for effecting their own survival.
lawoh

Politics aside, cancer is a business …. Big Business. For me, the true pity is that Mr. Layton was unable to think out of the box … I sent him 4 emails with information and a plea that he look to alternative cancer treatments (with my comments on both the links and my personal knowledge of the alternative treatment), 2 long emails when he announced he was diagnosed with prostrate cancer and 2 more 3 weeks ago … recommending to him not only to ingest marijuana oil made mostly from the top subtending leaves and a very small amount of the bud [the bud has a concentration of the psychoactive drug THC (which has NOT been proven to have any useful medical effect except as a general analgesic and appetite enhancer) and the subtending leaves and stalks contain much more of the medically useful cannabinoids including cannabidiol (CBD), cannabinol (CBN) and tetrahydrocannabivarin (THCV)] and I also gave him information on where and why he could obtain treatment from Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski in Houston whose success with cancer is remarkable and a lot information on how to treat his cancers with nutrition including my guys from southern Alberta (Stephan and Hardy) and some other suggestions for the prevention of any further cancers … I sent the material to the 3 email addresses I had for him and I received only one acknowledgement reply from an aid that he was in ‘the good hands of his doctors” … Pity!